SOURCE: Loflin, Christine. “Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Visions of Africa.” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 4 (winter 1995): 76-93.

In the following essay, Loflin maintains that descriptions of the land, boundaries, and features of Kenya are paramount to Ngugi's novels, asserting that his portrayal of the Kenyan landscape is closely related to the well-being and identity of the community.

I was living in a village and also in a colonial situation.

—Ngũgĩ, [Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics] (48)

Landscape as an aspect of fiction has tended to be underrated: less interesting than narrative, rhetoric, or tropology. Yet through landscape the author creates the horizons of the novel, establishing it in a historical (or an ahistorical) space. The landscape is not merely the setting of the story: it is a shifting, expanding territory, where the boundaries of public/private, fictional/real overlap. It has been said that...