Matigari

The man known as Matigari ma Njurũũngi, a phrase meaning “the patriots who survived the bullets”, comes down into the village out of the forest one day expecting to find his family and return home. He has spent years fighting the white imperialist Settler Williams and his servant John Boy, an African man who is happy to serve the colonists, so that he can have his home back again. Now that they are both dead, he leaves his weapons in the forest, sure that he does not need them any more. He emerges into a society that has freed itself from direct colonial rule but has not freed itself from oppression. Children throw stones at him, the police are violent and quick to arrest him, and foreign and local companies exploit their workers.

Matigari finds followers in the form of a young boy and a woman who listen to his story about his struggle against Settler Williams and John Boy, who lived off his labour and refused to give him any rights to the house he built with his own hands. When he arrives at this house he finds Williams’ and Boy’s sons barring the way, who refuse to let him enter or take possession of the property. Instead, the police arrest Matigari and throw him in jail. In prison, he shares his story with others who have been unjustly imprisoned, and once he escapes, aided by his two faithful followers, he decides to seek truth and justice in the country.

News of his escape spreads far and wide, and people quickly take up and embroider his story: Matigari becomes a legend, of indeterminate age, gender, or size. Some claim he is a supernatural being, or was released from prison by Angel Gabriel himself. These wild speculations and tales are interspersed with Matigari’s own wanderings, as he asks all around where he can find truth and justice. He meets with many people, including shepherds, students, professors, and priests. Finally, he goes to a regional appearance of the Minister for Truth and Justice, a government official who is accompanied by a travelling law court and foreign representatives.

It is in this section, where Matigari faces off against the Minister for Truth and Justice, that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s satirical intent truly shines through. The Minister rants and raves about strikes carried out by factory workers and university students, bans Karl Marx and Lenin from the country, and sets himself up as the only legitimate dispensary of law and justice. He announces that a foreign company has allowed the government to buy shares in it, thereby making this company one that is owned by the workers, in an attempt to quash the workers’ demands for fair wages. He finally bans strikes and subversive dreams, in the hope that this will put an end to the country’s discontent at the oppressive government who is in league with foreign interests.

The Minister cannot successfully argue against Matigari, and commits him to a mental hospital, claiming that Matigari’s rhetoric about the rights of workers and peasants to the fruit of their labour is clearly the ravings of a madman. By this time, Matigari’s name and ideology have spread like wildfire, and he becomes a powerful symbol of the people as the novel races towards its climax, where the people realise that there is another war to be fought against the forces of neocolonialism, and Matigari’s cry for justice rouses them into a rebellion.

Ngũgĩ is deliberately vague about the time and place in which this story takes place, and Matigari’s troubled country could be any one of a number of post-independence African countries in any decade. Matigari’s struggle against Settler Williams, and his continued struggle against the son of Settler Williams, is a clear metaphor for the national struggle of colonised African nations. His mystical status – which is even supported in text as he is described as changing his appearance at several points – gives him the status of a folk hero, who can stand for all the injustices of post-independence African society.

The book is interspersed with poems and songs, often inside prose dialogue, giving it a strong feeling of a parable or oral tale. In a case of art imitating life, Matigari was effectvely banned in Kenya (Ngũgĩ’s home country) after rumours spread about a man called Matigari that came seeking truth and justice; a character escaped from a novel. While dated in places – the news bulletins that talk about the Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa are a particularly prominent example – it is a lyrical, bittersweet satire that manages to be both specific and universal.