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since the colonized subject cannot change to accommodate the colonial order and the colonial order can only be overthrown rather than reformed. Indeed, this very imperative of decolonization is what serves as the essential context for Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, a novel “written in the shadow of colonial rule in its most violent form – the state of emergency,” during which period, as Gikandi asserts, “relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, social classes, families, and institutions, were conducted through modes of unprecedented violence” (Gikandi 2000, 71).

      A second point of departure is Jonathan Culler’s formulation of the relationship between readerly habits and meaning‐making in a text. According to Culler, reading

      is not simply a matter of critical strategy but has an important bearing on the thematic properties of the novel. For if genre is … an interpretation of experience, an attempt to make sense of the world, then we are confronted from the outset with the problem of relating the procedures which we use in interpreting the novel to those that narrators and protagonists attempt to use in ordering their experience. Both are instances of imagination trying to invest its objects with significance, and whether the processes are made to accord or whether they resist close identification, the relationship between them will be of considerable thematic importance.

      (Culler 1974, xvi)

      Culler raises two fundamental issues with regard to readership: the elusive but distinctive shifts in the discursive control that readers and/as critics exercise over a text on the one hand, and the symbolic investments in the experience and fate of the protagonist on the other.

      A third consideration is what Fredric Jameson in The Antinomies of Realism calls “tendencies” of the Bildungsroman, that is its ability to interweave many plots and destinies and to act as a kind of “social Bill of Rights (or Droits de l’Homme) for the novel as a form” (2013, 222). The Bildungsroman, often seen as the narration of the process of subject formation of an individual and the elaboration of their individuality in the process of becoming, often ends up being a novel about the social collective; a depository of the anxieties and symbolic investments of a society in turmoil. The fate of the individual mirrors the fate of society. As Jameson further contends, the endings of such novels should be seen as literary categories whose outcomes have “to be more openly justified by some larger ideological concept” (2013, 195).

Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child has often been read as a Bildungsroman which is also a fictionalized autobiography. Many scholars have noted, for example, the close affinity between Ngugi’s own life as a young man and that of his extremely naïve protagonist Njoroge. According to Gikandi, the tremendous significance of Weep Not, Child in the burgeoning “culture of letters in East Africa” in the 1960s lies in its autobiographical character: “Njoroge’s life and education so closely parallel that of the author that it was sometimes difficult to tell where to draw the line between fact and fiction” (Gikandi 2000, 81). Most notorious in this overly reductive reading of the novel is David Cook and Michael Okenimkpe’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings (1997), which not only reduces the novel to a simple didactic propaganda but also sees it as nothing more than Ngugi’s life reproduced in the story of Njoroge. Yet, it is necessary to pay attention to Gikandi’s cautionary observation that the novel should read complexly rather than simply as a reproduction of Ngugi’s life, in spite of Ngugi’s own encouragement of readers to read it this way (Gikandi 2000, 87). Focusing on the novel’s contexts and its manifest propinquity to the life of the author is convenient but inadequate because it ignores the ways in which genre ideology is reworked in the text, especially Ngugi’s negation of the individualistic, humanist, and progressively positivist norms¹⁰ that overdetermine the narrative development of the classical Bildungsroman. I am yet to come across a reading of this novel that takes seriously the ruling ideologies of this genre – namely “the effort to reconcile the subjective condition of the human being with the objective social world” (Slaughter 2007, 111).¹¹ Even the most invaluable critiques of Ngugi’s first two novels pay little attention to Ngugi’s elaborate utilization, reorganization, and contestation of the narrative architecture and ideologies of the genre in both Weep Not, Child and its precursor, The River Between. In one of the most insightful readings of the relationship between Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work and what he calls “a colonial and exclusionary school culture,” Apollo Amoko (2010, 1) revises the critical consensus around Ngugi’s works that focuses on his literary nationalism, arguing that the failure by Ngugi and his colleagues to take seriously the “institutional locus” of the famous Nairobi Revolution was inevitably what led to its ambiguous successes and legacies. Amoko states: “[T]he institutional context in question is the postcolonial university, a discursive formation whose links to the metropolitan university are more fundamental and enduring than may have been apparent to them and their future admirers … Ngugi’s project to canonize an African national culture from the privileged locus of the postcolonial university can equally be said to have been driven by an imitative fallacy” (Amoko 2010, 5). Amoko likens Ngugi’s attempts to Africanize the curriculum of African literature at the University of Nairobi to Matthew Arnold and E. R. Leavis’ attempts to integrate English culture into the metropolitan university in England which he calls “imitative fallacy” (5).¹² In doing so, Amoko sees The River Between and Weep Not, Child as exemplars of Ngugi’s ability to appropriate this genre of the novel into a weapon of resistance. The two novels, he further argues, enabled Ngugi to assert the demands for the restoration of African rights and dignity and to problematize Gikuyu engagement with the liberal ideas of human rights. While Amoko recognizes Ngugi’s ability to use the genre of Bildungsroman as a mode of questioning to interrogate the entire colonial enterprise and its correlative, decolonization, it is the genre’s correspondence to “the norms and narrative assumptions that underwrite the vision of free and full human personality development” (Slaughter 2007, 40), coupled with its ideological underpinnings as a “coefficient of optimism” (Culler 1974, 28) that receives the least attention in his study. In a somewhat different reading, Gikandi in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, probably one of the best books on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work to date, locates the text within the contradictory desires and anxieties generated by British colonialism in central Kenya. Gikandi is interested in the social, political, and cultural institutions that were formative to Ngugi’s career as writer: cultural nationalism in central Kenya as it manifested itself in the form of agitation for cultural autonomy; the missionary zeal for conversion of Africans whose activities and ideologies came to constitute a gateway to modernity and civilization; and colonial education provided by missionaries which was intimately conjoined to conversion and colonial civilization (Gikandi 2000, 39).

Published in 1964, Weep Not, Child was the first novel in English to be published by an East African and was written at the cusp of the negotiation for Kenya’s independence. The novel anticipates a series of problems and dilemmas that would come to define the Kenyan, indeed the African, social, political, and cultural imaginary (especially in countries where independence was won through a vicious and bloody struggle) in subsequent decades: How do we confront the immediate past in which, again to use Gikandi’s words, “relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, social classes, families, and institutions, were conducted through modes of unprecedented violence” (2000, 71)? How could an arbitrarily forged state translate into viable (imagined) national community within the context of unfinished decolonization defined by a stubborn refusal to confront the past and instantiate mechanisms for addressing the broader transitional justice? More importantly, how were European powers, so deeply imbricated in massive violations of human rights at home and abroad, to be coopted in the protection of the very same rights in which the crime of colonialism was deeply enmeshed? How could a people considered subhuman be accorded the dignity deserving of human beings? Weep Not, Child, in essence, reads like the classic testimonio – a true witness of the violence that both underwrites and sustains the colonial social order. As Gikandi so limpidly observes, the colonial experience was so harrowing that “the

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