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and religious cosmologies of the invaders” (117). For Mutua, as for Ngugi, the idea of civilization is highly racialized: It signals the psychologically violent ways in which the so‐called privileges of European culture function as a vehicle for the imposition of a naturalized white masculine version of civilization and the notion of human personality development and identity on the non‐European other while simultaneously undermining the cultural integrity of Africans.

      How then can Njoroge’s immersion into the colonial world be anything other than a process of unbecoming; a process, as it were, of growing down rather than growing up? In their book Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, João Biehl and Peter Locke argue that “the notion of becoming [is what] organizes our individual and collective efforts … the intricate problematics of how to live alongside, through, and despite the very profoundly constraining effects of social, structural and material forces” (2017, x). Njoroge seems to be completely unable to adjust or learn and thereby survive his traumatic experiences. At no stage in his life does Njoroge’s world seem to expand. On the contrary, it seems to shrink at every stage, culminating in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. This narrative formulation by Ngugi puts into question the entire notion of becoming that is definitive of the ideologies and narrative architecture of the positivist Bildungsroman. Unsurprisingly then, the optimism that organizes the early parts of the novel turns into tragedy at the end: Njoroge’s tragic end – his deep sense of failure and attempted suicide – speak to the broader ideological implications of his quest “to find a hospitable context in which to realize [his] aspirations” as a colonial subject (Abel, Hirsch, and Langland 1983, 7).

The novel calls for a reading that is open, what Biehl and Locke term “a radical analytical openness to complexity and wonder … so that we can understand how political forces and capital expansions exhaust existing (not ideal forms) and absorb some of the qualities and textures of individual and collective experiments with relating and knowing – lived tensions between power and flight … creation and ruination … belonging and fugitivity” (2017, xi) to the extent that it stages the tension between the imperialist violence of the colonial enterprise most visibly through mental enslavement, land dispossession, and the violation of the bodily integrity of Africans through torture and murder. The narrative ideology of Weep Not, Child stubbornly refuses to endorse Njoroge’s individuality and his naïve desire to accommodate himself to the institutions of colonialism as the path to self‐fulfillment. Instead, Ngugi is more interested in the collective fate of a society almost immobilized by its narratives of an irrecoverable past, a violent and insecure present, and an uncertain future. Ultimately, however, the novel questions these very individual and collective desires based on a white supremacist, racist, exploitative, and violent system that not only devalues African lives (the teacher Isaka’s death is emblematic of this), but also African bodies.

      In revisiting one of the most critiqued and foundational texts of East African literature – Weep Not, Child – I have argued for a reading that recognizes what Biodun Jeyifo, in a different context, terms “a convergence of aesthetic and political radicalism” (2004, 14), a reading that is informed by an ethos that seeks to interrogate the relationships among literature, violence, and human dignity on the one hand, and, on the other, the narrative architecture of the Bildungsroman at its point of convergence with the liberal discourse of human rights. Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, more than any other Kenyan novel, is not just a mere reconstruction of how Kenya’s cataclysmic war of decolonization is “remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized” (Paul Fussell, qtd. in Andrews and McGuire 2016, 3), but also a text that reminds us of the potential of the Bildungsroman to engender a “new kind of social content for the novel as form and the possibility of new kinds of narration” (Jameson 2006, 101).

      My rereading of Ngugi’s classical text from a human rights perspective has two implications. First, it calls attention not only to the importance of literary history, but also the importance of interrogating some of the foundational texts of African literature through emerging critical theories. To read Ngugi’s work from this perspective is to acknowledge that the restoration of the humanity of Africans that was taken away by the violent process of colonization is a theme that percolates all his creative and polemical works. Ngugi’s concern with the historical violation of the human rights of Africans, and, indeed, of black people, of the working classes, and of minorities throughout the world, is well known. Reading his earliest novel within a human rights framework acknowledges the complex and emancipatory dialectic that characterizes his works. My contention is that if his works are read through emerging theories of human rights, there is a lot to be excavated in his early novels that tend to be seen as less ideological than his later novels. Second, understanding narrative and criticism as generative might clarify some of the critical gaps in the scholarship of Ngugi’s work that are a result of either focusing on its historical and institutional contexts or on his ideological leanings, both of which approaches focus for the most part on the manifest thematics of nationalism and decolonization on the one hand, and the influence of Marxist aesthetics on the other. Ngugi’s attachment to specific geographical constructs, locations, historical temporalities, and socio‐cultural frameworks is what enables his very particularized critique of white supremacist ideologies that undergird colonial domination while at the same time questioning the idea of colonialism as progress and civilization.

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