ABSTRACT
NgUgi wa Thiong'o is best known as a writer of fiction detailing a national nan-ative. As a postcolonial theorist, NgUg\ follows Frantz Fanon in advocating psychological decolonization, and NgUgi's last novels engage a radical aesthetic, derived from the practice of Mau Mau Freedom Fighters. Often overlooked in the account of NgUgi's development, however, is that, in addition to his last two novels written in G1kOyO advancing a program of linguistic decolonization through the use of a transformed biblical allegory, NgUgi has written a series of children's stories, TIle Adventllres of Njamba Nene, first published in GikOyO between 1982 and 1986. These stories, like NgUgi's first novels, TIle River Between and Weep Not, Child, focus on the contested period of the liberation struggle. Focusing on the first two of these stories (translated into English as, "Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus" and "Njamba Nene's Pistol") in light of a consideration of his first novels, I argue that NgUgi presents a counterhistory of this period that by implication critiques the state-sanctioned natl'ative and attempts to decolonize the imaginations of his young readers (Ngugi, Mopillg xiv). While in NgUgi's early novels, we find the figure of an adolescent philosophically tom between traditional values, the teachings of Christianity, and the role of black messiah, in the Njamba Nelle stories, NgUgi's child protagonist arms himself. The stories' political vehemence indicates, perhaps even more clearly than his last novels, NgUgi's stridently engaged position, partly as a result of his own experience of radical decolonization while being detained in the neocolonial prison.
