ABSTRACT
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is best known as a writer of fiction detailing a national narrative. As a postcolonial theorist, Ngũgĩ follows Frantz Fanon in advocating psychological decolonization, and Ngũgĩ’s last novels engage a radical aesthetic, derived from the practice of Mau Mau Freedom Fighters. Often overlooked in the account of Ngũgĩ’s development, however, is that, in addition to his last two novels written in Gîkûyû advancing a program of linguistic decolonization through the use of a transformed biblical allegory, Ngũgĩ has written a series of children’s stories, The Adventures of Njamba Nene, first published in Gîkûyû between 1982 and 1986. These stories, like Ngũgĩ’s first novels, The 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 Ngũgĩ presents a counterhistory of this period that by implication critiques the state-sanctioned narrative and attempts to decolonize the imaginations of his young readers (Ngũgĩ, Moving xiv). While in Ngũgĩ’s early novels, we find the figure of an adolescent philosophically torn between traditional values, the teachings of Christianity, and the role of black messiah, in the Njamba Nene stories, Ngũgĩ’s child protagonist arms himself. The stories’ political vehemence indicates, perhaps even more clearly than his last novels, Ngũgĩ’s stridently engaged position, partly as a result of his own experience of radical decolonization while being detained in the neocolonial prison.
