ABSTRACT
Colonial settlers were among the first group of writers to attempt narration of the nature, the causes, and the atrocities associated with the Mau Mau movement in Kenya. This was probably because they had first-hand encounter with the Mau Mau rebellion. This settler writing was often coloured with myths about black people with regard to their traditions and actions especially in their confrontation with colonial systems. This chapter examines the representation of violence occasioned by Mau Mau activities by colonial settler writers in Kenya through a reading of Robert Ruark’s Something of Value. While focussing on characters’ actions and the author’s narrative technique, the chapter posits that Robert Ruark’s narrative not only presents scenes that reveal settler notions of the black person and the Mau Mau rebellion, but it also presents scenes that subvert the writer’s ideology. Analyses in this chapter are grounded on suppositions by Barber (1987), Bakhtin (1990), and Cooper (1992), who agree that there are multiple competing voices in a text and it is by unveiling these voices that an author’s ideology is rendered visible, and that it is through these same voices that an author’s ideology gets subverted. The paper concludes that although fiction renders ideology visible, it does so not without contradictions. The creative process therefore does not warrant a self-governing text because the competing voices often undermine the author’s intention.
