ABSTRACT
This chapter places the concept of atrocity within Kenya’s socio-economic context and extends the meaning of atrocity beyond physical violence or outrage. It analyses how language provides the means by which individuals living in atrocious socio-economic circumstances vent out their unenviable experiences in life. Specifically, it examines how the character discourses in two urban novels correspond to characters’ socio-economic conditions. The chapter investigates speech acts of characters in Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976) and Kinyanjui Kombani’s The Last Villains of Molo (2004) showing how the language of separatism is not only used to alienate, but also to galvanize protest against “the other”, and by extension, against atrocious socio-economic realities. In this regard, language is seen as an agency of mediation between characters and their socio-economic environment. The chapter adopts Content Analysis to read and correlate discourses of the lower-class characters in the two novels.
