NLSC: SENIOR THREE AGRICULTURE
SENIOR THREE AGRICULTURE Agriculture Senior Three, as outlined in...
Courses
-
-
NLSC: SENIOR THREE CHEMISTRY
SENIOR THREE CHEMISTRY Chemistry is the branch of science that focuses...
-
NLSC: SENIOR THREE GENERAL SCIENCE
SENIOR THREE GENERAL SCIENCE General Science Senior Three, as outlined...
-
NLSC: SENIOR THREE NUTRITION AND FOOD TECHNOLOGY
SENIOR THREE NUTRITION AND FOOD TECHNOLOGY The Senior Three Nutrition and...
-
NLSC: SENIOR THREE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
SENIOR THREE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION The Senior Three Christian...
-
Access the Comprehensive New A-Level Syllabus across all subjects on Yaaka Digital Learning Platform
New A-Level Syllabus Stay ahead in your academic journey with Yaaka...
Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Nepali
Norwegian
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Sesotho
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
PLOT SUMMARY
The novel opens as the narrator introduces his story in a reluctant tone: it is his duty to relay this sad and maybe even shameful account of events in the town of Ilmorog.
In Chapter 2, the narrator introduces his protagonist, Jacinta Wariinga, who is at the end of her tether. During an affair with the “Rich Old Man of Ngorika,” she became pregnant. The Rich Old Man abandoned her. Wariinga had her baby and returned to secretarial school, finding a job at Champion Construction. Soon, her boss Kihara made advances on her, and Wariinga was forced to leave her job. This didn’t stop her from losing her boyfriend, John Kinwana, who believed she had slept with Kihara. Unable to pay her rent, Wariinga has been thrown out of her studio apartment by three thugs acting on her landlord’s orders.
In despair, Wariinga takes herself to the railway tracks, where she intends to kill herself. However, she is prevented by the arrival of a man named Munti, who persuades her to give life another chance and hands her an invitation to the “Devil’s Feast.”
When Wariinga realizes that this Feast is taking place in her parents’ hometown of Ilmorog, she decides to go. She travels by “matatu” (taxi-bus), and on the long journey, she bonds with her fellow passengers: Gatuīria, an African Studies professor who works overseas; Wangarī, a peasant woman from the deep country; Mūturi, an industrial worker, and Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, a businessman. They also get to know the driver, Mwaūra, a hard-working man who worships money and idolizes the rich.
Businessman Mwĩreri explains that the Devil’s Feast is a competition: the guests will choose the seven cleverest thieves and robbers in Ilmorog. Mwĩreri thinks this competition is a good thing. It is not really organized by the Devil, he explains, but by the Organization for Modern Theft and Robbery. The occasion for the Feast is a visit by foreign guests from the Thieves’ and Robbers’ associations of America, England, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and Japan.
The passengers agree that they will all go together to the Devil’s Feast.
At the Feast, Wariinga and the other passengers witness the local Kenyan bourgeoisie (the members of the Organization for Modern Theft and Robbery) each set out their case for the title of cleverest thief. Each man boasts of a different scheme that he has used to rob Kenyan workers of the value of their labor.
Mwĩreri proposes that the Organization chase the foreigners out of Ilmorog in order to take a bigger slice of the wealth for themselves; an uproar breaks out.
Wariinga and Gatuīria decide to remain as observers, while Wangarī and Mūturi, horrified by what they have heard, decide to summon the police to arrest the self-proclaimed Thieves and Robbers. However, when the police arrive they arrest only Wangarī, and drag him away.
Mūturi raises a mob of local workers, students, intellectuals and peasants, who march on the cave where the Feast is taking place. They manage to break up the event, but the members of the Organization and their foreign guests all escape.
Two years pass. Wariinga is engaged to Gatuīria, and through lengthy and expensive training, she has fulfilled an old dream of becoming an engineer at a garage. Meanwhile Gatuīria has finished the musical composition he has been working on, honoring Kenyan history.
Wariinga’s old boss, Kihara, with the backing of businessmen from America, Germany, and Japan, buys the garage where Wariinga works, so he can demolish it and construct a tourist hotel on the site.
Gatuīria takes Wariinga to meet his parents. There she learns that Gatuīria’s father is the “Rich Old Man” who left her when she was pregnant. Finally Wariinga snaps. She shoots Gatuīria’s father and several other guests, whom she recognizes from the Devil’s Feast. Gatuīria is left standing, unsure whose side to take, as Wariinga strides from the house.
Devil on the Cross explores economic exploitation along many different axes: its characters allegorize the roles of the working classes and the peasants, the business elites and the petit bourgeoisie, as well as the specific forms of exploitation suffered by women, and the forms of abuse perpetrated by intellectuals and liberals—like Gatuīria—who might consider themselves neutral. Devil on the Cross is the fifth novel by Ngūgī, who is widely considered a front-running candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
CHARACTER/CHARACTERISATION
Jacinta Warĩĩnga
Jacinta Warĩĩnga—or Warĩĩnga, as she is known throughout most of the novel—is the protagonist and heroine of Devil on the Cross. Her experiences and actions act as bookends to this novel, as both its opening and closing scenes. When the novel begins, Warĩĩnga is distraught and on the verge of committing suicide. When the novel ends, she is calm, confident, and willing to use violence towards others in defense of her body and beliefs.
As the novel unfolds, the reader learns about Warĩĩnga’s past. Warĩĩnga, who was a good student and once dreamed of becoming an engineer, became involved in an affair with a man known in the novel principally as the Rich Old Man. He gave her presents and took her for joy rides in his expensive car.
The savior figure
The mysterious figure who finds her and stops Jacinta from killing herself is something like a savior figure in Jacinta’s mind. He invites her to attend a feast called “The Devil’s Feast,” and tells her that the party will be deeply insightful for her in her struggles. The emotional turmoil that she feels is obviously extreme, so she agrees to go with the man. The title Devil on the Cross is a reference to this feast and the fact that she has a hard time telling whether this man who saved her from suicide is good or evil.
The “Devil’s Feast” guests
At the “Feast,” Jacinta is made to sit and listen to lengthy speeches where the various unnamed guests of the “Devil’s Feast” all stand and explain why they are eligible to celebrate at the devil’s own table. They are guilty of extortion, exploitative business practices, and schemes. They tell their stories at the party, bragging about how easy it was to make money once they decided to do evil. Jacinta is stunned by what they say.
THEMES
Communalism
The novel portrays the virtues of communal thinking and action as a means of resisting the individualistic, selfish logic of modern-day capitalism. These two attitudes are captured early on in the contrast between the two songs that Mũturi recites. The first belongs to the patriots and independence fighters during the Mau Mau rebellion against the colonial Kenyan government: “Great love I found there/ Among women and children./ A bean fell to the ground – / We split it among ourselves” (39). In contrast, the home guards and imperialists who defended the colonial order against the Mau Mau sang the following song: “Self-love and the love of selling out/ Among the traitors of the land./ The bean we steal from the people – We struggle to see who can grab it all” (39).
Instability and corruption
Jacinta survives her suicidal depression with the help of a random passerby who stops her and invites her to an insightful feast where she learns about corrupt businessmen and the various ways they profited by corruption. In general, their stories are about exploiting the instability of the government to cut corners. They are sometimes guilty of business practices that verge on slavery of their own community, but the men are rich enough to get away with it in the unstable economy.
Evil and money
The whole “Devil” motif in the novel is a reference to this central theme. Jacinta is saved from suicidal depression and invited to a club where she does not belong. There she learns firsthand that many of the richest people in her economy are not even trying to help Kenya become a stable and sovereign government. They betray their own people in many different ways and then boast in those betrayals. The thematic connection between evil and money gives Jacinta something other than hope or happiness; it gives her deep anger at the mistreatment of people happening in her own community.
STYLE
Point of View
The point-of-view of the novel is that of the narrator, who introduces the story and who occasionally interjects with comments and observations on the events of the story, as well as pleas for help. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator explains that he is telling this story against the wishes of some residents in Ilmorog. In this sense, the narrator is determined to speak the truth and seek justice for those implicated in the story. The narrator’s determination and strength of will are revealed again when, reaching the end of his story, the narrator calls on “you who asked me to share this story” to “Give me strength…Give me the tongue. Give me the words…” (247). Thus, the narrator admits to telling a collaborate act, one that cannot be undertaken alone.
What Makes Devil on the Cross Special?
If you like postcolonial African writings, you are in for a treat. This novel is special in many ways
While you can find the plot summaries and character lists elsewhere, here I will primarily focus on certain conceptual issues that you might want to keep in mind while reading the book.
Significance of the Title: Devil on the Cross
What are we to understand by the title: Devil on the Cross? The crucifixion of the Devil is offered to the readers in the form of Wariinga’s recurring dream:
Wariinga’s dream continues, as the people pronounce the Devil’s ill-deeds before crucifying him:
But then three days after his crucifixion, the Devil is rescued by a certain specific group:
Obviously, this is a retelling of the Crucifixion of Christ. In this case, however, the devil is not being persecuted by the powerful but is being indicted, charged and punished by the people. And similar to the Christ’s story, the Devil is resurrected but by his disciples who want to emulate all his qualities. In my reading, the Devil is a personification of international/ colonial capital and the disciples are the native elite who, even after the “Devil” has left still rely on the exploitative practices introduced and mastered by the former colonizers. So, one could read the title in itself as a reversal of the traditional associations with the cross and thus read the novel as a journey into the functioning of the “Devil” of capital and the possibilities of resistance against it, especially within the framework of postcolonial nation-state and its workers, peasants, and the poor in opposition to the native elites, the disciples of the Devil!
Importance of Narrative Framing: Gicaandi Player
The story is told from the narrative point of view of Gicaandi Player, who, in the words of James Ogude, is the “Village Prophet . . . in the traditional Agikuyu community,” 1 but this reliance on a traditional storyteller also provides Ngugi the kind of creative cover to seriously critique the postcolonial nation-state itself. This framing is necessary both to ensure the native audiences that the critique of their nation is not meant to deride them for their “backwardness” and to ensure that a work about Kenya is not read by the international readers as an insider’s authentication of the racialized European myths about Africa. So, the Gicaandi player decides to tell the story of Wariinga after her mother beseeches him to tell her story. The figure of the Gicaandi player, thus, offers his reasons for telling the story as follows:
Thus, the figure of the Gicaandi player creates space for Ngugi to tell the story of national ills, caused by a native elite and their International masters, in a way that the critique itself does not become controversial and becomes a sort of corrective for the natives of Kenya. This framing allows Ngugi, in my opinion, to seriously point out as to where and how Kenya has gone wrong in its march to progress after the Independence. It is worthy of note, whoever, that this framing can only defend the writer from the wrath of the people of Kenya, for the elite, who are being indicted in the story, will obviously see this as an attack on their privileged position, but this framing also places the writer in solidarity with the people, who should be the primary concern and main audience of the Gicaandi player as well as a radical postcolonial author.
The Speeches in the Cave: International Organization of Thieves and Robbers
For me, Chapter four of the Devil on the Cross is instructive in several ways. One, it stages, satirically, the naked truth of neoliberalism, its basis in greed, and its alliance with postcolonial national elites in exploiting the people, and two, the scene in the cave also serves as a kind of political awakening for Wariinga, who until then had only seen herself as a victim and who had, until then, not seriously thought about her own place within in the nation and about her own true identity.
The speeches, though highly satirized, display the nature of greed that drives the neoliberal capital and since the speeches are delivered at a meeting called by the “European” masters, the naked truth of global capital, still governed by the North-Atlantic nations, is also revealed, for the participants “boast” of their accomplishments, most involving deceiving their own people, to win the praise and awards offered by the International Organization of Thieves and Robbers. Thus, in this chapter, Ngugi, in my view, stages the vary true dynamics of the neoliberal economic system that offers itself as natural and uncontested.
Wariinga’s Transformation
In the beginning of the novel, Wariinga was someone who “hated her blackness” (11) and straightened her hair with “red-hot iron combs” (11). Thus, while she is unconsciously attempting to shape her physical self into a European version of herself, she also seems to have developed a kind of deep loathing for her own ethnic and cultural identity. This self loathing, according to Ngugi’s other works, is a part of the colonial educational system where the native children do not only learn a foreign langue as a “language of power” but also internalize a certain disdain for their own languages and culture (For more on this, please read Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind). Thus, in the beginning of the novel Wariinga does not really know who she is and she has no political or social agency. Deciding to leave Nairobi to go back to her parents, was the first major display of agency that we see from her and it is this decision that puts her on the path to transformation. Surprisingly, it is not a story of a “broken” woman returning to her parents to heal herself: On her way home, Wariinga meets other people: workers, artists, and activists. It is through this encounter with others like her, especially the workers and former revolutionaries, that Wrriinga finally defines her own identity. Understanding this sociopolitical aspect of identity-formation is important to really grasp the the novel, for the novel offers lateral solidarity of workers as the ultimate mode of resistance against oppression. Its is through her alliances and friendships with her new friends and acquaintances that Wariinga finally becomes a successful mechanic and an engineer. Thus, by the time we reach the ending, we already know that it took a whole community of like-minded comrades, a certain degree of understanding of local and global politics to transform Wariinga from an object of oppression to an “angel” of destruction.
In the final scene, after having shot her oppressor, Wariinga is transformed into a goddess-like figure and the novel ends as follows:
One could call this an open ending, but as a reader who has seen Wariinga transform over the course of the story, I have no doubt imagining that she will be all right and that she will always have friends and comrades to rely on! And it is this ending and this reliance on lateral, collective support structures in developing a self that I find the most interesting part of the novel.
Conclusion
These are just some basic notes about the novel and are in no way exhaustive. If you find something else that could be interesting and of some use to other readers of the novel, please feel free to add your ideas to the comments section below.