Analysis Of Weep Not Child

930 Words2 Pages

Mario Marroquin
4/25/2014
African Studies

Many Eyes, One Home

“Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.”

-Rudyard Kipling,
“The White Man’s Burden”

“Weep Not, Child” by Ngugi Wa Thiongo’o tells a complicated story of the people of Kenya after the Second World War. The simple emotions of the characters are universal and immetiadely relatable, ranging from a childlike enthusiasm for education and simple yearning to learn to women’s inexhaustible ability to cause men ceaseless exasperation. However these simple and sharable emotions are refracted through the complicated and distorted lens of the last years of British colonialism. Through Colonionalism, Kenya became a prison of a home, a land where whites lived over the steep hills in the greener, more fertile valley, and dreams lived over the mountains and impassable sea. Where the weight of the world and its worst wrongs could weigh on the minds of the men and women living in state that suffers constantly, where they sweat and toil under a scorching African sun and the suffocating, segregating mentality of the foreign white man.
The effects of British colonialism on the physical, emotional, and mental states of the subjected citizens of Kenya and by association the subjected native sons and daughters of the great first state of civilization, Mother Africa are subjective, severe, lasting, and life-altering. Colonialism disrupts life in every way, but on the greatest scale in the most basic essence of human existence, and in the subconscious way it denies an individual and a peop...

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...unted as rich. A man who went with tattered clothes but had at least an acre of red earth was better off than the man with none.” (20). The traditional Gikuyu view of wealth places the highest importance on owning land, and because of this, the situation between the families of Njoroge and Mwihaki is further complicated.
Tracing these arcs and the viewpoints tracking them is important mainly because of Ngugi’s use of diversity. The characters and viewpoints in “Weep Not, Child” and all incredibly different and span huge divides like sex, status, and race. Every aspect is addressed from the intolerant old world guard of Mr. Howlands, to the friendly, significantly more enlightned view of his open-minded son Stephen. These diverse world-view and opinions serve to create a descriptive and emotional multi dimensional view of the waning days of British Colonialism.

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