Weep Not, Child, a commentary on fatherhood and masculinity

A man nursing his wounds. Ngugi was way ahead of his time in capturing the complicated terrain that is masculinities and their impact on gender relations. PHOTO| FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • The concern with success as a father, measured in terms of providence, respect and general authority could also explain many  writers’ preoccupation with fatherhood and its meanings in the entire corpus of the first generation of Africa novelists, from Achebe to Oyono to Soyinka and, of course, Ngugi.
  • The importance of a father in providing a moral, social and material centre is the one area where African thought, Christian theology and western cultures all agreed upon.
  • That is why, as different fathers, the Christian agent and the colonial agent would close ranks to either co-opt the African father through conversion into a Christian collaborator or, failing to do that, simply get rid of him.

One day in 2014, Apollo Amoko, a Kenyan-born scholar now based in America, presented an academic paper to staff and students of the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi.

His presentation fascinated me for two reasons; one, that it was on the idea of false fathers and what that meant to the patriarchal order in postcolonial African literature and, second, that he chose to use Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, himself widely considered one of the fathers of the African novel, to make his point.

Amoko made a compelling case, but perhaps not good enough to convince some in the audience who suggested that he was re-inventing patriarchy in the era when women’s empowerment is the catchword while, for others, his decision to revisit Achebe’s first novel was a return to a past that has somewhat been milked dry by critics, and therefore with little else to offer.

For me, however, Amoko’s presentation resonated loudly with the wider corpus of nationalist literature generally, including Soyinka’s powerful play, Death and the King’s Horseman, Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy, the satirical novel that laid bare colonialist violence in a painfully humorous way and, in East Africa, Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child.

The latter, described by critic Keith Booker as the first modern novel to be published by an East African, has over its fifty year existence attracted a mass of critical attention the bulk of which, nonetheless, focuses on the novel’s preoccupation with the historical aspects of anti-colonial struggles whose highest form is the Mau Mau war.

While the concern with the depiction of nationalist struggles is relevant, perhaps the most relevant, reading the novel for its commentary on fatherhood, masculinity, patriarchy and the whole range of related concepts, whether symbolic or otherwise, gives us another opportunity to appreciate this work that yields new insights into the specter of shifting forms of masculinity in the present day Kenya.

To borrow Amoko’s idea of false or failed fatherhood, not necessarily as a symbol of a declining patriarchy alienated from the security of skewed gender relations, but possibly a demonstration of individual inadequacies, we must wonder whether Ngugi, in a somewhat prescient tone, had foreshadowed the current state in the world where a general confusion reigns when it comes to gender roles, the meanings of success and of failure in life, especially for men.

In Weep Not, Child, Ngotho is presented as a failed father, therefore false to the extent that he does not play the role of providing unquestionable leadership to his household.

Nyokabi, his second wife, is presented as the pillar of the protagonist’s home, while Boro and Kamau become surrogate fathers who offer leadership in political and economic terms, respectively. All the while, Ngotho and some of his age mates bid time in the service of their employers while waiting for the mythic prophecy of restoration to occur.

By the time the Ngotho generation realises that the restoration may never happen, it is rather late in the day and their standing both in the eyes of their children and the colonial agents has been badly ruined.

Sadly for Ngotho, the most prominent father and father figure in the novel, Njoroge, sees him at this point in his symbolic nakedness, in his most vulnerable state, broken. “His face had been deformed by small wounds and scars. His nose was cleft into two and his legs could only be dragged.”

A little later, “Ngotho’s laughter was cold. It left something tight and tense in the air… And Njoroge thought: could this be the father he had secretly adored and feared?” Ngotho is defeated, humiliated and lonely.

Save for the biological bit, how else can he possibly remain a father to Njoroge and his other sons? In a different historical-temporal setting, James Baldwin had observed that “one wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore”. And what could Ngotho, in this state, tell his sons?

If the condition of slavery, or the state of being a slave was the lowest depth of humiliation and dehumanisation, colonialism and the state of being a colonial subject must have been somewhere close. What did it mean to be a father like Ngotho? Was his failure as a father due to systemic injunctions or personal disposition?

ULTIMATE PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL NEUTERING

If Ngotho’s ultimate physical and social neutering were due to institutionalised violence of colonialism, did Ngugi, in Weep Not, Child, also foreshadow the progressive and almost institutionalised assault on traditional masculinity where landlessness and other forms of material deprivation signify personal failure in the current society that held hostage by global capitalism?

While Weep Not, Child deals with many important concerns, I think that its centralisation of the moral dilemmas of fatherhood and its shifting meanings or experiences is an important aspect of creative imagination that has somehow only attracted passing critical attention, mostly by readers who see fatherhood in its symbolic link to nationalist politics and the heroism it spawned, rather than in its socio-psychological significance.

The concern with success as a father, measured in terms of providence, respect and general authority could also explain many  writers’ preoccupation with fatherhood and its meanings in the entire corpus of the first generation of Africa novelists, from Achebe to Oyono to Soyinka and, of course, Ngugi.

The importance of a father in providing a moral, social and material centre is the one area where African thought, Christian theology and western cultures all agreed upon.

That is why, as different fathers, the Christian agent and the colonial agent would close ranks to either co-opt the African father through conversion into a Christian collaborator or, failing to do that, simply get rid of him.

And that is one of the ironies of colonialism that Ngugi captures in Weep Not, Child: even though colonialism was conceived and executed by white patriarchy, it abhorred and destroyed black patriarchy either through physical violence or by socio-cultural, material and ideological conversions to create the Jacobos and Isakas of this world, preoccupied with material accumulation or self-preservation, while ruining those who think of the common good, like the Ngothos.

By mastering and deploying irony in Weep Not, Child, Ngugi was way ahead of his time in capturing the complicated terrain that is masculinities and their impact on gender relations.

There is a lingering question, for instance, whether Ngotho’s predicament is as bad as it appears, or whether Ngugi plays a double game of intensifying it by enhancing the moral and emotional strength of Ngotho’s wives.

Indeed, can we argue that it is by valorising the figure of the mother, and motherhood, that Ngugi most compellingly highlights the loneliness and helplessness of diminished fathers?

In this, he casts a glance at all fathers, including Howlands, the immediate face of colonialism.

In the novel, the scene where both Ngotho and Howlands walk from place to place admiring healthy tea shrubs, each inwardly celebrating his achievements, demonstrates their individual failure to understand colonialism and their place in it – in other words, their individual failure as fathers because they do not see themselves as pawns in a bigger game, deluding themselves that they are in charge of their actions.

Clearly, in Weep Not, Child, Ngugi has captured the complexity of fatherhood in a manner that has only attracted incomplete readings limited to the contexts of history and “heroism”. Equally important is the way the novel yields meanings that are immediate to people’s concerns even outside the context of politics, histories and the wider spectrum of post-colonial conditions.