SOURCE: Berger, Roger A. “Ngugi's Comic Vision.” Research in African Literatures 20, no. 1 (spring 1989): 1-25.

In the following essay, Berger explores the comedic elements in Ngugi's fiction, noting how the author's satirical overtones transform his novels into works of “resistant political discourse.”

The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation. … Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used for violence and authority.

—Mikhail Bakhtin

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We are reluctant to term Ngũgĩ's fiction comic. Indeed his novels and essays reflect an earnestness and an understandable seriousness, given what he sees as the betrayal of African aspirations following political independence, and without question, his fiction chronicles immense human suffering and tragedy. Moreover, the large critical response that now sprawls around Ng...