SOURCE: Tobias, Steven. “The Poetics of Revolution: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Matigari.” Critique 38, no. 3 (spring 1997): 163-76.

In the following essay, Tobias contends that Matigari utilizes an unique Marxist-African perspective to critique the sociopolitical structures existing within postcolonial African states.

The term postcolonial literature is inherently problematic. A useful and generally acceptable definition of this nebulous and diffuse genre appears in the 1989 book, The Empire Writes Back:

What each of these [various postcolonial countries'] literatures has in common … is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial culture.

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According to this definition, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's book Matigari can be considered a definitive postcolonial novel, as it sets a traditional Gikuyu folktale in the context of an unnamed contemporary African country. Ngugi liberally blends...