In the following essay, Jennifer Evans examines the development and portrayal of female characters in Ngugi's Petals of Blood. Evans discusses how the African woman, so often sketched as a passive image, is in Ngugi's writing both repository of traditional values and active on the forefront of change; thus Ngugi's female characters act as the thread of historical continuity in his work.

"The story of this heroic resistance: who will sing it ? Their struggles to defend their land, their wealth: who'll tell of it?" asks the narrator in Ngugi's Petals of Blood. Ngugi himself, as poet-historian, has taken up the challenge to tell the people's history. In his novels he presents the lives of ordinary Kenyan men and women, seen in the context of the vital continuity of past, present, and future, as the real basis of Kenyan history. He seeks consciously to correct "a history . . . distorted...