Ngugi wa thiong’o’s deployment of orality and his socialist discourse in Wizard of the Crow

Abstract EN

This paper is chiefly intended to examine the ideological purposes behind which the internationally renown Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong‟o deploys orature techniques in his tome book Wizard of Crow.

Rather than being merely regarded as part of the African writers‟ laudable quest for the attainment of literary independence, the politics of oralising the African novel in Wizard of the Crow enables the author to articulate his ideological pronouncements vis-à-vis the pathetic post-colonial condition in Africa and, more importantly, share his views with the masses who are hardly capable of understanding the literary discourse that is written in an elitist style.

The oral features with which the novel in question is infused include also the author‟s frequent reference to magic and traditional dances which are carnalivesque in character in the sense of defying the autocratic power of the Ruler of Aburriria which is a fictional country where the main events of the novel are set.

At the metaphorical level, the frequency of these popular in Ngugi‟s novel is to be construed as the author‟s symbolic means of imagining a renascent continent beyond its present dystopian condition marked by social stratification and abusive patriarchy.

All in all, the Ngugi‟s noticeable deployment of the oral tradition in Wizard of the Crow, besides serving his self-appointed literary project of enabling the masses to “appropriate” the novel form, is his allegorical way of conveying his ideological message about the need to for the masses‟ revolution that is partly is rooted in their local epistemology-