POLITICS OF THE DOMICILE IN THIONG’O’S MATIGARI

My paper offers a reading of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Matigari (1989) and investigates the use of the home space as a site of protest. It is the home space that Matigari struggles to retrieve in the novel. The journeys undertaken by Matigari are metaphorically interwoven with his journeys within-the journeys in the realm of memory. In Matigari (1989), Matigari’s search for a home space in the aftermath of the independence of an anonymous nation (identified as Kenya) culminates in the grim discovery of the neocolonial oppression that marks the collapse of the nationalist dreams. Hence, my main aim in this paper is to analyse the journeys undertaken by the characters in the novel, and in doing so, I will also try to explain the spatial politics that define these journeys.

I hope the running themes in the present collection will raise questions and promote debate about our present predicament. For we are all involved in a common problem: how best to build a true communal home for all Africans. Then all the black people, all the African masses can truthfully say: we have come home. (Thiong'o, 1981, p. xix) And so today is my homecoming and I want to bring my family together. (Thiong'o, 1987, p. 22) Postcolonial writers often use journeys as an important spatial trope for critiquing the colonial appropriation of space. In many postcolonial novels journey in search of the homeland has been used. Matigari (1989) by Thiong'o is an example/ an illustration of it. Matigari's journey in search of the home space subverts the colonial ethics of the domestic space as a stable, clean and tabular entity (Upstone, 2009. p. 117). In the novel, Thiong'o critiques the colonial appropriation of the home space that underlines the need of the white subjects to be located in a clean, comfortable and hygienic homestead in a colony away from the homestead of the natives in the marginal territories. The politics of the home space allegorises the formation of the nation. The colonial politics of the domestic space is revived in the neocolonial context. The primary focus of this paper is Thiong'o's critique of the neocolonial ethics of domesticity in Matigari (1989). Matigari travels within an anonymous nation (evidently Kenya) in search of the indigenous home space but discovers the marks of woe instead of the promised land of peace and harmony. Evidently, Matigari's dystopian findings question the validity of the neocolonial fashioning of domesticity in postindependence Kenya.
Home in the colonial literature has been represented as an 'idealized and apolitical location' (Upstone 115). The home as a personal space free from external politics is often associated with European domesticity. In White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the making of Kenya, Elspeth Huxley (1956) glorifies the cause of the British settlers in Kenya in unequivocal terms and politicizes the history of brutal imperialism 'as a story of white masculinity and its pioneering adventure in bringing untouched land under cultivation and untamed people under British rule' and calls Jomo Kenyatta 'a small scale African Hitler' (147).
The colonial domestic spaces have been represented as 'white civilization ' (p. 147) ' and 'native' lands. (McClintock, 1995, p. 357) In the English colonies, the home space followed the illusory Victorian ideals of domesticity. The division of the colonies into territories is a large-scale phenomenon of the division of the home space. The colonial civil planning marked the watertight division between the indigenous and the British settlement. The colonial home space was stuffed with the emergent middle-class values such as monogamy ('clean' sex, which has value), industrial capital ('clean' money, which has value), Christianity ('being washed in the blood of the lamb'), class control ('cleansing the great unwashed') and the imperial civilizing mission ('washing and clothing the savage') (Upstone, 2009, p. 116-7). With the newly constructed colonial domestic space, the naturalness of the imperial nation-building was justified. (McClintock, 1995, p. 208). The neo-colonial agencies validate and promote the construction of the nation's space on the former values of domesticity. The rapid urbanization, the various welfare movements and different cultural promotions in favour of a happy homestead in the post colony reinstate the colonial values of home space. Kaplan asserts that the term 'domestic' has a double meaning. It refers to both the space of the nation and the space of the household. These two meaning are intimately bound up with shifting ideas about the 'foreign:' 'Terms such as 'foreign' and 'domestic' are not neutral, but are rather 'heavily weighted metaphors imbued with racialized and gendered associations of home and family, outsiders and insiders, subjects and citizens' (Blunt &Dowling, 2006, p. 143). We must remember that etymologically the verb form of the word 'domestic' is 'domesticate' which means to 'dominate' as well as to 'civilize' (McClintock, 1995, p. 35). Therefore, the home space in the colonial imagination was a localised site for domination and control that reflect the broader spectrum of the colonial subordination: Through the rituals of domesticity, increasingly global and more often than not violent, animals, women and colonized peoples were wrested from their putatively 'natural' yet, ironically, 'unreasonable' state of savagery' and inducted through the domestic progress narrative into a hierarchical relation to white men. (McClintock, 1995, p. 35) Historically speaking, colonial notions of clean home spaces influenced the spatial demarcation of colonial Kenya. The British homestead in Kenya was represented as hygienic, stable and orderly; whereas those outside the colonial home space were represented as uncivilised and barbaric. The Mau Mau warriors, who inhabited forests, were the bestial and primordial forces in the colonial imagination.
Only the docile Gikuyu subjects were given a clean and domestic status (Nicholls, 2010, p. 63). They were allowed to remain in the domestic spaces. The prisoners were categorized as 'black' (hardcore), 'grey' (Mau Mau supporters), and 'white' (clear and loyal). In Hola detention camp 11 Kenyan prisoners were beaten to death for refusing to work (Nicholls, 2010, p. 64). The colonial government adopted some crucial military strategies to wipe out the Mau Mau supporters and workers.
Operation Anvil was one of the many military strategies of that kind. The Operation Anvil was shouldered in Nairobi in 1954 by 25000 men of the government's forces to find the Mau Mau supporters. (Nicholls, 2010, p. 64). The Villagization programme was initiated to relocate Gikuyu civilians to 'safe' villages that were surrounded by barbed wire so that the villagers might be alienated from the Mau Mau rebels (Nicholls, 2010, p. 66). In doing so, the British Government was following the Old England model in the demarcation of the domestic space in Kenya. More than 25000 people were removed from their homes. The villagized settlements resulted in a model of domesticity founded on the ethics of division (Nicholls, 2010, p. 65-6).
In Matigari, Thiong'o critiqued the so-called welfare movements that do nothing other than adjusting and appropriating the neocolonial mechanism. The 'Housewives' Programme' broadcast on the radio is such a process. Like the 'Voice of Truth,' 'Housewives' Programme' creates a neocolonial socio-sexual space: . The socio-sexual institutions such as prostitution, nuclear family, polygamy, etc. were politicized and monitored by the neocolonial powers. The 'Housewives' Programme' on the radio is a neocolonial aural panopticon to modify and construct the socio-sexual institutions. The voice of sympathy and goodwill is a façade of neocolonial hegemony to control those institutions. Interestingly, colonization was politicized as a civilising mission rooted in the eastward journeys. Paradoxically, the neocolonial politicization of the civilizing missions is founded on the spaces of domesticity. The stabilization of the home space was at the heart of those missions.
Thiong'o in Matigari (1989) highlights the nationalist dream of returning to the pre-colonial home space. Matigari's dream represents the dream of thousands of Kenyans who fought for their independence. Matigari's dream of returning to the pre-colonial home disrupts the colonial ordering of the home space. The novel dramatizes the Mau Mau insurgency in a new format. Ngugi wrote Matigari (1989) largely in exile in London in the year 1983. In the novel, Ngugi adopted an oral storytelling mode. Incidentally, the Gikuyu word 'Matigari' means 'the patriots who have survived the bullets.' In the novel, Ngugi takes resort to Fanon's argument that decolonisation marks the meeting of the two forces--the colonising and the colonized and that the colonial rule was sustained with violence and repression. Decolonisation, according to Fanon, can only succeed by taking resort to violence (Fanon, 1965, p. 02). The publication of the novel created such unrest that the ruling government of Kenya immediately banned the novel.
In the prefatory section of Matigari (1989), Ngugi has deliberately blurred the spatial and temporal specificity of action: The country is imaginary -it has no name even. As already said, Matigari's dream of house space is intimately woven with his dream of the home space that is the space of domicile: 'I will call together all the members of the family and tell them: Let's go home and light the fire together. Let us rebuild our home. The wise among them will understand the hint.'' (Thiong'o, 1987, p. 24).
In the novel, Matigari's search for the home and his failure to find the same underline the failure of the nationalist dream of liberty. Incidentally, Matigari, as Gikandi (2002) suggests, can be divided into three parts. The first part consists of Matigari's journey as a quest for personal experience of the postcolony.
The second part deals with his moral and ethical values such as truth and justice and the final part deals with his disillusionment (Thiong'o, 1987, p. 241-2). The first part dealing with Matigari's quest for the home space is, in the words of Gikandi, marked by a temporal dimension: 'Matigari's journey is one in which the temporal dimension (the hero's return) is defined by a degree of risk. Displaced from the real experience in the postcolony, Matigari has to depend on others for his education in the ways of the new world' (Thiong'o, 1987, p. 242).
Contrary to Gikandi's claim, I find that the journey Matigari undertakes in the first part of the novel is a postcolonial re-play of the colonial journey defined in a magical-realist dimension. Matigari's journey is a violent disruption of the linear temporality. Matigari's self-knowledge of the postcolony is a colluded fiction--a utopia that is violently topsy-turvied when he encounters Muriuki, Ngaruro, and Guthera. The discursive dislocation results in Matigari's dystopian realization that the post-independent world is a neocolonial world in which Settler Williams continues to thrive. Matigari's search for the pre-colonial home space is intrinsically wrought with his dream of a family, the space of the house becoming a utopian longing for the space of a home.
The second part of the novel, as Gikandi (2002) observes, deals with Matigari's search for 'moral or ethical values' (p. 243). According to Gikandi the graph of teaching and learning is reversed in the second section of the novel. The character of Matigari possesses a doubleness that is he is at once the same time the present and the past. He is not only a character in the novel but a phenomenon. In the first part, he learns the dystopian lesson of the neocolonial exploitation which underpins his postcolonial hope of liberty. In the second part of the novel, it is Matigari who teaches the lessons of ethicality and morality. Matigari produces a new doctrine of truthfulness and humanitarianism to counter the hollow colonial ethics of governance. He travels around the country to ask people where he could find truth and justice. Thus, he makes these values 'central to nation and identity ' (Gikandi. 2002, p. 244). Matigari's travels, thus, displace the neocolonial fabrication of stable and civilized space and replaces these with a revival of old values that is the doctrines of truth and justice. Moreover, Matigari as a character transcends its fictional boundaries and becomes an element of storytelling: 'On the contrary, the more people become absorbed in Matigari's fiction, the more it becomes an indispensable counterpoint to official discourse; in being able to talk about the phenomenon of the strange man seeking truth and justice, the populace is able to overcome the culture of silence sanctioned by the state' (Gikandi, 2002, p. 244). He becomes a part of the regional narrative that actively challenges the neocolonial domination. The monopoly of the national discourse fabricated for the smooth functioning of the neocolonial hegemony is severely challenged by Matigari. The alternative discourse of morality, truth, and justice crosses the threshold of the pages of Ngugi's novel and becomes a national phenomenon. Evidently, in the novel, Ngugi uses home space as a metaphor for the nation. Home does not refer to a personal and enclosed site away from the public sphere or as an interiorised entity of but as a pluralistic space that at once undermines the imperial ethics of domestic hygiene and luxury. Ngugi's concept of home is intimately associated with the nationalist concept of home as a spatial metaphor for the nation. The home space in the nationalist imagination was a reactionary space of resistance and return: In anti-imperial nationalist politics, the home and the nation were imagined in ways that resisted rather than repeated westernization. As Chatterjee argues, nationalist visions of home and nation were embodied by Bengali women and their domestic roles, which were fashioned as distinct not only from the stereotypical British memsahib but also from Anglo-Indian women. (Blunt, 2005, p. 30) Matigari's call for returning to the home is metaphorically layered with his nationalistic dreams of retrieving the pre-colonial culture in the aftermath of independence: Let's go home and light the fire together. Let us rebuild our home. The wise among them will understand the hint' (Thiong'o, 1987, p. 24).
However, Matigari's search for the domestic space is undermined by the 'Voice of Truth'--the voice of the bourgeoisie government in Kenya. In the novel, the 'Voice of Truth' functions like an aural 'panopticon' that operates invisibly and charters out the ways of the citizens.
Home and homecoming become the chief motif of the novel and the possibility of homecoming is deferred eternally to suggest the impossibility of the nationalist negotiation. Ngugi is evidently rebuilding his dream of real independence on a symbolic aspect --with the deconstruction of the colonial myths of home. At the same time, Ngugi advocates the restoration of pre-colonial home space that consists of the indigenous culture of the present postcolony. Ngugi`s call for Pan-Africanism is firmly rooted in his vision of home and homecoming.
It is interesting to note that Matigari's concept of home is built upon the notion of family, especially the children and women. Therefore, the concept of home in the novel is not merely an imaginary geographical but a cultural entity that rests on the primitive notions of love, togetherness and selflessness. Matigari's dream of sweet homecoming is challenged when he looks at the children in the garbage heaps of a leather factory. In the novel entitled the 'Anglo-American Leather and Plastic Works', the industry represents the core of capitalist exploitation in the country. The garbage heap symbolises the deposit of the harm that the neocolonial government has dumped: He did not even talk to the guard. He quickened his pace and followed the children and the tractor. His heart beat wildly. Let me hurry and tell them that I'm back. Let (Thiong'o, 1987, p. 10-1) However, the rapid deterioration of the children's space in the neo-colonial context marks the failure of Matigari's nationalist ideologies and his utopian dream of postcolonial homecoming. The disruption of the home space in the neocolonial context is initially reflected in the sufferings of the street children in the novel. The children's space in Matigari (1989) is located on the macadam on which they fight for any offal. Their childhood space is ravished by the colonial urbanized spaces. Matigari's vision of the promised space after independence is subverted by what he sees. He encounters the children standing in a queue to pay a fee to enter an enclosed ground where heaps of rubbish are dumped.
The children pay to enable themselves 'to fight it out with dogs, vultures, rats, all sorts of scavengers and vermin, for pieces of string, patches of cloth, odd bits of leather, shoe soles, rubber bands, threads, rotten tomatoes, sugarcane chaff, banana peels, bones ... anything!' (Thiong'o, 1987, p.11).
This grim reality brings him to his senses. He sees two policemen with a dog, a tractor driver, and the two men at the gate jingling the money they had collected and shared it among themselves. Matigari tries to visualise his home: 'A vision of his house appeared before him. He had not been there, he had not yet been home' (Thiong'o, 1987, p.12).
The urge to go and look at his house seized him with the force of thirst and hunger for many days. To conclude, therefore, it may be stated that in Matigari (1989), Ngugi critiques the neocolonial appropriation of the home space. Ngugi's primary concern in the novel is to discover the inherent chaos in the neocolonial project. Matigari's search for the home space for his fellow nationals and the failure of the same underline the 'pitfalls of national consciousness' (Fanon) as well.
The neocolonial mechanisms implemented by the Kenyan bourgeoisie perpetuate the capitalist exploitation even after independence. In the novel, Ngugi focuses on the colonial ethics of home space. Matigari's journeys subvert the ethics of the home space as a fixed, disciplined and hygienic locale. The homelessness of the natives, the suffering of the children and other discernible marks of the woe discovered by Matigari underline the inherent chaos in the capitalist edifice of the neocolonial welfare projects. Ngugi in the novel takes resort to a dystopian vision for challenging the neocolonial utopianism imported from Europe.
At the same time, Matigari's dream for building a home for all the natives underlines postcolonial utopianism though it is true and honest in its essence.
Unlike the feigned neocolonial utopias that are built upon the dishonest political economy, feigned welfare projects and capitalist power play, the postcolonial utopianism borders on a true longing for the cultural homecoming.
It should also be noted that Ngugi's postcolonial utopianism is both spatial and temporal. His advocacy of the cultural homecoming incorporates nostalgia, spatial reconstruction of the indigenous home space and memory.

Note:
Settler Williams in Matigari (1989) was Robert Williams, one of the white settlers in the fictitious town in Matigari (1989). He is a British predator who with his deputy John Boy extorted the lands of the natives.