BRIDGES: AN AFRICAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES, Number 16

Description

The ultimate aim of the struggle for independence in Devil on the Cross by Ngugi was to oust the Whiteman, referred to as Devil, from Kenya. Some strugglers were so visionary that fearing hollowness of their dream and possible return of that impersonated plague, they have chosen to crucify it. Unfortunately, that vision was not shared by everybody and only three days after the crucifixion, some natives who can but identify themselves with devil endeavored to resuscitate it as a black one. Strengthened by this unprecedented resurrection, the now black devil becomes more bloodsucking than beforehand as it has multiplied and taken uncountable human faces. The personated devil is traceable through characters whose base greed and devilish activities have seriously jeopardized the present, and even endangered the future of the country with the people turned into vulnerable preys. In a handful of words, those characters have tightly rooted neocolonialism where the people have struggled hard to uproot colonialism. Ngugi’s anger therefore targets these neocolonialists whose concern is to better exploit and subjugate their own people. Devil on the Cross “reflects Ngugi’s Marxist misanthropist standpoint against the ruling class and its oppressive socio-political and economy machinery which has been programmed to manacle the masses in Africa’s political economy” (Afolayan, 2014: 62). In his effort to denounce neocolonialism, the author simply ridicules devils. What is the core of this denunciation? How can one apprehend these characters as devils? Differently put, how does the author ridicule them?