Rhetoric in African Fiction: a Postcolonial Analysis to Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow

SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: English Language & Literature

CONTRIBUTORS:

Iwara, F.A;
Ogene, M.S;

ABSTRACT:

Rhetoric is the study of language aimed at analyzing persuasive oral discourse and the effects of language. The persuasive oral traditions of Africa are sometimes found in proverbs, myths, legends, folktales, riddles, oratory, Africanisms, songs and other elements of figurative language found in selected and isolated excerpts from written texts and oral performance. Many studies about Ngugi’s fiction apparently fail to capture the undertone of Ngugi’s concept of decolonization in terms of using African language and persuasive oral traditions of Gikuyu to explain human suffering in postcolonial Kenya. This limited scholarship has constituted a problem which makes this research to focus on the peculiarity and use of rhetoric in Ngugi’s English novels; A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood and his Gikuyu novels; Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow. The purpose of this study is to interrogate the extent Ngugi uses rhetoric to achieve argumentation, persuasion towards cultural decolonization, human sufferings and the traumas of postcolonial Kenya. Content and context analysis approaches of qualitative methodology were used in analyzing the forms of rhetoric in Ngugi’s novels selected for this study. This study employs the postcolonial theory as the theoretical framework of the study because the selected novels raise issues on colonialism, cultural hybridity, power play and neo-colonialism which are the core concerns of postcolonial criticism. The conclusion drawn is that the analyzed rhetoric in the novels distills portrayal of cultural decolonization against Eurocentrism in Africa, human sufferings and the traumas of postcolonial Africa.