The Autobiography as a Political and Ideological Rhetoric: an Evaluation of Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Memoirs

Abstract

This study evaluates the rhetorical strategies Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s has employed in his five memoirs: Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of the Interpreter, Birth of a Dream Weaver, Detained and Wrestling with the Devil. The study presupposes that, in crafting his five memoirs, Ngũgĩ artistically and rhetorically attempts to persuade his readers to assent to his political and ideological agenda. In evaluating the credibility of the narrators, the author’s claims/arguments and the major rhetorical agenda in each of the texts, the study adopts a multi-theoretical approach involving the theories of autobiography and creative nonfiction, rhetoric, narratology and prison literature. The study is qualitative and descriptive in design; hence, it involved close reading and textual analysis of the collected data from the primary texts and other relevant literature. The study establishes that, in each of Ngũgĩ’s memoirs, the author has employed a different rhetorical strategy in relation to the dominant exigencies and thematic focus of each text; hence, influencing the readers in different ways. It demonstrates that in Dreams in a Time of War, Ngũgĩ establishes his anti-colonial exigency through which he attempts to persuade the reader that colonialism had an indelible impact on his childhood memory by employing the epigraphic style, the extended metaphor of dreams, and invoking the family as a frame for anti-colonialism among others. In In the House of the Interpreter, Ngũgĩ adopts the rhetoric of the ambivalence of anti-colonial discourse by foregrounding education, racism and Christianity as frames for colonialism and using animal imagery and colonial iconography to interpret colonialism and the colonial Empire. The study further reveals that the rhetoric of an artist’s self-definition is Ngũgĩ’s rhetorical strategy in Birth of a Dream Weaver whereby he foregrounds his creative achievements and articulates the paradox of independence, focalizes colonialism as special topoi for his writings, and appeals to global imaginings as being among the multiple influences of his writings. It finally demonstrates that, in Wrestling with the Devil and Detained, Ngũgĩ’s rhetorical strategy is contesting autocracy in postcolonial Kenya by manipulating the narrative paradigm, extolling the artist while subverting the state, foregrounding prison as a site of political oppression, and taking the not-guilty stance in defending himself against his detention. The study concludes that Ngũgĩ’s style and rhetorical agenda in his memoirs draw heavily from the legacy of colonialism and are largely determined by his political and ideological agenda; hence, some of the rhetorical strategies effectively advance the author’s political and ideological agenda while others work against his intention to persuade his implied audiences. This study recommends that a rhetorical criticism on different kinds of nonfiction writings, especially the memoir/autobiography in Kenya and Africa in general, to establish that the African life-writing genre could be a critical rhetorical artefact.