Satire in Wamugunda Geteria’s Novel Nice People
Abstract
Many novels have been written about the effect of HIV and the resultant Aids Pandemic.
In Kenya novelists Joseph Situma, Marjorie Oludhe MacGoye, Wahome Mutahi, Moraa
Gitaa and Wamugunda Geteria have composed fictional works that reflect the devastation
that the pandemic has wrought on humanity.
Satire is one of fictional literature’s most important contributions to the society.
Satire has been used, among other social purposes, in the crusade against bad governance
to chastise the governors of independent African states into reformation, to castigate
alienation and neocolonial tendencies of African elite and to deplore the manner in which
men exploit each other in the modern society in the name of religion.
Geteria expands the scope of satire in the most pragmatic discourse on the pandemic
exposing how human folly perpetuates the spread of sexually transmitted infections.
Indeed he demonstrates that the devastation that Aids wreaked upon humanity is due to
the fact that social attitudes offered a conducive atmosphere for the virus to thrive. This
project is a discussion of how the writer has employed irony, burlesque, exaggeration,
paradox, invective and other literary devices to chastise the society out of the kind of
hypocrisy that the writer deems responsible for the plight of men and women in relation
to HIV and Aids.
The open discourse on Aids that the satirist advocates has been adopted as the most
effective way not only in containing the spread of the virus but also in reducing the
condemnation of the afflicted.
Stylistic theoretical framework, that studies a writers choice of language in order to gauge
the writer’s message, has been used in an analysis of the text to study how Geteria has
satirized hypocrisy that, as he so ably demonstrates, is responsible for the suffering of
the affected.
Citation
Master Of Arts In Literature At The University Of Nairobi,2014Publisher
University of Nairobi