Who Is Matigari?

By Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

(@bubakarsulai13)

Title: Matigari

Author: Ngugi wa Thiango

Pages: 175

Date: 1986

Publisher: African Writers Series

ISBN: 978-043505-46-0

Certain names remind us of certain people. Maryam is my course-mate and her name makes me remember my sister at home. Maryam is wonderful, always in control. She is the person who obliged me to write this. I want to be like her when I grow up.

  
If you read this and you enjoy it, do not thank me, thank Maryam. I will give you her number. She is in Lang, that’s how they say it, and I would be in Rome while in Rome. But Keep reminding me as we go along so that I should not forget. Here we go, enjoy.

So who is Matigari? A patriot, Angel Gabriel, Jesus Christ? Or human or a spirit, a prophet or lunatic, a man or a woman or simply an idea or image in people’s mind?

These are the questions people ask when a stranger emerges from the forest after he lays down his arms, buries his AK-47 and sword beneath a tree and girds himself with the belt of peace and comes into town in search of his family to rebuild his home. He fought for independence and defeated Howard Williams the White settler and John Boy his African accomplice. However, things do not turn out well as he expects. Corruption and injustices, poverty and dilapidation, are everywhere in the society.

The first shock comes when he sees a drove of children running after a truck of rubbish and each child has to pay to get to the garbageyard to fight out his share with vultures, dogs, rats and other sort of vermin. He stands there in shock. My children? 

One of the boys finds a scrape of radio from the garbage. The bigger one knocks him down. Matigari moves towards the children. The bigger one sees him and runs away. The smaller one also runs when he sees that the man is carrying a stick. However, Matigari remembers the belt of peace round his waist and throws away the stick.  He follows the children and along the way he sees the driver of the garbage truck and the police share the money they collected from the children. These are the injustices that drove him to the forest.

He follows the smaller boy to show him the way to his home. Conversation springs up between them where he learns that the boys have no home, no food and no shelter. They carve a space for themselves in the street and sleep in the disused and dented cars which they call homes. These are the children for which he, fought for, and now, sets out to save from the unjust, wicked society. As he stands there, they begin flying stones at him, mistaking him for one of those adults who usurp them some of the articles they find on the garbage.

He goes to the bar along with another person he just met. People are grumbling about the poor working condition and are planning strike. Matigari is still shocked to discover that after killing Howard Williams and John Boy, the oppressors, the living condition remains still atrocious. 

Outside the bar, on the street, Guthera peeps through the window, glimpses police men coming and takes to her heels. She has an intense hatred for them. They killed her father when she refused to have sex with them in exchange for his release. Guthera as a prostitute resolves that no amount of money will make her open her legs for any police officer. This would be her Eleventh Commandments.

The police run after her, catch her and make her kneel on the ground. They set growling dogs at her, barking and snarling menacingly close to her face.  The scene is peopled with cheerful crowd. Nobody could challenge the police for their harassment of a defenseless woman. Matigari comes forward and secures her dignity. He could not watch the beauty of the land being trampled upon. 

Matigari goes on searching for his people, telling everyone he meets that he could not surrender the home he built with his own hands to the oppressors. Guthera, the woman he helped outside the bar, tells him that he should try going to plantations to see if he can find his family but should not bother about people like her who have lost their souls to the bar.  However, she decides to assist him. They set westward. The day is closing in, yet they haven’t found Matigari’s home. When they reach a plantation, near the hill, Matigari identifies a huge mansion and a plantation as his own possessions. He believes, in his mind, that the land is the birthright of the poor.

He moves on to enter the house and the guards stop him and show him the Boys’ Quarters. But Matigari asks them is that where the keys are kept. The house that the White and the rich live belong to the poor since they were built from the sweat and labor of the poor. Robert Williams and John Boy Jr. come to the scene and query Matigari how he comes about claiming the house. Roberts Williams goes away to call policemen.

Matigari meets other people in the cell, they engage in conversation. There is a drunkard who is detained for drunkenness. There is a peasant farmer who is arrested for selling milk without a license. Another is arrested for stealing food from a restaurant. He is hungry. Another is charged of murder of a wealthy landowner who had failed to pay him his wages and there are children and a wife waiting at home. The fourth detainee is arrested for vagrancy, demanding him to obtain a permit before he can walk the streets of his own country. There is also a student who is detained for breaking the notorious Chief Act that prevents children from yelling at adults.  Another is a teacher who has been arrested for teaching Marxist ideologies, which is a grave violation of the state law. The seventh is detained because he almost snatched a bag from a bourgeoisie woman. He defends his action by saying that he only wanted to help her spend the money, she is rich.  They all mysteriously escaped and the police officers are commanded to arrest and return them back to the cell.

The Minister of Truth and Justice calls a conference to settle the dispute between workers and the factory owners. He sets up a committee of jury to discuss the punishment for the offenders of the Presidential decree that bans strike and revolutionary actions in the state. Matigari and his fellow detainees are brought forward from the room where they are locked after they were once gain arrested. The man in hood is the state witness who specialized in telling the truth. His main assignment is to testify against a party when involved in a lawsuit with the state. They Minister decides to remand them until the court gets a ‘chance’ to listen to their case but later decides that Matigari, Garuri wa Kiriro  and other political prisoners are mentally ill and should be taken to the psychiatric hospital for examination. Only a madman will preach the kind of ideology they hold. The vagrant feels grateful with the ruling since he could find food and shelter in prison. 

News came from the Voice of Truth that a group of patients has escaped from the mental hospital. The authority orders the shooting of any madman in sight. The town is thrown into chaos. Roadblocks are erected everywhere, and according to the instruction from the Voice of  Truth, “people are requested to report to the nearest police station anybody found” speaking, dressing, acting and doing things only madman would do like asking awkward questions or keeping unkempt beard.

Matigari determines to kill Robert William the son of Settler Williams and  John Boy Jr. the son of John Boy. The house they are hiding is heavily guarded to prevent Matigari from making his way in. Other security operatives are planted at strategic places. Some vehicles are sent out to hunt down Matigari. Cheerful crowd gathers to watch the spectacle, expecting a miracle to happen that day.  Matigari will force his way into the house heavily guarded.

On their way to the forest, before crossing deep down where Matigari buried his weapon, they find a man and a woman inside a Mercedes Benz one on top the other doing something (I won’t tell you what they are doing because I’m doing fasting). They coward them into accepting a deal to allow them use the car in exchange of keeping their secret. The lovers accepted the deal to preserve their image.

Matigari sits behind the wheel and starts the engine. They drive through the town, the car so expensive, beautiful and posh, giving them absolute privilege and cover, passing every roadblocks without hitches, the police having not recognizing them, sometimes “assisting them by opening more passage so that the car  can pass easily without slowing down.”  Maruiki is excited by the sumptuousness of the car and feels that the car is like a ticket to heaven. He giggles at the ignorance of the police and feels like peeping out to tell the police “it is us you are looking.” The car they are riding belongs to the wife of the Minister of Truth and Justice and thus, the police treat them with immense respect.

Matigari drops Muruiki and Guthera and rides the car to the John Boy’s whereabouts. Huge crowd gathers around every street leading to, and in the vicinity of, the house. Matigar is driving, two police cars are chasing after him. He suspects the person he met at the filling station must have been a police informer. They nearly caught him but Matigari managed to escape. He quickly makes a u-turn, and to the delight of the police, he is perusing a dead-end road. The police drive leisurely behind him, pleased with themselves.

Every inch of the road is stuffed with security guards. The police want to catch him dead or alive but they want to do it in full view of the public to dispel the rumor about the miracles of an angel and Jesus Christ’s second coming that springs around him. The public must see.

The crowd and the security men at the William’s compound have no clue about how Matigari will arrive.  They then just spot a breathtakingly black Mercedes with two-police-car escort. Who is that dignitary? There is no mistake that the government and its business allies are worried about Matigari. Even VIP people are coming to watch the end of Matigari, the security men and the crowd are amazed.

Matigari drives straight into the house, nobody stops him. The police realize their blunder and begin begging Matigari to come out and surrender. If he does that, they promise, nobody will touch him. The public cheer in merriment at the police gaffe and the police warn them that whoever dares to cheer again would be shot. An explosion is heard, Matigari burns the house. Unfortunately, Robert William and John Boy Jr. are not in the compound. Matigari slips through the window to escape to the bush from where his family of freedom fighters would continue launching resistant attack against the oppressors.

Analysis

The novel is historical written originally in Gikuyu and translated into English Language by Wangu wa Guriri, set in an unnamed country, but we can detect the nation, and not a direct attack on colonialism, but on political disillusionment after independence, corporate corruption and global capitalism, taking the reader back to the history of liberation struggle in Kenya, with oppression, corruption, injustices, exploitation, land usurpation, passiveness, and ideational war as recurring themes featuring throughout the novel.

Masses are used and exploited in building the coffee factories and processing industries, tilling the crop and the plantation and building the houses that the White-settlers and their Black accomplice own. But what about the reward? For your salary, the factory owners will fling a shilling at you and a tax collector from the Revenue Department is waiting at the door.  They till the land and the harvests go to the Whiteman. They build the house and they beg to sleep on the verandah. Now the consciousness that Matigari is raising among his people is to stop the unjust distribution of wealth.  This sets the stage for the story.

First, the expectations were initially that paradise will come when the colonial masters have gone. But ironically, the situation exacerbates, oppressively harsh and cruel after independence. 

Second, the search for a better society is a heavy burden on Matigari as the only person concerned about the situation, not talk of people who lost their souls to the bar. Yet, despite hunger and thirst, Matigari is determined in his quest for a better society.

To begin with, Guthera tells him that they should start their search by visiting plantations. Now which plantations, where would he begin? He realizes of course that there are many problems. Guthera feels duty-bound to assist him to show her gratitude for saving her from police brutality.

Events in Part One unfold through question-and-answer technique which is skillfully handled to present a picture of a terrible society. What transpires in his encounter with Robert William and John Boys Jr. is revealed using this technique. This is deliberate; Ngugu allows the character to tell us their own story without dominating their thoughts. Matigari who stands as a representative of the poor resolves that the builder will refuse to beg for a place to squeeze his head, the tiller refuses to starve and the tailor refuses to go about naked. 

Times elapsed and the society has changed between the intervals Matigari spent in the forest. Matigari is stunned when he is asked by John Boy Jr., now the owner of the house after purchasing it from Robert Williams, a kind of continuation of the system, to produce evidence that he owns the house and had signed a contract with his father to sponsor John Boy Jr. abroad for his education as he claims. Matigari is not familiar with this sort of intricacies and complexities of modern society. He says that his hands are the title-deeds since he is the laborer who built the house. Matigari also believes that such well-known fact as contributing the child’s education by the society isn’t a point of contention. You don’t need any written document before you do an act of kindness.

We see a sharp contrast between the worlds of African and European societies. The initial hope was that such people who had been sponsored to study abroad would come back to pay the society in kind. While Matigari is calling for the collective ownership of values and benefits in the society, John Boy Jr. is lecturing him that there has always been difference between individual and community, yours is yours, mine is mine. Ko ba haka ba?

The children who stoned Matigari should be exonerated. They, like Guthera, are forced to live a life they do not choose. They live in a wicked world and their life is a typical example of street culture and urban violence, resulting from either the death of a guardian or vices such as poverty, dysfunctional homes and broken societies. And government is unable to integrate them and make them useful.

In the cell we meet detainees who present a perspective of unjust society with criminal justice system stacked up against the poor.  All the detainees are members of the lower class who are detained, they believe, for no reason at all. The cell has no toilet facilities, and each has to contribute what little he has to sustain themselves. Although there are some far-fetched incidents, here Ngugi uses the merit of probability to present real life characters and condition that can be found in many African states.

Part Two largely centers around  Matigari’s fervent quest for the truth and justice. It is not like Matigari does not know the situation, but a kind of investigation, a survey to show the reader the real issue in the society and to justify his decision of resorting to violence in the later part of the book.

The idea of crisis between labor and capital dominates, with the masses working under harsh condition. Ngugi raises an argument that capitalism and Western imperialism are bad to Africans and only serve as means of protecting European political and economic interests.  The society is divided on ideological lines: the patriots and the sellouts, those who defend the people and those who attack them. Capitalism versus socialism, individualism versus communism, truth versus injustice and liberation versus oppression in which injustices is shaken to its foundation when Matigari feels that too much fear breeds misery and stands up to put out questions to the Minister of Truth and Justice in a meeting. People admire him; it has been so long such display of courage. Because he is on the wrong side, the Police Commissioner frets in fear suspecting that Matigari is carrying a dangerous weapon.  He is not. Matigari’s courage comes from his moral stand to side with the truth. Victory is always with the people.

Then the reader is taken into the mind of the capitalists to tell their reason for oppressing the poor. In his opinion during the conference, The Minister announces that industries cannot run if workers are to decide their wages, which day they would work and how many hours they are going to spend. He tells them categorically that their agitation would not produce good results. The country, any country in the world, is governed by few individuals. This vividly shows the hypocrisy of democracy where truth and justice are ever elusive.

In attendance during the conference are representatives of the Western countries, the Provincial Commissioner, the Police, the Army, the Priest and the man in judicial robes. The Minister for Truth and Justice speaks about the virtue of loyalism to the Crown and rebukes disobedience to the authority.

Ngugi has successfully conveyed his message, satirizing the notion how notorious African leaders have become in parroting what their foreign masters tell them on how they should rule their own people. To reinforce this notion, there are the Editor of the Daily Parrot, professor of History of Parratology and another university lecturer B. Ed, MA and PhD., Philosophy of Parratology who hold hymn-book of parrot and ready to give evidence to show that “historically, philosophically and journalistically speaking, [that] those who teach Marxism” are the bad elements spoiling the country. 

Under Presidential Decree, the government bans revolutionary politics, socialism and foreign ideologies, riddle, joke, story, proverbs, fiction and the mention of Matigari ma Njiruungi, anything that would arouse consciousness. In this case, Ngugi sees the state as an instrument of oppression. As Ngaruro wa Kiriro rightly observes “in the past before the Whites brought imperialism here, did we ever have police and soldiers? Never was there any prison…” The army, the court and the prison are there always to keep down civil unrest.

The issue of racism thinly sneaks in when Matigari and his comrades break from madhouse. The government orders the arrest of anybody with unkempt hair. However, it is the same government that will later apologize to foreign governments when white people with unkempt hair are accosted, saying that all the criminals are Black people other than one Asian. Here in lies the gradation of race, the most superior, the superior and the inferior.

The Voice of Truth should not be ignored. It comes often to ridicule and satirize the Minister of Truth and Justice, His Excellency and other government officials.  The irony is that the officials telling people to be obedient are notorious law breakers. If somebody tells you not to do a thing such are the very people doing it more than you. If they tell you not break a law, it is the one they break the most and only do not want you to match their offense. Those who steal a big cut from the national cake are those who take the meat from the table to teach contentment. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry of the wonderful times to come.

Religion does not go unscathed. The peeing and farting of the drunkard in the cell is a mild satire and comic relief, a device of making light what is serious and still being what it is.  The feeling while reading the text is entertaining and instructive. When the other detainees pinch the drunkard from his sleep, he says humorously that he is helping God with his peeing by letting three drops. Now they seem to believe that a drunkard person has an insight to look at things differently. There is widespread drought; weeds, grass and trees have dried.

When Guthera narrates a story of a girl whose father was killed, the Priest only says thou shall not kill, thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s things, thou shall not commit adultery; all the crimes that the leaders commits against the citizens. What of hunger? What of food, shelter and nakedness of the hungry child in the street?  Other than mere worshiping, religion, any religion, should have something to offer to its followers when they are in hard condition. Not that, the same religion fails to punish those who commit the most atrocious crimes in what the writer refers to as imperial Christianity where the criminals are becoming the dispensers of justice.

The wife of the Minister of Truth and Justice usually appears on the radio to extol virtues. She had once issued a public statement that all barmaids and prostitutes should be put in prison. But see her, naked in wilderness being eaten up by another man. Thou shall not commit adultery. Here in lies the discrimination against the poor. For breaking her eleventh Commandments to save the comrades, the Priest says Guthera should kneel before God to ask for forgiveness. But Matigari disagrees. Who should kneel for forgiveness between one who is vulnerable and one who created the world so upside-down and throws the weak to live in it?

Part Three is about the new strategy. Matigari realizes that, despite his peace mission, reason and sound argument could not appeal to the oppressors. That kind of thinking first landed him in prison and now in madhouse. He discovers that the employment of words without gun, gun without words, could not drive the enemy away. He pilots a new way to combine the two, one to appeal to the poor, the other to strike the power structure, with truth and justice working on the same side. This way, he believes, he could defeat the enemy.   

Matigari has won the war at long last when found his home and children who join the course of liberation movement shouting “we are the children of Matigari ma Njiruungi…We are the children of the patriots who survived the war and their wives.” This is to show the degree of fierceness and resilience of the undying spirit of freedom struggle hence the sun, we are told, continues to peep behind the cloud, and from there sends “out darts of fire to every direction.” That says falsehood will walk a distant mile before truth triumphs over it in one leap.

Matigari is a human like everyone and unlike everyone. What differentiates him from others is that he conquers fears and resists oppression. People’s agony becomes his agony, their suffering his suffering and is determined that wealth produced by the masses would not continue to remain in the hands of those who reap where they’ve never sowed. We obviously see the difference between do-something and do-nothing.

The ending is a strong message to the oppressors. When  Matigari says “…whether they imprison, detain or kill us, they will never stop [us] we who toil from struggling against those who only feed on our toil” and has sworn that John Boy Jr., who the author uses to stand as the symbolism of domination and oppression, would never sleep in that house. In other words, in as much as injustices exists, there will never be peace in the society.

Postscript

Shit, you see ba,  the effect of forgetfulness! I have forgotten to write down Maryam’s contact till I dropped my pen. It’s your fault that you refuse to keep reminding me. But don’t worry, we'll meet next time.