Abstract: | The opening chapter of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's first novel, 'The river between', indicates some of what would later prove to be not only the main themes of his fiction, but the issues that lie at the heart of his later existential, literary and linguistic options. The oppositions between harmony and struggle, distance and involvement, isolation and communication are already linked to the problem of power and its legitimation and hence the relationship between the leader and his rank and file constituency, or between the author and his readers. And the movement of the reader down into the valley of life where the hidden contradictions can be made to surface, seems to anticipate the direction Ngugi was himself to take in the course of his development. This article examines this development through an analysis of Ngugi's first five novels: 'The river between' (1965), 'Weep not child' (1964, reset 1976), 'A grain of wheat' (1967), 'Petals of blood' (1977), and his first novel in Kikuyu, 'Caitani M~utharabain~i' (1980), (translated into English as 'Devil on the cross', 1982). Notes, ref., sum. in Italian and French. |