Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This was written soon after the Mau Mau uprising. Petals of Blood is his best book. African literature is too often put into a corner of the bookshop like some kind of booby prize. But this is a world-class novel by any standards – it happens to deal with those themes, but it’s a cleverly constructed and accurate account … It’s sort of prescient. Like any great novel it opens the heart of the issue. It’s basically about the Mau Mau, and about various infighting and how Mau Mau became, from his perspective, a gang war in some ways.
Your fourth book is Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. This deals with oppression of Africans by Africans.
It was written relatively soon after the Mau Mau uprising. Petals of Blood is his best book. African literature is too often put into a corner of the bookshop like some kind of booby prize. But it’s a world-class novel by any standards – it happens to deal with those themes, but it’s a cleverly constructed and accurate account… It’s sort of prescient. Like any great novel it opens the heart of the issue. It’s basically about the Mau Mau, and about various infighting and how the Mau Mau became, from his perspective, a gang war in some ways.
Even recently we’ve had tribal violence in Kenya. Is that the sort of thing that he was predicting?
In a sense. But it’s not a morality tale – it’s a jolly good story. I haven’t chosen it because it says something in particular about Africa, although funnily enough it does. It’s less political in a sense than Things Fall Apart, although the setting is more explicit, if that makes sense.
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War correspondent Sam Kiley is the author of Desperate Glory: At War in Helmand with Britain’s 16 Air Assault Brigade. Kenyan-born, he was educated in England and he has now covered 30 conflicts in more than 20 countries. Married with two children, he lives in rural Suffolk.
