Breaking the Patriarchal Enclave. Wariinga the Female Protagonist Emerges a Heroine in Ngugi’s "Devil on the Cross"

Akademische Arbeit , 2021 , 7 Seiten , Note: 1

Afrikawissenschaften - Literatur

This paper addresses the challenges that women are exposed to at the hands of men. Guided by feminist theory, this paper projects Wariinga, a woman who breaks the male chauvinistic strongholds and educates herself, acquires an education with professional qualifications. She first studies typewriting and later mechanical engineering and finds work as a mechanic, which is a male dominated area. She stands against men’s sexual advances and takes charge of herself and her world. She evolves into a new, dynamic character, determined to assert her strength squarely on her hunters who hitherto viewed her as a bounty. She shoots her former paramour and counters the men who had earlier tormented her with a gun, a weapon usually associated with masculine power. Equally, women in Zambia and elsewhere in the globe can become the Wariinga in the Devil on the Cross by shaking off the male chauvinistic yoke by learning to assert themselves to bring change in their own lives and destinies and of those dependent on them.

Table of content

Table of content

Background

Discussion

Conclusion

References

Abstract: This paper addresses the challenges that women are exposed to at the hands of men. Guided by feminist theory, this paper projects Wariinga, a woman who breaks the male chauvinistic strongholds and educates herself, acquires an education with professional qualifications. She first studies typewriting and later mechanical engineering and finds work as a mechanic, which is a male dominated area. She stands against men’s sexual advances and takes charge of herself and her world. She evolves into a new, dynamic character, determined to assert her strength squarely on her hunters who hitherto viewed her as a bounty. She shoots her former paramour and counters the men who had earlier tormented her with a gun, a weapon usually associated with masculine power. Equally, women in Zambia and elsewhere in the globe can become the Wariinga in the Devil on the Cross by shaking off the male chauvinistic yoke by learning to assert themselves to bring change in their own lives and destinies and of those dependent on them. (167 words)

Keywords : Male dominance, Women, Chauvinism, Wariinga, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Devil on the Cross.

Background

Male domination is one of the earliest known and most widespread forms of inequality that has led to violence and subjugation of women and girl children in human history. This dominance continues to exist without apology to one half of the human species even today. The wonder of it is that men do not see anything wrong in this inequality. To some, the very idea of a book on the origins of sexual inequality is absurd. Male dominance seems to men, a universal, if not inevitable, relationship that has been with us since the dawn of our species. For women it will not be proper, considerate, prudent, or honest to tar all men with the same brush as there men such as Ngugi Wa Thiongo who view this inequality as a serious malaise that has beset men in most parts of the world.

A number of scholars began to question and address the issue of male dominance in the last two decades of the earlier century. Earlier it was viewed as a historical phenomenon, grounded in a specific set of circumstances rather than a limited mindset flowing from some universal aspect of human nature or culture. There are scholars who offer differing perspectives on the development of sex roles and sexual inequality and the two are by no means identical. These scholars share a belief that the phenomena must have its origins in socio-historical events and processes which may have been part of communal life, ever since man started living in a community and sought to protect women from invaders, strangers.

Discussion

Devil on the Cross, presents a woman who had every reason to succumb as a victim of exploitation or as an object of pleasure for the local male. In communities, especially in Kenya, the woman’s role is limited to motherhood, “leaving the whole field open to men” (DOTC, 141), However, Ngugi presents a woman who opens new avenues of thought for both men and women. Wariinga though used, abused and abandoned, by her male friend, does not resign to her predicament. She decides to present a fait accompli to the men who took her for granted and other men like them. Agho analyzing the same text says “…the novel focuses more emphatically on the particular dilemma of women in a rapidly changing society, and their exploitation in terms of class and sex, using women’s position as a measure of the ills of contemporary Kenya”. She takes on the challenge of asserting herself. This was long before the rich old man from Ngorika seduced and impregnated her, temporarily making her stall in her ambition.

She is later able to complete her junior school certificate course and a course in typing and shorthand to qualify as a secretary. With a professional certificate, Jacinta starts to roam the streets of Nairobi for a job. Even her brief stint at the Champion Construction Company ends when she refuses the sexual advances of her boss. This also coincides with her ejection from her apartment, making her decide to return to Ilmorog. Through Wariinga’s experiences in Nairobi, Ngugi highlights the problem of sex exploitation,…prevalent in contemporary Kenya” 13. This kind of exploitation exists elsewhere in the world. She decides to educate herself and realise her childhood dream of becoming a mechanical engineer. Wariinga’s anecdote on the fate of Kareendi, the archetypal Kenyan girl, removes the experience of sexual harassment”. A close reading of the novel reveals that modern-day Kenya has become a country where the “women thighs are the tables on which contracts are signed [and] modern problems are resolved…He who wishes to sleep is the one who is anxious to make the bed” (DOTC, 19).

Women constitute the group mostly oppressed in Kenyan society, especially in sexual harassment. Women became conscious of this stigmatization and dehumanization of Kenyan womanhood especially by members of the national bourgeoisie. They enter in a battle against these bad considerations based on traditional gender roles negating equality of sexes. Wariinga “presents a mature feminine vision of a woman ready to confront the social, cultural and political challenges of postcolonial Africa in the 21st Century” 15. She represents the struggle against corruption and adulteration of foreign culture, primarily against neo-colonial elite which have subjugated women to secondary roles which are diametrically opposed to their revered status in traditional Gikuyu society.

Wariinga is faced with the odds that millions of women everywhere in the world experience in life, because they are taught by the family, community, society and tradition to trust the male, yet she is not guided to make the correct choices. Along the way, she decides she must live for herself, yet obey the lessons taught through tradition, she trusts and obeys the man who befriends her. It does not cross her mind that she is being used or taken advantage of, she accepts, she fears, she trusts. Wariinga’s yearning for a better life makes her succumb to the demands of the man she befriends. She lives with him in a flux of emotion and notions of love ignorant of the fact that,

It is a trans-generational relationship

He controls the relationship, as a man and with the economic means

His financial means puts him in a different social and economic class

He does not mention commitment, with the payment of the lobola

Despite her naiveté, she awakens after she recognises that she is pregnant, and when he casts her aside. In her naiveté, she goes experiences bewilderment, loss of trust, a feeling of being physically used without any emotional attachment and fear. She overcomes all of these and makes several life-changing decisions:

To continue with her pregnancy and give birth to the child

To return to the village and accept her mother’s help in looking after her child

To leave the child in the village in her mother’s care

To make a life for herself

To return to the city to correct her shortfall in education

To equip herself with a qualification for employment

To never succumb to the dictates of a male

It is in making these decisions some which are stated and some which are implied that she blasts the male bastions and storming into the male comfort zones. She chooses

To prepare herself to handle the strange world that will open in the future

To study mechanical engineering

To learn martial arts to defend herself, thereby assuring herself that she is safe and without loss for herself

To earn her own way with an assured income

She resolves that she is able to defend herself and stands on her own in every way. Wariinga changes completely during the following two years as the narrator says: “The Wariinga of today has decided to be self-reliant all the time, to plunge into the middle of the arena of life’s struggle in order to discover her real strength and to realize her true humanity. No, this Wariinga is not that other Wariinga… Cleanliness is bathing. A hero is known only on the battlefield. A good dancer is known only in the dance arena” (DOTC, 216).

The narrator argues about this women stigmatization and Wariinga’s awaking in these words:

“People love to denigrate the intelligence and intellectual capacity of our women by saying that the only jobs a woman can do are to cook, to make beds and to spread their legs in the market of love. The Wariinga of today has rejected all that, reasoning that because her thighs are hers, her brain is hers, her hands are hers, and her body is hers, she must accord all her faculties their proper role and proper time and place and not let any one part be the sole ruler of her life, as if it had devoured all the others. That’s why the Wariinga of today has said goodbye to being a secretary and has sworn that she will never type again for the likes of Boss Kihara, bosses whose condition for employing a girl is meeting for a five minutes of love after a hard drink” (DOTC, 218).

Kenyan men think that a woman can do nothing apart from cooking food and massaging the bodies of men. They have forgotten the contribution of women during the Mau Mau rebellion as Wangari has shown it in this text: “Why have people forgotten how Kenyan women used to make guns during the Mau Mau war against the British? Can’t people recall the different tasks carried out by women in the villages once the men had been sent to detention camps?” (DOTC, 245). Apart from women’s contribution in a certain era, Wariinga succeeds to study in Polytechnics generally reserved to men and to work as a mechanic engineer among men. Firstly, they denigrate her and then they respect her after proving her best proficiency. When Wariinga is working in a garage, a man teases her while he is working on his car. Wariinga rebukes him but the man continues and touches her breasts. Wariinga gives him a lesson with kicks and chops as it is revealed below: “Wariinga turned like lightning, and in a twinkling of an eye, she had assaulted him with judo kicks and karate chops that for a time he saw stars. When he was finally felled by her judo kicks, he beseeched her to stop: ‘I’m sorry’. The man got to his feet, took his car keys, started the engine and literally raised dust on the tarmac as he drove away (DOTC, 221).

A gun is seen as a very common phallic symbol, as they are often touched, polished and fondled, normally being kept in a man’s trousers. Often in films they are a fetish, with lingering close ups on the gun to signify a male’s power. “All elongated objects,” wrote Freud, “such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas (the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ – as well as all long, sharp weapons, such as knives, daggers and pikes”. All the objects that Freud lists in his book can indeed represent the human genitals, but usually after they have represented a lot of other things besides. The trouble with Freud's sexual obsession was that he robbed symbols of all other implications. The phallus, for example, is a symbol of power and fertility as well as male sexuality. “The penis,” quipped Jung, “is itself a phallic symbol!” A conscious fear of a gun represents a subconscious fear of that which a gun symbolizes, which is the male phallus. Any person who fears a gun in real life makes a unconscious reference to their subconscious fear of, well, penis.

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• Hochschule: Kwame Nkrumah University
• Note: 1
• Autor: Jive Lubbungu (Autor:in)
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2021
• Seiten: 7
• Katalognummer: V1038919
• ISBN (eBook): 9783346453433
• Sprache: Englisch
• Schlagworte: breaking, patriarchal, enclave, wariinga, female, protagonist, emerges, heroine, ngugi’s, devil, cross