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The Journey
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Petals of Blood, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonialism and Capitalism
Education
Gender, Sexuality, and Exploitation
Religion, Hypocrisy, and Delusion
Land and Nature
Summary
Analysis
Munira spends eight days in jail with no human contact after his interview with Inspector Godfrey; he writes his account of events alone. On his ninth day, he approaches the policeman on guard and demands to be released, saying he was being brought in for routine questioning but since entering jail hasn’t been able to change clothes or see a newspaper. The policeman, who believes in the second coming and is afraid of Munira’s professed religious power, tries to sweet-talk Munira, claiming Munira is in jail of his own free will and that the policeman is “waiting on” him, not incarcerating him. Then he goes to get Munira a newspaper.
Munira’s indefinite detention and poor conditions of incarceration highlight again that in an unjust society, the criminal legal system serves the status quo, not justice. The cowardly policeman’s fear of Munira leads not to help Munira but to make up implausible stories about “waiting on” Munira, which again demonstrates the novel’s implicit belief that religious people tend to be superstitious and hypocritical.
Themes
The policeman returns with a newspaper. Munira reads an article describing Chui, Mzigo, and Kimeria. It notes they were owners of Theng’eta Breweries & Enterprises, Ltd.; it laments that, with their deaths, their plan to buy out all shares owned by non-Kenyans might come to an end and insinuates that their deaths may have been a plot to prevent “total African ownership” of the company.
Theng’eta symbolizes the small economic elite’s exploitation of Kenya’s potential. The newspaper’s focus on “African ownership” of Theng’eta Breweries ignores that even if all the company’s owners were African, only a tiny handful of elites would see the profits. Full social equality requires economic as well as racial justice.
Themes
Munira reads another article describing how Nderi wa Riera is seeking to institute the death penalty for stealing and for “economically motivated” crimes, as well as to illegalize strikes. Munira recalls how Ilmorog’s delegation threw things at Riera and laughs. Then he contemplates how Ilmorog organized a delegation to seek help for drought and brought back “spiritual drought.”
Riera wants to use the law to kill people who commit “economically motivated” crimes ( i.e., crimes of poverty) and to prevent strikes. This shows that in capitalist countries, laws often reinforce economic inequality. Munira’s thoughts about “spiritual drought” suggest that something bad happened to Ilmorog after the delegation returned.
Themes
In a flashback, a month after the charitable organizations and other visitors leave Ilmorog, it begins to rain. Munira interprets this outcome as an expression of humankind’s impotence compared to God; the older townspeople believe Mwathi’s sacrifice brought the rain. All the townspeople celebrate.
Munira interprets the rain according to his religious beliefs; Ilmorog’s elders, according to theirs. Since the rain is open to multiple, unfalsifiable religious interpretations, the novel implies that any religious certainty about it constitutes superstition. Munira’s beliefs encourage inaction—he thinks that people are subject to God’s will, so there’s no point in doing anything to alleviate the effects of drought. Meanwhile, the elders’ beliefs encourage dubiously effective action (sacrificing animals). The novel may be hinting, then, that people should rely on knowledge unrelated to religion to protect themselves from natural phenomena like drought.
Themes
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At Abdulla’s store, Karega, Munira, and Abdulla gather; each of them becomes aroused when they see Wanja coming to join them. Yet they all feel their journey with the delegation has posed them “questions” and “challenges” they haven’t yet answered. As an aside, Karega tells Abdulla that Joseph is doing extremely well in school.
The men’s aroused reaction to Wanja reveals their tendency to see her as a sex object first and a human second. The “questions” and “challenges’ they intuit after the delegation suggests that the journey made them wonder whether the status quo needed to change. The conversation about Joseph shows that the characters believe education is important, despite the bad experiences several of them had with racist or Eurocentric schooling.
Themes
Karega devotes a lot of energy to teaching to distract himself from the question, “where now the solidarity and unity of blackness?” As a youth, the love he shared with Mukami seemed to offer adequate meaning. Once “hypocrisy and religious double-dealing” destroyed that love, he looked to people who had practiced self-sacrifice for others’ freedom to provide meaning. But when Karega saw Chui, a former striker, become “a tyrant who thought that his power came from God and foreigners,” Karega lost that source of meaning, too.
Karega wants to believe in racial “solidarity and unity” but didn’t see it in Riera’s response to the delegation. This passage reveals that Karega wants to organize his life around some source of meaning. It also confirms he used to have a romantic relationship with Mukami, Munira’s sister who died by suicide, and that religious “hypocrisy” somehow destroyed that love. Karega blames Chui’s conservatism on religion and the Eurocentric views he absorbed at Siriana, which suggests that Christianity and colonial education pose problems for an egalitarian future in Kenya.
Themes
Wrestling with confusion, Karega recalls the lawyer as someone who seems principled and knowledgeable. He writes to the lawyer asking for books. The lawyer gives him books and recommendations for further reading. Karega reads history, hoping it will explain how the idle rich came to parasitize the working poor. Instead, the histories jump from ancient history to colonial times, bypassing most of Kenyan history before colonialism, and treat Kenyans as barbarians for resisting European exploitation. He reads political science, but political scientists seem to avoid talking about “colonialism and imperialism” directly. He reads literature, but though writers accurately describe the horrible conditions that colonialism created, they respond with “pessimism, obscurity and mysticism.”
Historians, political scientists, and novelists don’t adequately explain Kenya’s past or present. The historians and political scientists are too beholden to white-supremacist and colonialist values while the novelists peddle “obscurity and mysticism,” failing to explain how one ought to react to the terrible conditions colonialism has created. Thus, Karega cannot educate himself just by reading what academics and novelists have written—because they too are enmeshed in and compromised by a white-supremacist, postcolonial world order.
Themes
Karega sends the books back to the lawyer with a letter asking why none of them contained “the history and political struggles of Kenya.” The lawyer responds with a long letter telling Karega that, in response to Karega’s request for works by Black intellectuals, the lawyer sent him what existed. This will allow Karega to discover for himself that scholarship contains no “neutral, disembodied voices” but rather perspectives connected to material interests that the reader has to learn to identify. Karega, thinking that he only desires “truth,” wonders what kind of education he and the Siriana students went on strike hoping to get.
Karega, wanting the “truth” about “the history and political struggles of Kenya,” asked for Black-authored history and political science. The lawyer’s response—that readers must interpret all writing through the lens of the writers’ material interests—indicates that Karega won’t find “neutral” “truth” anywhere: each writer comes from a particular socioeconomic viewpoint. When Karega wonders what he and his Siriana classmates went on strike to get, he’s wondering whether an Africa-centric curriculum of African writers would be sufficient to get closer to the truth. The novel seems to imply that an Africa-centric curriculum is necessary to combat colonialism but not sufficient to get the truth, because capitalism and colonialism can corrupt African writers as well as European ones.
Themes
Meanwhile Ilmorog women, including Wanja, form a farming group, the Ndemi-Nyakinyua Group. They help each other weed and harvest. Abdulla, repentant he ever kept Joseph from school and amazed by Wanja’s transformation into a worker, thinks hopefully that perhaps they’re on the brink of something new. Suddenly two trucks come and begin building a police station and a church in Ilmorog; just as suddenly, heavy rains arrive and drive the builders away. The people realize that their next harvest is going to be enormous. Everyone plans to help with the harvest, and there will be a circumcision ceremony. Munira, recalling that he met his wife Julia during such a ceremony, hopes he'll “possess[]” Wanja again around the time of this ceremony.
In contrast with Munira’s passive attitude toward drought and the elders’ mystical one, Wanja and the other Ilmorog women take a practical view: they decide to start a mutual aid society to improve their farming. This development hints at how the novel thinks people should treat nature: husbanding it and controlling it through social policy rather than submitting to it or trying to influence it through religious ceremonies. Munira’s hope to “possess” Wanja reminds the reader that his attitude toward Wanja is often objectifying and sexist.
Themes
One night during harvest time, Munira and Abdulla are chatting while Karega teaches Joseph some math when Wanja joins them, looking thoughtful. She shrugs off Munira’s lustful stare and tells them about Theng’eta, a plant the people used to brew and drink on special occasions such as circumcisions. Drinking it helped people create art and prophesy. Though European colonists outlawed it, believing drunkenness made the colonized lazy and rebellious, Nyakinyua knows how to make it. Wanja suggests that Nyakinyua will show them how to brew the Theng’eta, and they can drink it with the elders on the day of the circumcision ceremony to celebrate.
In this scene, Theng’eta represents the potential of Kenya and Kenyan people. It seems to be indigenous to Kenya (hence, it represents the land’s potential) and it makes a culturally significant drink that colonizers attempted to ban (hence, it represents Kenyan people’s potential power). The reader already knows that Kimeria, Mzigo, and Chui will commodify Theng’eta, so it also represents the exploitation of Kenyan potential by a rich, elite few.
Themes
Nyakinyua, Wanja, Munira, Karega, and Abdulla prepare millet seeds, mix them with flour and water, and put them in a pot to ferment. On the night before the circumcision ceremony, the town comes together for dancing and singing contests. Nyakinyua and Njuguna engage in a song duel full of sexual innuendo. After a while, Njuguna concedes Nyakinyua’s victory. Munira tries to join in the singing at this point, but he messes up. When Nyakinyua and Njuguna mock him in song, Abdulla sings to defend Munira. Njuguna then challenges Karega to sing—but as he doesn’t know any songs, Abdulla defends him too, singing that they should transition to a different activity.
Whereas Nyakinyua, Njuguna, and Abdulla know how to engage in a celebratory singing contest, Munira and Karega do not. Though the novel doesn’t explain why Munira and Karega are less well versed in this traditional activity, context suggests that their Eurocentric education has cut them off from rural Kenyan culture.
Themes
While the others sit down, Nyakinyua sings about Ilmorog’s drought, the arrivals of Munira, Wanja, and Karega, the delegation’s journey, and the horrors of the city. She asks who impoverished Kenya. Then she transitions into singing about Kenya’s longer history of natural disasters and of violent colonization. She concludes by singing that the youth must resist “foreigners and enemies” and “that was the meaning of the blood shed at circumcision.” Though her song and the other celebrations are beautiful, they put Karega in a melancholy mood; he feels as though he’s witnessing a “relic,” something “from a dying world”
Nyakinyua’s song pairs natural disasters and violent colonization as two kinds of trial Kenyan people must overcome. Thus, she makes clear that while Kenyan people may have a special relationship to their land, they must also struggle to control it, lest it harm them. When Karega thinks of the song as a “relic”—an artifact from a vanished culture, a “dying world”—it suggests that rural Kenyan culture won’t survive international capitalism or increasing urbanization.
Themes
The next afternoon, Wanja, Karega, Munira, and Abdulla walk to Nyakinyua’s. Wanja explains to the others that they finally managed to find the Theng’eta, a small plant “with a pattern of four tiny red petals.” Nyakinyua opens the pot containing the brew. She explains that without the Theng’eta, the brew is just alcohol, but with Theng’eta, it can give you artistic inspiration, visions, and fertility. Nyakinyua squeezes the plant over the brew, and the alcohol turns green.
The Theng’eta plant has “four tiny red petals,” linking it to the “petals of blood” that Munira saw with his students and that give the novel its title. The flowers Munira saw represent the independent country that Kenyan freedom fighters bled for, which elite Kenyan capitalists are eating alive from the inside. By connecting the Theng’eta plant to those earlier flowers, the novel emphasizes that Theng’eta symbolizes Kenya’s potential, which colonizers and capitalists have exploited.
Themes
That evening, Wanja, Karega, Munira, and Abdulla gather at Nyakinyua’s with the town elders to drink the Theng’eta. Everyone takes off their shoes and puts any money they’re carrying, “the metal bug that split up homes and drove men to the city,” outside the “ritual circle.” After several ritual utterances, Nyakinyua states that Theng’eta manifests dreams and wishes. She tastes it and tells the assembled that her only remaining wish is to meet her dead husband, who taught her to brew Theng’eta, “in the other world.”
When the people gather to drink Theng’eta, they exclude money from “the ritual circle,” the space where Theng’eta’s spiritual power will be effective. Theng’eta and commerce don’t mix: Theng’eta’s later mass production and distribution as a commodity by Kimeria, Mzigo, and Chui is antithetical to the drink’s spiritual and cultural properties. The description of money as “the metal bug that split up homes and drove men to the city” places the blame for Ilmorog’s depopulation and Kenya’s urbanization squarely on the capitalist imperative to accumulate wealth.
Themes
Nyakinyua begins passing the Theng’eta around. When Munira drinks it, he has a vision that conflates past, present, and future, and he sees Nyakinyua working side-by-side with Ndemi. From beyond his vision, someone asks what his dreams and wishes are. He longs to ask Wanja to have sex with him again, believing that she can transform him from a passive spectator of life into “a player, an actor, a creator.” Instead, he says he sees Nyakinyua in the past, present, and future, with Ndemi but also with warriors. He asks Nyakinyua to explain what the vision means.
Ndemi is Ilmorog’s legendary first farmer, who changed the culture from mostly nomadic to mostly agricultural. When Munira sees Nyakinyua with Ndemi in a vision, it suggests that Theng’eta represents Kenyan culture, continuous from the legendary past to the present. Munira’s belief that sex with Wanja will turn him into “a player, an actor, a creator” shows both his dissatisfaction with his own passivity and his tendency to treat Wanja as a sexual object or a means to an end.
Themes
Nyakinyua says they ask her to explain too much—don’t they, too, have secrets? She also claims Ndemi has cursed the people, who were supposed to “defend [the land] with blood.” Then she tells them her husband was pressganged into serving in a European colonial war, because he refused to provide animal fat to a chieftain who collaborated with the Europeans. With other indigenous men, he was forced to carry burdens for the European army through the forest. On this journey, the men saw a mysterious animal. When one threw a rock at it, it “vomited out a fire” and slithered away. Several more men threw rocks; none of the men who threw rocks survived to go home. Nyakinyua’s husband did return, but when he did, he was “not the same man.”
Nyakinyua argues that Ndemi has cursed the people because they failed to “defend [the land] with blood”; in her view, Kenyan people had a special relationship to the land that they violated by not preventing colonization. The European colonial war Nyakinyua mentions may be World War I (1914 – 1918), as German and British colonial forces did fight each other in East Africa during that war. Nyakinyua’s sense that the war made her husband different shows the negative effects of colonialism on colonized people’s selves and relationships.
Themes
Nyakinyua’s description of her husband coming back different makes Karega think of moments of change in his own life: Mukami’s death, his expulsion from Siriana, and Ilmorog’s delegation to the city. He wonders whether African history belongs to the freedom fighters like Kimathi, the collaborators, or those who falsely conflated obedience to white people with religious duty. He concludes that Africa has multiple conflicting histories, not just one.
Mukami’s death turned Karega against religion. His expulsion from Siriana showed him that some fellow Kenyan people like Chui will uphold the unjust status quo. The delegation showed him that Kenya’s post-Independence political system isn’t working for most Kenyans. For Karega, freedom fighters like Dedan Kimathi (1920 – 1957), the most famous Kenyan general among the guerilla fighters against the British colonial government immediately prior to Kenya’s independence, represent what is best in African history. Yet African history also includes African people who collaborated with colonizers, converted to Christianity, and so forth. Karega seems to be concluding that someone’s African identity doesn’t guarantee that they’ll have the anti-colonial or anti-religious beliefs that Karega espouses.
Themes
Out of nowhere, Karega sees the face of his brother Nding’uri, whom he never knew. He wonders whether Abdulla knew his brother when they were both freedom fighters. He’s unsure why he never asked Munira about his brother, since they certainly knew each other. Then he begins thinking again about Munira’s sister Mukami. Thinking how his passion for her follows him everywhere, he suddenly begins to speak of her. One day when he was a youth, he encountered her sitting with her legs dangling over the quarry’s edge. She asked him why he didn’t attend school, and he decided to start going.
Karega never knew his freedom-fighter brother, which shows the human cost of resisting colonialism. Initially, Karega wanted an education neither to conform to the colonial status quo nor to protest it. Rather, he wanted an education to get closer to Mukami. This motive reveals the importance of sexuality to the novel’s understanding of characters’ psychology and actions.
Themes
Karega picked flowers at Mukami’s father Ezekieli’s pyrethrum fields to earn money for tuition. Mukami would sometimes help him in the fields; other times, she would bring him fruit. When he earned enough money to attend school, Mukami tutored him, and he worked very hard, skipping grades until he was just one grade behind her. One day, she got sick, and Karega—not religious—prayed to God for the first time ever that Mukami get well and become his girlfriend. They began spending time together unrelated to work or school, wading in the lake and wrestling each other. The wrestling excited Karega in a way he didn’t understand.
Pyrethrum flowers contain a compound that works as a natural insecticide. In the past, Kenya was one of the world’s major producers of pyrethrum. In the novel, flowers generally symbolize Kenyan potential; in this passage, they represent the potential both of Kenyan agricultural products (the pyrethrum industry), which Ezekieli has privatized and exploited, and the burgeoning relationship between Karega and Mukami. Their romantic potential unlocks Karega’s educational potential and his nascent religious sentiments.
Themes
Mukami began attending Kanjeru High School. The next year, Karega matriculated at Siriana, which was close by. One vacation, Mukami asked Karega to attend church with her. Afterward, they went to the lake and sat together on a little island in the middle. They got into a fight, wrestled, and began having sex. Afterward, they fell asleep.
By implication, Karega went to Siriana not because of its reputation or ideology but because it was close to Mukami’s school—which may partly explain why Karega went further in criticizing Siriana than Munira did. Mukami asked Karega to go to church with her and then sex with him; while fear of sex may characterize Munira’s religious beliefs, not all religious people share his fear.
Themes
When Karega and Mukami woke up, she began crying and asked him whether his brother (Nding’uri) had died. Karega didn’t know—his mother Mariamu had told him, vaguely, that his brother went to live with his father—and asked why Mukami wanted to know. Mukami said Ezekieli had discovered she and Karega were in love. Ezekieli claimed Karega’s brother was a Mau Mau and had been involved in cutting off Ezekieli’s ear for denouncing the Mau Maus in church. Ezekieli gave Mukami an ultimatum: either she break up with Karega, or Ezekieli would disown her and kick her out of the house.
This passage reveals why Karega believes hypocrisy and religion destroyed his and Mukami’s love. Ezekieli’s religious commitments derive not from conviction but from a desire for power. His religious denunciation of the Mau Mau guerilla fighters is thus hypocritical—and it incites the Mau Maus to cut off his ear, which leads to him forbidding Mukami from dating Karega, a Mau Mau’s brother.
Themes
Karega walked Mukami home. Back at his own house, he asked his mother Mariamu for the whole truth about his brother (Nding’uri). She admitted that Karega’s brother was executed for transporting ammunition for the Mau Mau. Shortly after—before Karega had a chance to see her again—Mukami died by suicide, jumping off the quarry’s edge where she and Karega met the first time. Karega’s story ends there.
Karega lost his brother to colonial violence against freedom fighters. The novel implies that Ezekieli’s ultimatum to Mukami—forbidding her from having a relationship with a Mau Mau’s brother—prompted her suicide. In a way, Karega lost his first love to pro-colonial attitudes as well. Karega’s story thus shows how harmful colonialism has been not only to Kenya as a whole but to individual Kenyan people and their relationships.
Themes
Munira isn’t sure whether he should hold Karega or his own father, Ezekieli, responsible for Mukami’s death. He flees the hut for a moment. When he returns, Abdulla is shaking Karega and asking whether Karega is Nding’uri’s brother. Abdulla composes himself, drinks some Theng’eta, and explains: Nding’uri was Abdulla’s friend. They were both involved in the Mau Mau rebellion. One day, the brother of Nding’uri’s girlfriend offered to sell them a gun and bullets. At the hand-off, the girlfriend’s brother gave them bullets but no gun. After the brother disappeared, police descended on Abdulla and Nding’uri—suggesting that the girlfriend’s brother had sold them out. Abdulla managed to escape, but Nding’uri was arrested and hanged. Abdulla swore revenge on the girlfriend’s brother but to this day hasn’t fulfilled his oath.
The Theng’eta inspires various characters, including Abdulla here, to tell their politically inflected personal histories. Thus, it shows both their individual potential and the way that colonial history has exploited and harmed them. The story of Nding’uri’s girlfriend’s brother, who collaborated with the colonial police to kill Nding’uri, reminds readers that while Kenya may be independent, Kenyan people who helped the violent, oppressive colonial government may remain in the country—another way in which colonialism’s influence lingers after independence.
Themes
Wanja asks Nyakinyua what her husband saw that made him come back so different from the war. Nyakinyua explains he had a vision in the light that the strange animal vomited. According to the vision, white people would trick Black people into turning against each other, and “a few hungry souls sick with greed” would keep the people impoverished and wretched until eventually a great struggle would come. Most of the listeners think they understand the vision Nyakinyua is relating and believe it has already come to pass. Abdulla starts swearing and groaning with pain; Wanja comforts and quiets him. Nyakinyua tells the assembled to go home and sleep.
Nyakinyua’s husband’s vision seems to summarize the Kenyan socioeconomic situation as the novel represents it: in postcolonial Kenya, white former colonizers have tricked or bribed Kenyan elites, the “hungry souls sick with greed,” into participating in the continued economic oppression of the Kenyan people. The great struggle that ends the vision may prophesy a social and economic revolution yet to come.
Themes
Abdulla, Wanja, and Karega leave Nyakinyua’s. Munira follows. Seeing Wanja walk first with Abdulla and then Karega, Munira feels left out. He calls to her. When she joins him, he complains about the sexual distance she’s kept from him and asks why she came back to Ilmorog, claiming she’s disturbed his “peace.” Wanja calls his peace “the peace of nothing happening” and returns to Karega. Walking home by himself, Munira contemplates how he’s always felt like an outsider in his family, how Karega seems to know more about it than he does, and how he wants to “avenge” something so as not to remain a “spectator.”
Munira blames Wanja for his disturbed “peace,” though she hasn’t done anything except live in the same town as he does. In other words, he blames Wanja for being sexually attractive to him, treating Wanja like a sex object and dodging responsibility for his own desires. When Wanja calls his peace “the peace of nothing happening,” she touches on Munira’s fear that he's a passive person, a “spectator.”
Themes
