Petals of Blood suggests that people have a special relationship to the land from which their forebears came—but that people must still exert careful, custodial control over the land, because nature can be cruel. The novel asserts at various points that people have a special relationship to their land. For example, when the people of Ilmorog are traveling to the city to ask for aid during a drought, they feel that the Kenyan freedom fighters who died for the land they’re crossing have “hallowed it,” that is, made the land sacred. In the same vein, the anti-capitalist political organizer Karega thinks of the land as a mother or father and of the Kenyan people as its children—which is why individual people shouldn’t own the land any more than one child should occupy all a parent’s time to the detriment of other siblings. Despite hinting at a special relationship between Kenyan land and Kenyan people, however, the novel shows that nature can be cruel: it describes famines caused by natural events such as locusts and drought and calls “uncontrolled nature” a “threat” to people’s flourishing. It also subtly undermines statements by Ilmorog farmers who suggest that harvests are good or bad according to God’s will (and so better science and farming techniques are beside the point) by hinting that European colonists’ poor land management and clear-cutting of forests made Kenyan harvests worse. In this way, the novel simultaneously asserts that people have a special, close relationship to their ancestral land—and that people need to exert control over land and nature to keep nature from hurting or even killing them.
Land and Nature ThemeTracker
Land and Nature Quotes in Petals of Blood
We are all searchers for a tiny place in God’s corner to shelter us for a time from treacherous winds and rains and drought. This was all that I had wanted him to see: that the force he sought could only be found in the blood of the Lamb.
Kenyan people had always been ready to resist foreign control and exploitation. The story of this heroic resistance: who will sing it? Their struggles to defend their land, their wealth, their lives: who’ll tell of it?
Haunting memories from the past; the year of the locust; the year of the armyworms; the year of the famine of cassava […] uncontrolled nature was always a threat to human endeavor.
Kenya, the soil, was the people’s common shamba, and there was no way it could be right for a few, or a section, or a single nationality, to inherit for their sole use what was communal, any more than it would be right for a few sons and daughters to monopolize their father or mother.