Weep Not, Child
Weep Not,child, is a 1964 novel by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. It was his first novel, published in 1964 under the name James Ngugi. It was among the African Writers Series. It was the first English novel to be published by an East African.Thiong'o's works deal with the relationship between Africans and white settlers in colonial Kenya, and are heavily critical of colonial rule.Specifically, Weep Not, Child deals with the Mau Mau Uprising,and "the bewildering dispossession of an entire people from their ancestral land."Ngũgĩ wrote the novel while he was a student at Makerere University.
Quotes
[edit]- Aaa! You could never tell what these people would do. In spite of the fact that they were all white, they killed one another with poison, fire and big bombs that destroyed the land.”
- (Narrator, Page 5)
- Any man who had land was considered rich. If a man had plenty of money, many motor cars, but no land, he could never be counted as rich. A man who went with tattered clothes but had at least an acre of red earth was better off than the man with money.”
- (Narrator, Page 20)
That’s why you at times hear Father say that he would rather work for a white man. A white man is a white man. But a black man trying to be a white man is bad and harsh."
- (Kamau, Page 22)
- [Njoroge] always thought that schooling was the very best that a boy could have. It was the end of all living. And he wanted everyone to go to school.”
- (Narrator, Page 40)
- Yes, that’s how your land was taken away. The Bible paved the way for the sword.”
- (Kiarie, Page 61)
- Colour bar was everywhere. Rich Africans could also practise colour bar on the poorer Africans…”
- (Narrator, Page 68)
- All white people stick together. But we black people are very divided. And because they stick together, they’ve imprisoned Jomo, the only hope we had. Now they’ll make us slaves. They took us to their wars and they killed all that was of value to us…”
- (Boro, Page 82)
- “I was thinking that if Jesus knew, really knew, about this thing in our country, He could have stopped it.”
- (Mwihaki, Page 102)
- It’s strange. It’s strange how you do fear something because your heart is already prepared to fear because maybe you were brought up to fear that something, or simply because you found others fearing...”
- (Stephen Howlands, Page 121)
