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
At the end of Munira’s fifth year teaching in Ilmorog, Munira walks outside the school. The help promised after Ilmorog’s delegation hasn’t appeared. Mzigo sometimes visits and has found one more teacher for the school, but that’s all. The trauma of “tea” has faded for Munira, and he contemplates visiting Ezekieli, though he’s not sure how he’d feel seeing his father now that he knows the truth about Mukami’s suicide. Biking along, he sees Nyakinyua and stops to speak with her. Bringing up the new teachers, she accuses the headquarters of having given “with the right hand only to take away with the left.” When Munira claims not to know what she means, she says he knows exactly what she means. Then she vanishes.
Mzigo neglects Ilmorog’s school, hinting that rural schoolchildren aren’t priorities for urbanizing, hyper-capitalist administrators like Mzigo. The idiom “to give with the right hand and take away with the left” (or “to give with one hand and take away with the other”) means to help someone and then undermine or harm them. Nyakinyua is suggesting that the new teachers have helped Ilmorog—but the headquarters has done something else to hurt the town.
Themes
Returning home, Munira finds Wanja waiting for him and invites her inside. She asks him whether he remembers, on the night they drank Theng’eta, asking her why she’d come back to Ilmorog. She tells him that she was afraid she was infertile and had tried many treatments. When he interrupts to point out that she said she was pregnant once, she tells him that child died, and it wasn’t until much later that she realized she wanted children. She visited Nyakinyua seeking advice, and Nyakinyua took her to Mwathi wa Mugo, who told her to have sex outside under a new moon.
Theng’eta, drunk in a culturally appropriate context, represents Kenyan potential—but in an inappropriate, capitalist context, it represents exploitation of Kenyan people. Wanja mentions Theng’eta now while revealing that her first child died and that she has been trying to have another, suggesting a symbolic parallel between capitalist exploitation of Kenya and Kimeria’s sexual exploitation of young Wanja.
Themes
Munira, hurt that Wanja only had sex with him to get pregnant, asks why she’s explaining this all now. She says she’s trying to make clear that she’s had an ulterior motive with every man except Karega, who gave her back her womanhood and made her feel she was beginning to “flower.” Then she accuses Munira of getting Karega fired. She demands that Munira get Karega his job back, or she’ll take revenge on him and Mzigo. Then she leaves. Though Munira feels overpowered by Wanja’s forcefulness, he knows he can’t do anything about Karega’s firing now and tells himself that he did it for Wanja, in any case.
Prior to Karega, Wanja’s sexual relationships have been mutually exploitative and capitalist: men have wanted sex, Wanja has wanted power, gifts, money, or a baby, and she has engaged in businesslike exchanges with men to get what she wants. She “flower[s]” when Karega helps her discover her own potential for non-exploitative, non-transactional sex. This passage reveals that Munira’s “evil thought” was to get Karega fired; when Nyakinyua talked about “taking away with the left hand,” she meant the headquarters firing Karega.
Themes
Walking to Abdulla’s, Wanja swears to herself that if Karega leaves Ilmorog, she will too—even though the idea of leaving Ilmorog frightens her. At Abdulla’s, Abdulla offers Karega partnership in the shop. Karega, shocked and disappointed at Munira’s pettiness, almost makes “the fatal mistake of losing faith in people and in the possibilities of truth and beauty and ideals.” But Wanja and Abdulla’s support keeps him from that mistake.
Abdulla offers Karega a partnership in the shop even though there’s no economic benefit to Abdulla. Though Abdulla is a businessman, he sometimes ignores capitalist self-interest in favor of interpersonal generosity. Forgetting that people have this capacity for generosity is a “fatal mistake” to Karega, because generosity forms the basis for “truth and beauty and ideals”—and change.
Themes
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Karega asks Abdulla why he moved to Ilmorog. Though flinching at the question, Abdulla answers: when he was released from Manyani detention camp just before independence, he joyfully anticipated that the country’s factories and farms would belong communally to all Kenyans and that Black collaborators who worked with white colonizers would be punished. Yet no economic redistribution or mass employment occurred. Abdulla bought a donkey and cart to support himself hauling goods. When he went to a loan office to buy a farm—though he didn’t understand why he should “buy lands already bought by the blood of the people,” they told him no one gets anything for free in “New Kenya.”
Manyani Detention Camp was a prison where the British colonial government incarcerated Mau Mau guerilla fighters and other political dissidents prior to Kenyan independence. After independence, Abdulla expected more economically just land distribution and punishment for collaborators. Though Abdulla’s blood and “the blood of the people” brought about the “New Kenya,” its capitalist system meant that communal land ownership did not occur and many former freedom fighters like Abdulla remained poor.
Themes
Abdulla saw regional and ethnic tensions growing between Black factions and wondered where memories of the independence movement had gone. One day, he went back to the factory where he’d worked before the war to seek a job. They told him they wouldn’t hire a crippled man; if he wanted anything for free, he should move to Tanzania or China. While standing outside the office, he saw a man arrive in a Mercedes Benz and enter the office—Kimeria wa Kamianja, who betrayed him and Nding’uri to the police. He overheard the clerks saying Kimeria had a contract with the factory and how good it was an African man “handled millions.” After that, Abdulla fled to Ilmorog to forget all that had happened.
Tanzania, an East African country bordering Kenya, became a socialist state in 1967. China became a communist state at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Abdulla cannot even get a job at the factory where he worked before Independence, after becoming crippled fighting for Kenyan freedom. The people at the factory suggest that to give Abdulla any economic help would be tantamount to Tanzania’s socialism or China’s communism. This illustrates that while corrupt elites like Kimeria “handle[] millions” after independence, most Kenyan people suffer from economic injustices.
Themes
Abdulla finishes his story and advises Karega to stay in Ilmorog, as there’s nowhere better to go. Then the men hear Wanja crying. She asks whether Abdulla’s Kimeria had a scar on his forehead. When Abdulla says yes, Wanja explains that Kimeria is the man who impregnated her when she was an adolescent and then forced her to have sex with him during the Ilmorog delegation’s journey to the city.
This passage makes explicit that the same Kimeria betrayed Nding’uri to the colonial police and abused Wanja. In so doing, it parallels the colonial violence and capitalist exploitation that ordinary Kenyan people suffered to the abuse women and girls suffer at the hands of powerful men.
Themes
Suddenly, Abdulla, Wanja, and Karega hear an airplane flying in odd circles. When they spot it in the sky, they realize it’s going to make a crash landing near them, and they throw themselves to the ground in terror. After the plane lands in a nearby field, they go investigate and find the passengers—a European and three Africans—unhurt and examining the wreck. Circling the plane, Abdulla cries, “My other leg!”
While the people in Ilmorog live in poverty, Europeans fly overhead in planes—showing the ongoing economic inequalities that European colonial exploitation of Africa has caused. Abdulla has previously referred to his donkey as “his other leg;” his cry suggests that something has happened to the donkey.
Themes
In the next weeks, many people come to see the wrecked plane, and an impromptu “festival” forms. To cheer Abdulla up, Wanja suggests they sell food and Theng’eta to the tourists. Abdulla thinks that’s a great idea, and indeed, Theng’eta is a huge hit—it becomes a nationally famous product. A newspaper reports that after the crash of an airplane doing survey work for a projected Trans-Africa Road, Ilmorog has become the location of a “strange cult” that worships a mysterious animal “bring[ing] power and light” and that drinks Theng’eta, which confers fertility on drinkers. Among the people of Ilmorog, however, the main topic of talk isn’t the wreck or the tourists but Abdulla’s donkey, which the plane crashed into and killed, and Karega, who has left town.
When Nyakinyua introduced the Theng’eta ceremony, she made everyone put money outside the ritual circle—suggesting that economic exchange had no place in Theng’eta’s cultural use. Wanja may have good intentions when she suggests that she and Abdulla sell Theng’eta to tourists, but since Kimeria, Mzigo, and Chui will later own a Theng’eta factory, this initial commodification of Theng’eta will lead to more egregious exploitations of what was once a non-commercial, culturally important practice. The sensational newspaper coverage of a “strange cult” and an animal “bring[ing] power and light” suggests that journalists are misinterpreting the people of Ilmorog, treating them as weirdly religious and superstitious when they are more concerned with practical matters, like Abdulla’s dead donkey and Karega’s move.
Themes
