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
Inspector Godfrey rides the train away from Ilmorog and thinks about the case he has just closed. He feels uneasy. He doesn’t care about Karega. Godfrey loves order and believes capitalistic economic hierarchies are as “fixed” as the stars; for him, Karega might as well try to “push the sun or moon” from its place and is morally worse than a violent criminal.
Inspector Godfrey’s belief that the stars are “fixed” is false. Solar systems (including ours) orbit the center of their galaxies, while the moon orbits the earth. When Inspector Godfrey compares capitalism to “the sun and moon” to prove that it is “fixed,” the novel implies the opposite: capitalism isn’t any more immovable than the sun or moon, which move all the time.
Themes
Yet it disturbs Inspector Godfrey that Munira, a religious man from a rich family, would commit murder. He tries to dismiss Munira as a “fanatic,” but he can’t deny that Munira correctly identified evil in Ilmorog—not so much Wanja’s brothel, but the tourist village co-owned by Nderi wa Riera and the German man, which sells African women and girls as sex workers for European tourists—and sometimes sex-traffics them to Europe. Godfrey considers alerting his superiors to the sex trafficking—but then he remembers how many important people might be involved and decides to keep out of it, rationalizing that “moral questions of how and why” aren’t his job.
This passage reveals that Riera and the German man are in fact trafficking Kenyan women and girls to European men. This revelation once again parallels rich people’s exploitation of poor people and European exploitation of African people with male sexual exploitation of women and girls. Inspector Godfrey’s decision to ignore “moral questions” reemphasizes that the police in corrupt societies do not serve morality or justice, only the status quo.
Themes
In bed in her hut, Wanja wonders why people choose the sides they do in conflicts, such as colonizers versus the people. She decides it’s about what you love and hate. You determine what you love and hate by your choices, for example, whether you help the people or help colonizers oppress them.
Wanja’s argument seems circular. She decides that if you love the people, then you will help them, but also that you choose to love the people by helping them. That is, you love them once you’ve helped them. Her logic makes it unclear which comes first, loving or helping. Wanja’s circular analysis shows how hard it is to analyze people’s motives.
Themes
Wanja concludes that she and her father ended up on the same side—small businesspeople siding with imperialists and capitalist interests. She recalls how she went to visit him, shortly before first traveling to Ilmorog. She was sick and asked her for money. When she reached into her purse, he began showering her with compliments—and she felt paralyzed, realizing that only money ever made him like her. She refused to give him anything, and he criticized her harshly. She left. Afterward, she heard he’d died of cancer, and she didn’t cry.
Wanja’s final break with her father shows how economic inequality and capitalist greed can poison interpersonal relationships. Due to his poverty, Wanja’s father wants money so much that he can’t value Wanja as a person anymore—he can only value her according to the money she can provide him.
Themes
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Someone knocks on the door of Wanja’s hut—and Wanja’s mother enters, saying “fire again!” Both women cry. Wanja’s mother explains that she only learned what Wanja suffered because an acquaintance asked her how Wanja was healing—a shock Wanja’s mother could only endure due to her Christian faith. Wanja’s mother stays with her for several weeks. Suddenly, Wanja tells her mother that she believes she’s pregnant. When her mother asks who the father is, Wanja sketches a person, missing a limb, whose appearance contains elements of Kimathi and of the sculpture in the lawyer’s house. Examining the sketch, Wanja’s mother asks who the person is, and why he appears to have suffered so much and yet is laughing.
That Wanja’s mother says, “fire again!” shows she doesn’t see Wanja’s near-murder as a one-off crime by a religious madman. Rather, she sees it as part of a pattern of male violence against women, which includes her own sister’s murder by fire. Though the novel usually represents Christians negatively, as hypocrites or zealots who impede progress, here it shows Wanja’s newly supportive mother gaining strength from her faith. Though Wanja was likely pregnant before she murdered Kimeria, she only realizes she’s pregnant afterward; in symbolic terms, killing the abuser who impregnated her as an adolescent resolved her trauma so she could become pregnant again. The father Wanja sketches resembles Abdulla (the missing limb), famous Kenyan freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi, and the lawyer’s freedom-fighter sculpture. Abdulla may be the baby’s biological father, but the baby is figuratively the child of Kenyan freedom, made newly possible by the deaths of exploiters like Kimeria.
Themes
Abdulla and Joseph are sitting outside Abdulla’s place in New Jerusalem. Joseph has Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood with him. He tells Abdulla that Chui’s murder came at an odd time, since the students and some staff were planning a strike to protest Chui’s neglect of the school in favor of his business interests. The students are still planning to agitate for ending “the whole prefect system” and a curriculum “related to the liberation of our people.”
Sembene Ousmane (1923-2007), also called Ousmane Sembène, was a Senegalese novelist and filmmaker. His novel Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960), translated into English as God’s Bits of Wood, critiques French colonization of Senegal. That Joseph is reading an anti-colonial African novelist suggests that he has surpassed Karega in decolonizing his mind at a young age; while Karega wanted Siriana to teach African literature, Joseph seeks it out himself. Joseph, like Munira and Karega before him, is planning a student strike at Siriana, which shows that the struggle to decolonize Kenyan education isn’t over but is progressing; now, the students’ demands are growing more radical, and they want not only Afrocentric lessons, but lessons related to “liberation.”
Themes
Abdulla, tuning Joseph out, thinks of elders he knew as a child who talked of Kenyan patriots and the dream of communal land ownership. He remembers Nding’uri and his own resistance fighting. Regretting his poor treatment of Joseph in the past, he wonders whether he should tell the boy that they aren’t really related. Abruptly he asks for Joseph’s forgiveness. Joseph, surprised, tells him “there’s nothing to forgive.” He says he’s grateful to Abdulla, Munira, Wanja, and Karega; he wants to struggle for freedom when he grows up, like Abdulla did, and has been reading both about Kenyan independence and independence struggles around the world.
While Abdulla is apologizing to Joseph for yelling at him and keeping him out of school in the past, he was just thinking about his ideals and days as a freedom fighter—which hints that he’s also apologizing to Joseph for not managing to make the world a better place. Joseph believes “there’s nothing to forgive” and expresses a desire to continue the political struggle—which suggests that activists should be grateful for their forebears in resistance rather than resenting them for not accomplishing more. Joseph’s independent reading emphasizes the importance of self-education to political development.
Themes
Abdulla, listening to Joseph, wonders whether people don’t help history progress and then bow out for new generations who improve on them. He feels he’s too old now to be historically relevant, but he’s happy he saved Wanja on his way to murder Kimeria, and he hopes she thinks of him occasionally.
Abdulla has served history by fighting colonialism, and he’s saved his friends by saving Wanja’s life (this passage makes explicit that she was the person he pulled from the burning brothel). He is now ready to pass the torch to Joseph.
Themes
Munira’s father Ezekieli, his mother, his wife Julia, and Rev. Jerrod Brown visit him in jail before his trial. When his mother demands to know why he committed the crime, Rev. Jerrod says he could have “helped.” Disgusted by their hypocrisy, Munira tells them to repent and asks his father why he refused the Mau Mau oath but later took the KCO oath. Then he tells Rev. Jerrod that the Reverend once turned away a hungry traveling group that included a cripple and Munira himself. Munira, quoting the Bible, tells Rev. Jerrod he'll be punished for not helping “the least of these,” who stand in for Christ.
Though Munira has been a hypocrite in the past, he clearly recognizes his father’s pro-colonial political hypocrisy and Rev. Jerrod Brown’s religious hypocrisy. The phrase “the least of these” comes from a Gospel parable often called the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31 – 46). In the parable, Jesus Christ says that at his Second Coming, he will tell the righteous that whatever they did to help “the least of these” (i.e., any poor person) counts in their favor as if they had done it for Jesus Christ himself.
Themes
Munira’s visitors leave and go to church to pray for him. Rev. Jerrod says the evangelical sects should be illegalized. Ezekieli agrees but momentarily wonders whether he’s being punished for trying to commit adultery with Mariamu, since her sons Nding’uri and Karega have caused him so much trouble. Then he dismisses the thought, deciding not to “question God’s wisdom.”
Rev. Jerrod wants to persecute evangelical sects using the law—implying a relationship between established religion and political repression in Kenya. Ezekieli briefly wonders whether Munira’s behavior is his punishment for sexual sin. This poses to the reader a deeper question: whether Ezekieli’s life as an abusive employer and hypocritical religious believer made his son Munira’s violent breakdown more likely. Rather than scrutinize his own behavior, Ezekieli blames the trouble on “God’s wisdom,” thereby illustrating how superficially religious people can blame the results of their own actions on God’s will.
Themes
Still in jail, Karega gets word that his mother Mariamu has died. Crushed that he was never able to improve her material circumstances, he thinks about all the poor of Kenya and Africa. Karega doesn’t eat for two days. On the third day, the warden comes back, tells Karega he has a visitor, and tells Karega that some jailers think Karega’s right about workers’ solidarity—they only work in the jail because they have to eat. All the same, Karega wonders whether Wanja was right after all in her dog-eat-dog worldview.
Informed of his mother’s death, Karega starts grieving for all poor people in Africa—seeing his mother as a representative of a type, not an individual. This reaction suggests that fighting against capitalist oppression has made Karega acutely aware of how social forces hurt individuals—yet at the same time, that awareness makes it harder for him to think about individuals as individuals, even when the individual is his own mother.
Themes
Outside, Karega sees through barbed wire a girl who introduces herself as Akinyi. She works in the Theng’eta factory. She says the other workers sent her to tell Karega that members of all the unions, the unemployed, farmers, and even some businesspeople are planning to strike and march. She also tells him a certain “very important person” was shot to death in Nairobi while collecting rents; the assassin is rumored to be a political revolutionary. Karega ponders how revolutionaries are “born every day among the people.”
Theng’eta has represented the potential of Kenya’s land and people—but also their colonial and capitalist exploitation—throughout the novel. Now the Theng’eta Breweries Union is organizing with other workers to generate new potential and hope, suggesting that Kenyan people’s potential is on the upswing and their exploiters’ power may be in decline. The “very important person” shot to death is likely Nderi wa Riera, since it was earlier implied that he was a slumlord who exploited poor renters. Karega’s thought that revolutionaries are “born every day among the people” implies that heroic individuals don’t matter—when one falls, another will rise up.
Themes
When Akinyi asks what’s going to happen to Karega, he tells her they’re going to hold him. Akinyi insists he’ll be set free to the workers. For some reason, this pronouncement fills Karega with new revolutionary fervor and a vision of “the kingdom of man and woman.” Akinyi repeats her claim that Karega will return to the workers. In her, Karega sees Mukami, Nyakinyua, Mariamu, and “the future.” He feels that he's “no longer alone.”
The phrase “the kingdom of man and woman” alludes to Karega’s earlier wish that a “human kingdom come”—that is, his wish for a political utopia on earth. That he sees Mukami, Nyakinyua, and Mariamu in Akinyi suggests that he is appreciating the strength of Kenyan women as a group—but also that his political focus on organizing communities makes it difficult for him to relate to individuals as individuals. When he sees Akinyi, a union member, as the “future” and believes he’s “no longer alone,” it hints that after prison, Karega will find a loving community among other idealistic political activists.
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