Joseph Character Analysis

Joseph is Abdulla’s ward. Working as a poor, self-employed transporter of goods after Kenyan independence, Abdulla comes upon a homeless child searching for food in a pile of garbage. Abdulla questions the child, who does not know his own name and has been waiting for a long time for his parents and siblings to come find him. Abdulla, whose own family was massacred during the independence struggle, tells the child he’s Abdulla’s brother, names him Joseph, and assumes responsibility for him. Abdulla takes Joseph with him when he moves to Ilmorog and makes him work in the store. Though he cares for Joseph, he also yells at him and treats him brusquely. Eventually, at Wanja’s urging, Abdulla sends Joseph to school, where the schoolteacher Munira considers him among the best and brightest students. During the drought, Joseph joins the delegation from Ilmorog to the city to ask help from MP Nderi wa Riera; on the journey, he becomes very sick. The travelers approach various rich houses along the road for help and are rejected; it is while seeking help for Joseph that Wanja reencounters Kimeria, who detains her and coerces her into having sex with him. When he grows older, Joseph attends Siriana. By the time the fire that Munira set to kill Wanja kills Siriana’s headmaster Chui, Joseph has joined a student group planning a strike to protest Chui’s neglect of the school in favor of his business interests, poor staff and teacher pay, and the school’s conservative curriculum. Thus, like Karega, Joseph represents a later stage in mental “decolonization” than Munira and Chui, who organized an earlier strike at Siriana: he knows to protest not only overt racism but also the school’s politically conservative curriculum and its poor treatment of workers, which are subtler indications of the school’s fundamentally colonial education style.