In Petals of Blood, only when Kenya rejects capitalism will it be truly free of European colonialism. The British Empire colonized Kenya in the late 19th century. Though Kenya became independent in 1963, Petals of Blood suggests that Europeans use capitalism to continue economically colonizing and exploiting Kenya. The novel illustrates Europe’s capitalist exploitation of Kenya clearly through one of its major characters, Abdulla. Prior to Kenya’s independence, Abdulla worked at a factory under terrible conditions. Though the workers tried to improve conditions by striking, the colonial police used violence to break the strikes. While working at the factory, Abdulla joined the rebellion against the British colonial government because he hoped that after independence, the country’s factories would “belong to the people”—that is, he hoped that ending colonialism would abolish capitalism’s system of private ownership. Abdulla’s motives for becoming a freedom fighter suggest that a major reason for rejecting white political control of Kenya was to end Europeans’ capitalist economic exploitation of Kenyan workers.
Yet after Independence, Abdulla cannot realize his dreams of Kenyan economic freedom. Though Kenya has rejected British political control, it has retained the capitalist economic system European colonists introduced and remains under Europe’s economic control. While fighting for Kenya’s freedom, Abdulla received a crippling leg wound. Under post-Independence capitalism, he cannot get a job because employers refuse to hire a crippled man. After many years, Abdulla starts a small business brewing a drink called Theng’eta with his friend Wanja. Yet when an economic development scheme of politician Nderi wa Riera leads to a bank repossessing Wanja’s grandmother Nyakinyua’s land, Abdulla and Wanja sell their business to ensure that the bank doesn’t take Nyakinyua’s home. Due to a deceitful contract, Abdulla and Wanja lose not only their brewery but also their legal right to brew alcohol when they sell their business. A European-American (UK/U.S.-owned) group buys Theng’eta Breweries, and a few European-backed Kenyan elites, Mzigo, Chui, and Kimeria run it locally; meanwhile, Abdulla becomes impoverished, and Wanja becomes a sex worker. Abdulla’s history shows how international capitalism introduced by European colonizers exploits Kenyan workers and leads to European control of the Kenyan economy. Thus, the novel argues that Kenya has to reject capitalism to truly free itself from colonialism.
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Colonialism and Capitalism Quotes in Petals of Blood
‘We must always be ready to plant the seed in these last days before His second coming. All the signs—strife, killing, wars, blood—are prophesied here.’
‘How long have you been in Ilmorog?’ asked the tall one, to change the subject from this talk of the end of the world and Christ’s second coming. He was a regular churchgoer and did not want to be caught on the wrong side.
A man, believed to be a trade-union agitator, has been held after a leading industrialist and two educationists, well known as the African directors of the internationally famous Theng’eta Breweries and Enterprises Ltd, were last night burnt to death in Ilmorog, only hours after taking a no-nonsense-no-pay-rise decision.
They nearly all had one thing in common: submission to the Lord. They called him Brother Ezekieli, our brother in Christ, and they would gather in the yard of the house after work for prayers and thanksgiving. There were of course some who had devilish spirits which drove them to demand higher wages and create trouble on the farm and they would be dismissed.
‘But boys were always more confident about the future than us girls. They seemed to know what they wanted to become later in life: whereas with us girls the future seemed vague . . . It was as if we knew that no matter what efforts we put into our studies, our road led to the kitchen and to the bedroom.’
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?
We can imagine the fatal meeting between the native and the alien. The missionary had traversed the seas, the forests, armed with the desire for profit that was his faith and light and the gun that was his protection. He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity.
‘Why should we fail, though? We are now going as a community. The voice of the people is truly the voice of God. And who is an MP? Isn’t he the people’s voice in the ruling house?’
‘To understand the present . . . you must understand the past. To know where you are, you must know where you came from, don’t you think?’
To redeem the land: to fight so that the industries like the shoe-factory which had swallowed his sweat could belong to the people: so that his children could one day have enough to eat and to wear under adequate shelter from rain: so that they would say in pride, my father died that I might live: this had transformed him from a slave before a boss into a man.
The others surrounded the sculpture and commented on the fighter’s hair, the heavy lips and tongue in open laughter, and the sword around the waist. But why did he possess breasts, somebody asked: it was as if it was a man and a woman in one: how could that be?
They were arguing about it until Nyakinyua almost silenced them with her simple logic.
‘A man cannot have a child without a woman. A woman cannot bear a child without a man. And was it not a man and a woman who fought to redeem this country?’
‘I saw in the cities of America white people also begging . . . I saw white women selling their bodies for a few dollars. In America vice is a selling commodity. I worked alongside white and black workers in a Detroit factory. We worked overtime to make a meagre living. I saw a lot of unemployment in Chicago and other cities. I was confused. So I said: let me return to my home, now that the black man has come to power. And suddenly as in a flash of lightning I saw we were serving the same monster-god as they were in America.’
He did not therefore want to hear any more nonsense about African teachers, African history, African literature, African this and that: whoever heard of African, Chinese, or Greek mathematics and science? What mattered were good teachers and sound content: history was history: literature was literature, and had nothing to do with the colour of one’s skin.
‘Educators, men of letters, intellectuals: these are only voices—not neutral, disembodied voices—but belonging to bodies of persons, of groups, of interests. You, who will seek the truth about words emitted by a voice, look first for the body behind the voice. The voice merely rationalizes the needs, whims, caprices, of its owner, the master.’
‘We are all prostitutes, for in a world of grab and take, in a world built on a structure of inequality and injustice, in a world where some can eat while others can only toil […] we are all prostituted. For as long as there’s a man in prison, I am also in prison [. . .]. Why then need a victim hurl insults at another victim?’
‘Are there pure facts? When I am looking at you, how much I see of you is conditioned by where I stand or sit; by the amount of light in this room; by the power of my eyes; by whether my mind is occupied with other thoughts and what thoughts. […] Even assuming that there were pure facts, what about their selection? Does this not involve interpretation?’
‘Even with you, I was hoping, but it did not work out. With him it has been different. I want him. I really want him. For himself. For the first time, I feel wanted . . . a human being . . . no longer humiliated . . . degraded . . . foot-trodden . . . do you understand? It is not given to many: a second chance to be a woman, to be human without this or that “except,” “except” . . . without shame. He has reawakened my smothered woman-ness, my girlhood, and I feel I am about to flower . . .’
‘I was surprised to see it on sale . . . but it did not taste the same.’
‘You cannot serve the interests of capital and of labour at the same time. You cannot serve two opposed masters . . . one master loses . . . in this case labour . . .’
This was the society they were building: this was the society they had been building since Independence, a society in which a black few, allied to other interests from Europe, would continue the colonial game of robbing others of their sweat, denying them the right to grow to full flowers in air and sunlight.
‘Must we have this world? Is there only one world? Then we must create another world, a new earth[.]’
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.
‘The junior staff—the workers on the school compound—were going to join us. And one or two teachers were sympathetic. They too had grievances, about pay and conditions of work and Chui’s neglect. This time we were going to demand that the school should be run by a committee of students, staff and workers . . . But even now we are determined to put an end to the whole prefect system . . . And that all our studies should be related to the liberation of our people . . .’
