Petals of Blood represents religion either as a tool hypocrites use to get rich and oppress deluded believers or as a delusion that prevents believers from taking effective action. In other words, religion prevents political progress by helping the powerful manipulate the oppressed into passivity or collaboration with their oppression. The novel reveals many religious characters to be opportunistic hypocrites. For example, Munira’s father Ezekieli, a wealthy Presbyterian farm-owner, hires religious workers and worships with them to keep them content with low pay; he dismisses those who ask for better pay as “devilish spirits.” Though a married man, he tries to exploit one of his workers, Mariamu, sexually. Thus Ezekieli—like many characters in the novel—uses religion to hide his greed and lust and to convince the people he abuses to accept the abuse passively. Other characters are genuine believers. Munira himself is tepidly religious for much of the novel but converts to a zealous evangelical Protestantism near the end. The novel implies that Munira converts because he is so disgusted with the economic oppression and sexual exploitation he has witnessed throughout his life that he wants to believe in the “new earth”—the fundamentally changed reality—that Christianity promises will arrive after Jesus Christ’s second coming. Yet it is precisely Munira’s religion that prevents him from taking effective action to alleviate oppression and exploitation. He comes to believe that humanity cannot fix its own problems and must wait for God to fix them. When he finally does take action, setting fire to Wanja’s brothel and killing the villainous exploiters Chui, Mzigo, and Kimeria, it’s because a voice he hallucinated tells him that Wanja is an evil temptress. In other words, Munira accidentally commits political assassinations while trying to commit an act of misogynistic, religious violence that a hallucinated voice dictated to him. This set of events shows how religion can manipulate believers into collaborating with oppression: to make the world a better place, Munira tries to attack Wanja, another oppressed person, rather than Chui, Mzigo, and Kimeria, their oppressors. In this way, Petals of Blood represents religious believers either as hypocrites or as dangerously deluded and religion as a force that impedes political progress.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Religion, Hypocrisy, and Delusion ThemeTracker
Religion, Hypocrisy, and Delusion 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.
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.
He stole a matchbox, collected a bit of grass and dry cowdung and built an imitation of Amina’s house at Kamiritho where he had sinned against the Lord, and burnt it. He watched the flames and he felt truly purified by fire. He went to bed at ease with himself and peaceful in his knowledge of being accepted by the Lord. Shalom. But the cowdung had retained the fire and at night the wind fanned it into flames which would have licked up the whole barn had it not been discovered in time.
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.
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?’
‘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?’
‘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 . . .’
‘Must we have this world? Is there only one world? Then we must create another world, a new earth[.]’
