In his Moving the Centre, Ng?g? wa Thiong’o proposes the idea of “moving the center”, that is, a kind of cultural liberation struggle, to accomplish the as-yet unrealized decolonization of post-independent African nations including his home, Kenya. He explains the need to “move the center” in two senses. One entails moving from the center from the so-called Western center to diverse, “outlying” ones in all of the indigenous cultures of the world. The other involves removing the male bourgeoisie holding power within nearly all African and the Third World nations. This center, indeed, has been in collusion with Western imperialists. Ng?g? proposes that the center be moved from all governing classes within nations to the real creative centers among the working people, so as to overcome Africa’s horrendous realities and achieve, finally, its full decolonization.
This paper interprets Petals of Blood as the fictionalization of Ng?g?’s second sense of moving the center, and, also, as an explanation of why moving the center is needed. It aims, as premised on this understanding of the novel, to contextualize the characters and episodes in the neocolonial-social-system dynamics of the Western imperialist-backed ruling class’s cultural and political relations with “the wretched of the earth.”
Concretely, the paper shows how the center, located in the hegemonic male bourgeois, has replicated the views and mimicked the practices of Western imperialists; it accomplishes this through analyses of several key characters including Raymond Chui, Hawkins Kimeria, Mzigo, Nderi wa Riera and Ezkieli, all of whom Ng?g? represents as the ruling-class representatives or comprador bourgeoisie. These characters are the inside enemies who, preoccupied with material greed, try to keep their power and fortunes by robbing the Kenyan people of their just fruits from independence struggle. This interpretation of the characters attests to Ng?g?’s assertion that we must move the center so that it exists not for ruling class but for the oppressed Kenyan people.
This paper also examines the oppressed Kenyan people’s pains and disillusionment with post-independent Kenya through analyses of several characters such as Wanza, Abdulla, Karega, and others, whom Ng?g? embodies as the representatives of “the wretched of the earth.” Additionally, it focuses on their aspirations for, and views on the creative possibilities of, the new world, which Ng?g? values highly as the people’s property. Hence comes the need, again, for the completion of decolonization and the concomitant rejection of the Western imperialists’ neocolonial social order.