Matigari Ma Njirũũngi (1986) (Matigari, 1989), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s second novel in Gĩkũyũ, is the most disparaged of his works. Critics like Nkosi (1995: 197-206) and Gurnah (1991: 169-72) have raised questions about the identity of the novel, its place in the changing canon of African literature and its aesthetic strategy. Ogude accuses Ngũgĩ of abandoning the depiction of ‘moral complexity’ of his earlier novels in favour of what the scholar dismisses as ‘simple minded ... allegorising’ (1991: 13-14) . How can we account for this critical hostility towards the novel?

In this article, we argue that with Matigari Ma Njirũũngi, Ngũgĩ reaches the apogee of his intellectual crusade for the democratization of African literature, an endeavour which, in the possibility of its fullest realization, is forbidding for an elitist literary establishment. This democratization, in Ngũgĩ’s view, calls for the use of indigenous African languages as vehicles for ‘thought, feeling and will’ (2009: 95). It presupposes a notion of audience that includes the vast majority of the African people who are mostly the oppressed and the marginalized in the post-colonial dispensation. It manifests itself in the literature’s rootedness in the folklore of the people, which Ngũgĩ understands in the Herderian sense of it being the expression of the character and soul of a people. German philosopher, poet and literary critic (1744-1803) Johann Gottfried von Herder insisted that each people should develop on its own cultural foundation. Embracing an alien cultural foundation would result in ‘breaking the continuity of past development and disrupting the nation’s organic unity’, in the ‘stultification of native cultural forms and ultimately the death of the nation itself’ (Wilson, 1978: 823). In Ngũgĩ’s view, a democratic literature is also one that reflects the historical accomplishments of the African people, their life experience, philosophy, mindset, their moral and creative potential, their patriotism. It is a literature that rejects despotism, tyranny, oppression, spiritual and physical slavery, that condemns depravity and immorality. The main purpose of such a literature is to find the way towards bringing about a cardinal change in the destiny of the people. Matigari Ma Njirũũngi becomes a veritable model for such democratic African literature.