Today on bookflash Wednesday, we are spotlighting Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel, The River Between. The novel, published in 1965, marks Ngũgĩ’s entry into the literary space. Through the themes of religion and family, Thiong’o exposes the bedevil effect that colonial religion inflicted on the natives. Through his vehement voice, he expresses his discontent with the religion and advocates for either its total evacuation or integration into the already established tradition of the people of Kenya.
Lloyd Williams, while reviewing this novel for African Literature Today, spoke that Ngũgĩ’s philosophy rests on humanity, and how everything else must evolve from intricate evolution. Writing on religion, Lloyd commented that ‘a religion which speaks only of religious ideals and moral truths, without touching on the concrete situation of man in his everyday life, can give to man but emptiness.’
Through the lens of Joshua, Thiong’o presents a walking dead society, sniffing and gobbling after dead. Joshua is a born again Christian, who stops his daughter from getting circumcised in the traditional way. In page 35, Thiong’o writes, “For Joshua[,] indulging in this ceremony was the unforgivable sin.” Why? Because he “wanted to enter to enter the new Jerusalem a whole man.”
A society that practices an alien religion is dead to Thiong’o. This theme is similar to that explored by Chimamanda Adiche in Purple Hibiscus, where Eugene is nothing but a puritan, a stalwart to bishops and Catholicism, but a demon in his family. He is the very kind that the bible describes as, ‘honoring me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.’ Eugene may be the sweetest, most preferable man in his hometown and church, but does not his violation of basic humane virtues defile it?
Thiong’o may have been thinking this way when he wrote The River Between. To him, the good side of this new religion cannot be used as drape for its negative. Before the coming of the white colonial masters, Makuyu and Kameno lived as one, both sharing in the Honia River. But as soon as the religion settles in, it bifurcates the bond by using the river as the boundary. Makuyu becomes home to the Christians while “Kameno remained the home of all that was beautiful in the tribe” (p.63). Then Thiong’o poses a rhetorical question: who would ever bring them together?
From the beginning to the end, we never see the reunion Thiong’o hoped for, and from 1965 to date, the gap is still evident. Not only to the people of Kenya but continent wide, has the distance between the people and their cultural heritage continued to widen. Ngũgĩ uses the conflict between Kameno and Makuyu to dramatize the crisis of African identity under colonialism, showing how colonial religion, education and cultural transformation can divide a community while also creating the need for a new form of African consciousness.
The novel follows a trajectory narration from the start of time to the present. Using flashbacks, Thiong’o teaches us that Kenya started from a relationship of two people, the first ever created beings: Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi. The story he narrates about them akin to that of Adam and Eve in the bible, and a reader or critic would wonder if Thiong’o intentionally forged this story to signify exodus from Christianity.
However, there are some differences. At the beginning of the novel, Ngũgĩ takes the reader back into the mythic past of the Gĩkũyũ people. According to the tradition presented in the novel, Murungu, the creator/deity, brings Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi, the father and mother of the Gĩkũyũ people, into the land. Murungu gives them the land and tells them, essentially, that it belongs to them and their descendants. Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi become the ancestral parents of the tribe. They eventually have nine daughters, and these daughters become the ancestors of the different Gĩkũyũ clans.
The novel is set in the Gikuyu communities of Kenya, particularly in two ridges separated by the Honia River: Kameno and Makuyu. It is represented largely by Chege and the people of Kameno, traditional culture values: ancestral customs, circumcision, communal identity, indigenous spirituality, loyalty to Gikuyu traditions, and Christianity and Western influence.
Represented particularly by Joshua, a Christian convert, Christianity rejects several traditional Gikuyu practices as pagan and immoral. The most explosive issue is female circumcision, which becomes a symbol of the larger struggle between African tradition and Christianity.
Waiyaki, on the other hand, is educated in a Christian missionary school but remains deeply connected to his Gikuyu heritage. He dreams of using education to liberate and unite his people. However, his attempt to reconcile the two opposing worlds ultimately fails. His relationship with Nyambura, Joshua’s daughter, makes the conflict even more complicated. Nyambura is Christian but emotionally connected to Waiyaki.
Nyambura dies after undergoing circumcision, and the novel ends with the river flowing peacefully as at the beginning, undisturbed by whatever happened to the tribe. This is a testament that nature and time has no dealings with humanity, and in this context, the river is patiently waiting for the reconciliation that is yet to materialise at the end of the novel.
Thiong’o explores several themes, some which include Traditional vs Christianity, Influence of colonialism, Love, as well Family. His work expresses optimism that nature still awaits the reconciliation of the tribes. It is the same shared optimism that writers like Ayi Kwei Armah demonstrate at the end of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: the man jumped into the water to wash himself of the stench of shit that had rubbed on him during a night escape. It is the same for In Dependence, where Sarah describes Tayo and Vanessa (a cross-cultural unionism: could she be hoping that a time will come when love will matter beyond racial ideologies) staring at green meadows and cows, drowning in church bells. Nature will always go its way, harmless, peaceful, and until humanity learns to walk in its footsteps, the relationship once shared in the garden of Eden will forever be lost to violence and division.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025), born James Thiong’o Ngũgĩ, was a renowned Kenyan novelist, playwright, essayist, scholar and literary critic, and one of Africa’s most influential writers. Born on 5 January 1938 in Kamiriithu, near Limuru, Kenya, he grew up in a Gĩkũyũ family during British colonial rule and experienced the tensions surrounding land, Christianity, cultural identity and the Mau Mau struggle for independence. He studied at Alliance High School and Makerere University College, later teaching at the University of Nairobi and several universities in the United States. His major works include Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (1980), and Decolonising the Mind (1986). His increasing criticism of colonialism and his advocacy for African languages led him to abandon English as his principal language of creative writing and embrace Gĩkũyũ. His political activism also resulted in his imprisonment without trial in 1977 and subsequent exile. Through his fiction and critical writings, Ngũgĩ consistently examined colonialism, cultural alienation, language, power, land and African identity. He died on 28 May 2025 in the United States at the age of 87, leaving behind a remarkable literary legacy that continues to shape African literature and postcolonial studies.
