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I was living in a village and also in a colonial situation.
Ngugi, Homecoming (48)
Landscape as an aspect of fiction has tended to be underrated: less interesting than narrative, rhetoric, or tropology. Yet through landscape the author creates the horizons of the novel, establishing it in a historical (or an ahistorical) space. The landscape is not merely the setting of the story: it is a shifting, expanding territory, where the boundaries of public/private, fictional/real overlap. It has been said that African writers are particularly uninterested in landscape description (Roscoe 177-78). If, however, landscape is understood as the description of the land and its role in the cultural, economic, and spiritual life of the community, it immediately becomes clear that landscape is an essential part of African literature. Throughout the African novel, concerns about land use, ownership, spiritual values, nationalism, and pan-Africanism are reflected in the description of the land. In their descriptions of Africa, their mapping of boundaries, their choice of features and background, of what matters in the landscape of Africa, African writers challenge Western visions of Africa and reclaim the landscape for themselves. In Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novels, the importance of the landscape is paramount, as the landscape of Kenya is intimately related to the community's spiritual, social, and political identity.
Ngugi's descriptions of landscape are shaped by some specific circumstances of Kenyan history: the centrality of land in the Gikuyu worldview, the forced removals of the Gikuyu from the White Highlands, the Mau Mau independence war, and post-independence disillusionment in Kenya. Ngugi himself has insisted on the connection between particular historical events and literature:
Literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in a particular society. (Homecoming xv)
In analyzing the description of landscape in Ngugi's novels, I want to do more than show his mastery of a Western technique; Ngugi's works re-evaluate the importance of landscape, integrating geography with his people's cultural environment, religious beliefs, and economic system.
For the Gikuyu people, land is central to their spiritual, cultural and economic practices:
to anyone who wants to understand Gikuyu problems, nothing is more important than a correct grasp of the question of...