Nairobi — Ngugi wa Thiong'o's representation of women is the subject of new studies by eminent scholars of his writing.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's representation of women is seen as negative. The author is a post-colonial cult figure most intensely admired for his relentless critique of colonial and neo-colonial practices

Although the studies criticise Ngugi's treatment of women in his fiction, their publication by major international journals and presses indicates the continued global interest in the Kenyan novelist despite impatience with established writers like him by the younger generation locally.

This is a welcome development because the Western academy seems keener on studying and promoting nonsense coming out of Africa in the name of paying attention to newer voices and modes of expression, perhaps in a bid to deflate radical anti-colonial cultural discourses and encourage enslavement to the Western cultural agenda.

However, these studies may ruffle feathers among die-hard admirers of Ngugi, a postcolonial cult figure most intensely admired for his relentless critique of colonial and neo-colonial practices that newer writers seem ready to condone in exchange for funding and sponsored trips to western capitals.

Elleke Boehmer's Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester University Press, 2005) devotes a chapter to Ngugi's fiction and refers to his writing quite often as it examines intersections of independence, nationalism and gender in African and Asian literatures. For his part, Brendon Nicholls discusses the representation of women in Ngugi's first published novel - Weep Not, Child (1964) - in the current issue of the respected Journal of Commonwealth Literature. He has another article on Ngugi in Glenn Hooper's Landscape and Empire (Ashgate, 2005).

The Mildred Carlile Professor in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, Boehmer is best known in Kenya for her exhaustive Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, a much sought-after book at Nairobi's British Council Library when it arrived 10 years ago.

Stories of Women: gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation contains her keynote essays, perhaps the most popular of which is the one on Ngugi: "'The Master's Dance to the Master's Voice': Revolutionary Nationalism and Women's Representation in Ngugi wa Thiong'o", first published in 1991 in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Nicholls is a younger critic who is undoubtedly influenced by Boehmer. A lecturer in African Literatures and Cultures Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Leeds University, UK, Nicholls relates Weep Not, Child to American poet Walt Whitman's On the Beach at Night to reveal the gendered gestures in Ngugi's meditation on national conflicts in the novel that borrows its title from Whitman's poem, written in 1870. Witty is the critic's reading of Ngugi's use of the poem by "Whit(e)man" as "freighted with anxieties of influence." Nicholls, a Ngugi specialist who is currently working on two books on the novelist's writing, reads keenly the gendered mode of address that Ngugi uses in the construction of his main characters in Weep Not, Child. Demonstrating that the contestants in the conflicts represented view land in gendered terms, the critic notes that the very opening of the novel marks the maturation of its main character, Njoroge, in gendered stipulations and connects the young boy's breakdown later in the novel to his failure to sexually possess Mwihaki, his girlfriend.

Nicholls is also the author of "Clitoridectomy and Gikuyu Nationalism in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between, published in the journal Kunapipi in 2003. In the article, Nicholls discusses the circumcision debate that erupted in Central Kenya in 1928 and examines Ngugi 's use of the term "woman" in The River Between (1965) as freighted with nationalistic meanings against western practices. Kunapipi, established in 1979, is published at the University of Wollongong in Australia, while Sage in America, England and India publishes the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, in circulation for over 40 years.

"The most obvious gender disparity in the novel lies in the different values ascribed to the sexual contexts of the male and female characters," Nicholls says in the article on Weep Not, Child. He takes issue with the scene in the novel in which a barber, a World War II veteran, reconstructs his sexual exploits in Europe. The character recounts to his incredulous customers how he slept with white women and found them no different from the African ones, except that the white female is not as meaty.

Nicholls notes that the narrative's ideological attempt to deflate the colonial, oppressive, and bigoted West is seen, through the barber's eyes, in terms of sexual penetration of white women. The man triumphantly proclaims that whites "are not gods we had thought them to be.

We even slept with their women."

However, in the novel African women who sleep with white people reproduce deformed children, even if the white men are not part of the British colonial project.

Like Abdulrazak Gurnah and Patrick Williams in their various analyses of this section of Ngugi's novel, Nicholls notes a contradiction in the way Ngugi presents Italian prisoners of war as diseased, just because of their race.

The African woman's body becomes a site of censure for seeking carnal pleasure in men of other races, whether or not the whites are implicated in colonialism.

Nicholls remarks that while some of the text's comments can be forgiven because they come from its characters as opposed to Ngugi himself, the omniscient narrator renders the novel's attitude towards women who sleep with Italian prisoners.

He reads the omniscient narrator as objective and historical. Even these sections, we should note, are relayed to the reader through the tainted consciousness of the characters.

However, the text, even without endorsing the characters' perspectives, does not offer any rebuttal to the racist sexism.

Overall, Nicholls departs from earlier readings of the novel that sympathetically view Ngugi as ideologically separate from his characters.

His article in Glenn Hooper's Landscape and Empire notes shifts in Ngugi's emphases, but argues that the novelist uses landscape and gender to symbolise ideological positions. Nicholls notes that in Ngugi's fiction, even when characters are politically opposed to each other, as are Boro and Howlands in Weep Not, Child, they speak a similar patriarchal grammar regarding women.

The characters, according to Nicholls, "reciprocate a patriarchal discourse," and "in effect, 'woman' becomes the contested terrain across which ideological struggles are waged.

This representation is suspect, since the Gikuyu woman is allied with nature while her male counterparts dominate culture."

The verdict Nicholls reaches on Ngugi's representation of women is far from positive. The novelist is seen as perpetuating the colonial stereotype that Gikuyu women are victims with limited capacity to change their condition.

"It seems to me that Ngugi's oeuvre attempts, and largely fails, to open up positive spaces of political agency for women," he concludes. "In short, Ngugi's fiction largely repeats the colonizer's construction of Gikuyu women as static figures in the Emergency landscape.

There's no exception to this rule."

While energetically exposing Ngugi's stereotyping of women as mothers or whores, Boehmer is more sympathetic in her reading of Ngugi.

She reiterates that, given the negative portrayal of women in African nationalist writing, Ngugi has staged considerable gender-sensitive gestures.

"Ngugi's exertions to include women in his vision of a Kenya liberated from neo-colonial domination merit recognition," she writes.

Boehmer also sees similar stereotyping of women and the mother figure in other writers, including women novelists.

Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta, for example, exhorts "the white female intellectual to come to the womb of Mother Africa to learn how to be a woman." Nuruddin Farah and Indian feminist Arundhati Roy have made similar comparisons of the nation as mother.

Boehmer underscores that in Ngugi's writing, women "are made acceptable as national figures by becoming more like men." To be sure, perhaps to express the conditions in the reality we inhabit, Ngugi constantly repeats and ridicules without apology racial and gender stereotype, well aware that there are many of us who, in our real lives, are like stereotypes.

Just as he 'masculinises' positive women in his works, Ngugi feminises some of the male characters that he would like the readers to emulate.

The disturbing question is why Ngugi frustratingly refuses to transcend stereotypes even when he doesn't endorse them.

Is it because he wants to realistically present a world in which women are denied agency by a male-dominated society or is it because he subconsciously subscribes to patriarchal power games?

A critique of Ngugi similar to Boehmer's and Nicholls's can be found in Florence Stratton's Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (1994).

In the book, Stratton argues that gender is a marginalised category in Ngugi's novels, only "reconstituted to meet the requirements of the master narrative."

There are critics who have celebrated the way Ngugi's figures women to break from traditional stereotypes. These include Kenyan critic Eddah Gachukia, especially in her "The Role of Women in Ngugi's Novels" published in the Busara journal in 1971. Another text that reads Ngugi sympathetically is David Cook and Michael Okenimpke's Ngugi wa Thiong'o: An Exploration of His Writings (1983, revised 1997 to cover Matigari and gender issues).

Also remarkable is Kavetsa Adagala's "Wanja of Petals of Blood: A Study of the Woman's Question and Imperialism in Kenya." Kavetsa posits that "through the years, the woman characters in Ngugi's works have developed with the struggle of the Kenyan masses as new material conditions and contradictions arose." In her paper, Kavetsa, like Gachukia before her, operates outside the post-structural theories that frame Boehmer's and Nicholls's analyses.

Therefore, she may have missed the moments of aporia (logical silences, contradictions, and inconsistencies) in Ngugi's prose.