Ngugi

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, author of "Decolonization of the Mind," introduced us to the very relevant idea that under a colonizing power, people aren't really themselves. In order to shed this watered-down formed of humanity, Africans as a whole had to unload the burden of imperfection from their shoulders and take pride in their own lives and the deep roots that their ancestors cultivated for them. Without this spirit, Ngugi commented that blacks in Africa were simply letting themselves become a casualty - a statistic with no name, unless they claimed a name as their own.

The reason I say that Ngugi's theory of decolonization of the mind is so relevant is because his essay and his two short stories, "Wedding at the Cross" and "Minute of Glory," definitely capture the zeitgeist of our generation. I was talking with some of my buddies the other night, and we came to the conclusion that the reason that we and everyone we know is so quick to go out, try every drink and drug in existence, cover ourselves in tattoos, and generally rage to the fullest extent every single day is due to the overwhelming notion that we just might die at any moment.

Now let me take that back a step. "Minute of Glory" and "Wedding at the Cross" both tell two entirely separate stories with vast differences between setting, symbolism and roles of characters, but they do parallel each other in a couple important ways. The first is the fact that the ends of both stories revolve around a forceful decision made at the last moment that alters the protagonist's life forever. While Glory's ending is a bit more depressing, expressing the waste of a perfect opportunity to grow for a single minute of revenge, Ngugi is cunning in telling the reader that decolonizing oneself is not an easy task. This is where the second parallel lies; the decision to decolonize for both heroines involved completely abandoning everything they knew as "safe." For Wanjiru ("Minute of Glory"), she had to make the decision to steal hundreds of dollars, risking her life and livelihood has a barmaid, but the story ended with her martyrdom of her freedom teaching another to find her own way to feel human again and to use Wanjiru's mistakes as a guide - in that way, she lived up to the beauty her name beheld for her. For Miriamu ("Wedding at the Cross"), she had to give up money, her parents, her husband and her whole family in order to go back to the simple life that she first fell in love with. For this sacrifice, she turned away from the cross, yes, but was greeted back into her life of genuine love for her friends and savior by a crowd of people dancing, laughing and singing.

So back to everyone dying. To elaborate on what I said before, the reason we said everyone in our generation's willing to live so heavily for the day boils down to the fact that we've been conditioned to be afraid. Look at it this way: the president in office when I was born was banging his aides, the president after that started a war that's seen many of our friends and family off to the afterlife, and our current president promised us something new and frankly, I'm getting desensitized by the whole ordeal. The World Trade Center was hit by terrorists and thousands of innocent lives were lost in a single horrific event when I was in fourth grade, just barely getting a grasp on the world. Now, our privacy is slowly slipping out from under us and the world seems to be edging closer and closer to either nuclear war or natural cataclysm. We're simply all nervous wrecks, so Ngugi's works can teach us all a valuable lesson: Know yourself, know your strengths and especially your weaknesses, and never settle for a life living down on your knees. He leaves us with a powerful warning too; this huge responsibility can be squandered in a single act of revenge. Keep one last thing in mind though. At the end of "Wedding at the Cross," when Miriamu cast aside her false life and lived as free as the spirit she contained, she was greeted by a chorus of dancing and singing, and her captors could do nothing but watch and weep.