Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Should Remi, the first of his tribe go to university, return to his people from the city, marry his brother's widow under the tribal custom, or should he continue to be a "black hermit" in teh town visiting the night-clubs with his friend Jane? Should he be supporting the African Party when his people feel that colonial oppression has just been replaced by another form? These are the main dramatic conflicts in the play.

The Black Hermit

Marion

These eyes have seen the rain come and go, Have seen sunrise and sunset,

Seasons followed by many others, Birth and death alternating.

I am not making a speech. But a word, one word I must share with you. We elders of Marua love our soil. Because we love that soil, we, years ago, agreed to fight the white-man and drive him away from the land. Today the same love of our soil makes us turn to the only educated man in the country. Look at our country since Independence. Where is the land? Where is the food? Where are the schools for our children? Who of our tribe is in the government? Who of our own flesh and blood can be seen in long cars and houses built of stone? Our tribe waits under a government composed of other tribes.

Not nothing. It has brought us heavier and heavier taxation.

We are told about roads, about hospitals; but which hungry man wants a road? When we all stood solidly behind the Africanist Party we thought that once Uhuru was gained, taxation, for the poor, would stop.

 To you tribalism and colonialism, the tyranny of the tribe and the settler are an abstraction. To me they are real. I have felt their shaft here.

Yes, they have made a wound here, a wound that made me run to the city. To you, African nationalism and what it means to us who suffered under colonial rule for sixty years can only be an intellectual abstraction. But to me, my whole being - I am involved in it.

Has our nationalist fervour that gave us faith and hope in days of suffering and colonial slavery been torn to shreds by such tribal loyalties? All my life I believed in the creation of a nation. 

The Black Hermit quotes

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