Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “Wedding at the Cross”

In “Wedding at the Cross,” Ngugi, who himself comes from a colonized country (Kenya, colonized by the British, among others), writes about a young man and a young woman, Wariuki and Miriamu.

She comes from a successful family – that is, a family that had been colonized.  They are wealthy, but their wealth is a result of their colonization.  Her father, notice, is named Douglas Jones. He is a Christian, in an African nation – and what sort of Christian? (There are two sorts in this story.)

Here is what we are told about Douglas Jones:

He owned several groceries and tea-rooms around the town. A God-fearing couple, he and his wife were: they went to church on Sundays, they said their prayers… they were looked on with favor by the white farmers around. Theirs was a good Christian home, and hence they objected to their daughter marrying into sin, misery, and poverty. (1693)

It is the last which disturbs them about Wariuki – his poverty – for he is neither sinful nor miserable, as we know by this point in the story.  But he is, relatively, poor – lower middle class – and that is a dreadful thing from Douglas Jones’ (colonized) point of view.

What is the Christian point of view on poverty? Remember Douglas Jones is supposed to be a good Christian. But he is a colonized Christian – he is practicing the Christianity of Britain, in which not Christ but Capitalism is worshiped. It is the Prosperity Gospel, which worships mammon, not Christ.

Wariuki seems a happy enough young man – working as a milk clerk, spending his weekends singing and dancing with his friends – but his behavior doesn’t please his prospective father-in-law.  Why not?

Partly, it’s because he’s poor.

Wariuki, we learn, is poor (among other reasons) because he’s an orphan – his father died fighting with the British in the First World War; he himself will serve with British in WWII.

This heroic ancestry matters not at Douglas Jones. (Nor did Wariuki’s father’s service matter at all to the British, we might note.) No, what he notices is that Wariuki does not act like a good British young man should – he doesn’t wear proper British clothing, he’s not working a proper British job, he sings and dances (like some African!), and worst of all, he’s not saving up any money!

Wariuki had not been properly colonized, in other words.

Douglas Jones drives this home to Wariuki, by asking in front of the elders of the community, to see his bank book: asks, in other words, how much money he has.

Wariuki has no savings. Like the lilies in Christ’s sermon, he has given no thought to the future.

Wariuki is humiliated by Douglas Jones’s question, though he doesn’t understand exactly why, not then or ever.  (He’s humiliated because he, like other colonized people, has been inculcated with the belief that “being like the British” is the only really acceptable way to be. Douglas Jones has pointed out that he’s failed at being like the British, and pointed that out in front of the people who matter most – paradoxically – to a young African man: the elders of his tribe.)

Wariuki cannot get over this rebuff.  It drives him through the rest of the story.  It becomes his prime motivation.  He must show Douglas Jones that he is wrong – that he, Wariuki, is a proper British man.

Wariuki has let the (colonized) Douglas Jones define what a good man is – it is a man like him (a colonized man): a man who has a British name; a man who has a lot of money as the British define a lot; a man who worships Christianity as the British colonizers do; a man with British mannerisms, who lives in a British house and wears British clothing.

And until Wariuki has those things, he will not count himself as successful, or as a good man. Wariuki spends the rest of the story colonizing himself.

Notice what he does toward this end – notice what he becomes. Like Douglas Jones, in order to become a proper (colonized) British man, he must become a colonizer. He is a traitor toward his own people in time of war; he abandons his wife and children for long periods; he exploits and abuses the workers of his own country.

At the end, when he decides re-marrying Miriamu is the correct act, he does so not because he loves her or wants to pledge his heart to her again – he wants to pledge his fealty to the British way of life. He wants to prove he has been thoroughly colonized. Miriamu, repelled and horrified by his plan, does not really understand why she is so sickened by it until she is standing at the alter and realizes that the community around her in the church is not her community – it is the British community – and the man beside her is not the man she married. Rather, he is Dodge Livingstone, a replica of her father. She cannot “see any difference between them.”

In seeking to become successful, as his British colonizers defined success, Wariuku has destroyed himself. “He is dead,” Miriamu realizes, standing at the alter, at the cross before which Wariuku has sacrificed himself.