Ngugi wa Thiongo's novel, Matigari by Frank Bures At last, Matigari's war with Settler Williams was over and he was going home. It was 1986, and the hero of Ngugi wa Thiongo's novel, Matigari, was not only emerging from his hiding place in the woods, but from the page on which he existed. After the book's publication, the real Kenyan police hunted the man people were whispering about, this Matigari who was roaming the country, escaping from prisons and mental hospitals, asking everyone where he could find truth and justice. Matigari taunted and challenged the paranoid regime of Daniel arap Moi, and the president wanted him stopped. When the police figured out that Matigari lived only in Ngugi's novel, they seized all known copies of the book and condemned Matigari to a different kind of prison. Fortunately, the writer, who had already spent a year in a Kenyan jail, was far away and escaped imprisonment. Ngugi's novel resonated so deeply with average Kenyans partly because he wrote in his native Kikuyu, a switch he had made during 1978, in prison, when he started writing his first Kikuyu novel, Devil on the Cross, on toilet paper. When he was released from jail, Ngugi was stripped of his position in Nairobi University's literature department, but he kept writing novels and plays and working with a local theater company, where his productions at the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre continued to provoke authorities. In the spring of 1982, the center was razed by the police. Shortly afterward, while Ngugi was in England for the British publication of Devil on the Cross, there was a failed coup attempt in Kenya, followed by increased repression. Ngugi was told he would be arrested if he returned, and he has never gone back. Except through Matigari, who rose from the world Ngugi created to spread his message of revolution. Matigari has received scant attention outside Kenya. It is written partly as an allegory and partly as a cat-and-mouse adventure. After he emerges from the woods, Matigari finds that his country has been sold, that his new leaders have been corrupted, that his war has been for nothing, and that John Boy Junior, the son of Settler Williams's cook, has taken over his house. Matigari then sets off on a quest for truth and justice. He asks students and teachers, shoppers and shopkeepers, shepherds and priests where he can find them. No one can tell him, so he decides he has to take back his house, and his country, himself. In places Matigari is a mystical journey and in others an antineocolonial tract, woven into Matigari's powerful voice. He is an unmistakable incarnation of both Christ and Moses, who has risen to lead his people out of darkness. Matigari is both a great story and a powerful metaphor for what is needed in African politics today: the honesty and equality, truth and justice that Matigari tirelessly seeks. That may be how Ngugi dreams of going home—as a hero and messiah, making one last attempt to bring down the systems he's fought against all these years. From reading his work, there can be little doubt that Ngugi, too, dreams of emerging from the woods to roam his country again, as defiant and free as Matigari.