Glory Just a Poor Farm

¶ … Glory

Just a Poor Farm Girl

Kenya is a country where class distinctions are strict and apparently honored by everyone. Probably this system of ordering society by class comes from the colonial era when the English occupied the country and imposed their social system on the Kenyan people. Class is a rhetorical construct that imbeds itself in a person's consciousness and so seems very real. In our own country, for example, we idolize celebrities like movie stars and athletes who entertain us and pay them enormous amounts of money, while we look down upon sewer and garbage workers who protect our health and pay them very little. Once a person accepts the idea that he or she is of a certain class, that idea guides how and where a person will live, how much and what kind of education a person will get, what kind of work the person will do, who a person's friends will be, and how the person will feel about him/herself in terms of self-worth and self-image. Beatrice, the main character in "Minutes of Glory" by Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, is such a person. She longs for dignity, but because she comes from a poor rural area and has had no access to education or training, the only place she can work is in a barroom where she hopes to sell her body to affluent men. Her sense of self-esteem is severely limited by her beliefs about herself, and these beliefs are largely informed by class consciousness. This may be seen in her "unattractiveness," her inability to fit in with the people around her, and in the transformation that occurs in her when she suddenly obtains some money.

Beatrice is not ugly, "but she could not be called beautiful either." This implies that she is an average looking black woman. It is not her looks that prevent her from attracting men, although she believes it is. "Her body, dark and full fleshed, had the form, yes, but it was as if it waited to be filled by the spirit." Beatrice has only a poor sense of who she is inside. Her identity has been formed by poverty, lack of opportunity, and class distinctions and so she sees her physical body as her "self." She can only see herself through the eyes of the men around her, and they hardly notice she is there. This makes her a nobody. She is like a stick of furniture in the barroom -- there to be used and forgotten by the men who frequent the place -- certainly, not to be loved, cherished, or valued as a person. Beatrice envies Nyaguthii for her ability to attract men and wants to be like her. She thinks her own inability to attract men is because of her lack of money and because she is a poor girl from the country. She hasn't enough money to buy skin lightening creams or new stockings with "no ladders" (runs) in them. "Clothes? But even here she never earned enough..." In the beginning Beatrice doesn't see that she and Nyaguthii are both in the same boat, that an empty life is an empty life, no matter what you are wearing, that society and the class system are keeping her from having any sort of meaningful life. "My god, she wept inside, what does Nyaguthii have that I don't have?"

Beatrice cannot fit in with the urban people around her, people who frequent the barroom scene. Worldly city dwellers tend to look down on simple country folk, for one thing. Beatrice wasn't raised for the kind of life she is trying to live. "She was part of a generation that would never again be one with the soil, the crops, the wind, and the moon. Not for them that whispering in the dark hedges, not for her that dance and lovemaking under the moon..." Farmers are considered middle-class people. So she has made a transition downward from middle-class back home to working class or lower class in the city.