Land and Nature Theme Analysis

Petals of Blood suggests that people have a special relationship to the land from which their forebears came—but that people must still exert careful, custodial control over the land, because nature can be cruel. The novel asserts at various points that people have a special relationship to their land. For example, when the people of Ilmorog are traveling to the city to ask for aid during a drought, they feel that the Kenyan freedom fighters who died for the land they’re crossing have “hallowed it,” that is, made the land sacred. In the same vein, the anti-capitalist political organizer Karega thinks of the land as a mother or father and of the Kenyan people as its children—which is why individual people shouldn’t own the land any more than one child should occupy all a parent’s time to the detriment of other siblings. Despite hinting at a special relationship between Kenyan land and Kenyan people, however, the novel shows that nature can be cruel: it describes famines caused by natural events such as locusts and drought and calls “uncontrolled nature” a “threat” to people’s flourishing. It also subtly undermines statements by Ilmorog farmers who suggest that harvests are good or bad according to God’s will (and so better science and farming techniques are beside the point) by hinting that European colonists’ poor land management and clear-cutting of forests made Kenyan harvests worse. In this way, the novel simultaneously asserts that people have a special, close relationship to their ancestral land—and that people need to exert control over land and nature to keep nature from hurting or even killing them.