Satire in Wamugunda Geteria’s Novel Nice People

Abstract

Many novels have been written about the effect of HIV and the resultant Aids Pandemic. In Kenya novelists Joseph Situma, Marjorie Oludhe MacGoye, Wahome Mutahi, Moraa Gitaa and Wamugunda Geteria have composed fictional works that reflect the devastation that the pandemic has wrought on humanity. Satire is one of fictional literature’s most important contributions to the society. Satire has been used, among other social purposes, in the crusade against bad governance to chastise the governors of independent African states into reformation, to castigate alienation and neocolonial tendencies of African elite and to deplore the manner in which men exploit each other in the modern society in the name of religion. Geteria expands the scope of satire in the most pragmatic discourse on the pandemic exposing how human folly perpetuates the spread of sexually transmitted infections. Indeed he demonstrates that the devastation that Aids wreaked upon humanity is due to the fact that social attitudes offered a conducive atmosphere for the virus to thrive. This project is a discussion of how the writer has employed irony, burlesque, exaggeration, paradox, invective and other literary devices to chastise the society out of the kind of hypocrisy that the writer deems responsible for the plight of men and women in relation to HIV and Aids. The open discourse on Aids that the satirist advocates has been adopted as the most effective way not only in containing the spread of the virus but also in reducing the condemnation of the afflicted. Stylistic theoretical framework, that studies a writers choice of language in order to gauge the writer’s message, has been used in an analysis of the text to study how Geteria has satirized hypocrisy that, as he so ably demonstrates, is responsible for the suffering of the affected.