Jacinta Warĩĩnga
Warĩĩnga is the protagonist of Devil on the Cross. As a young girl, Warĩĩnga hoped to become an engineer, but her involvement with the Rich Old Man from Ngorika caused her to get pregnant with a daughter, Wambũi. Warĩĩnga then dropped out of school, leaving her baby with her parents, in order to pursue secretarial work. When this does not work out due to the predatory behavior of her bosses, however, Warĩĩnga decides to return to her home of Ilmorog and see her parents. On the way, she encounters Robin Mwaũra, Mũturi, Wangarĩ, Gatuĩria, and Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, whose tales of neocolonial Kenya shock her into realizing her solidarity with the peasants and workers of the world. She attends the Devil's Feast in Ilmorog, and then is visited by the Devil himself afterwards at a golf course. She constantly resists the temptation to give in to corruption and the exploitative nature of sugar relationships, however, and she grows greatly as a person after taking up with Gatuĩria. Once a victim who sought to end her life, by the end of the novel, Warĩĩnga has become a stereotype-dispelling mechanic who embraces her Blackness, her past, and her Marxist sensibilities. These sensibilities run so deep and so passionate that, when confronted with the truth that Gatuĩria's father is the Rich Old Man from Ngorika, she kills the Old Man and runs away, sacrificing her own comfort and marital bliss for her Marxist ideals and in the name of freeing Kenya from robbers and tycoons.
The "Devil's Feast" Guests
At the Devil's Feast, Warĩĩnga is made to sit and listen to lengthy speeches, during which the various guests all stand and explain why they are eligible to celebrate with foreign extortionists and how they intend to enslave the Black race even more to White colonizers in service of making money for a select few native Africans. They are guilty of exploitative business practices, dehumanizing schemes, and betraying the loyalty of their clans and race. Even so, they freely tell their stories at the party, bragging about the ease of making money through betrayal and framing it as a progression towards modernity. Warĩĩnga is stunned by what they say, but even more importantly, each of the guests is described using grotesque language, which blends the real and fantastical and also draws parallels between these guests and ogres and monsters from Gĩkũyũ legend.
Rich Old Man from Ngorika
The Rich Old Man from Ngorika is an exploitative sugar daddy who is introduced to Warĩĩnga by her uncle, who hopes to earn some money and social status in return for her innocence and body. He initially is nice to Warĩĩnga, and Warĩĩnga loses sight of her personal goals as the Rich Old Man lavishes her with money, presents, and attention in exchange for sex. However, once Warĩĩnga becomes pregnant with his child, he sours and abandons her to a cruel fate, never seeing her again. Or so he and she think, until Warĩĩnga arrives in his house as the betrothed of Gatuĩria, his only son. Again, here, the Rich Old Man propositions Warĩĩnga and tries to pressure her to leave his son, but in return, Warĩĩnga draws a pistol and kills the Rich Old Man. He is a symbol of both the corrupted bourgeois class of neocolonial Kenya as well as of the piggish nature of wealthy men in post-colonial Kenya, and his retribution at the end of the novel is evidence of Ngũgĩ's anti-bourgeois sympathies.
Robin Mwaũra
Mwaũra is the driver of the Matatũ Matata Matamu Model T Ford, which conveys Warĩĩnga and the others to the Devil's Feast in Ilmorog. Mwaũra is a very stingy and greedy person, driving an old and rundown matatũ while at the same time constantly doing everything he can to earn additional money on the side. Throughout the novel, Mwaũra espouses a very unsettling, wealth-based value system and also expresses his discontent with the Communist leanings of Mũturi and Wangarĩ. However, he swears that he has no allegiance to either God or the Devil. He claims that he simply works in service of whomever pays more. By the end of the novel, however, Mwaũra is exposed as a former mercenary working for the neocolonial bourgeoisie, someone who would not hesitate to kill anyone if it meant that he would receive a paycheck in return. In fact, he is hired to kill Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, and he succeeds in doing so through a car accident that does not take his own life. Even so, despite Mwaũra's evil heart and clear interest in exploiting others, he is laughed off the stage at the Devil's Feast for the relatively small scale of his operations of theft and robbery.
Mũturi
Mũturi is a hardworking builder, the representative of the working class in the novel. He used to work for the same company as Warĩĩnga, but when wages stagnated, Mũturi left his job to journey to Ilmorog. Throughout the novel, one gets the sense that he is unnaturally interested in the devilish work of the Ilmorog thieves and robbers, and it is eventually revealed that he works for a secret organization of workers, one whose goal is to banish neocolonial thieves, put power back in the hands of the people, reject globalist modernity, and restore Mau-Mau-era nationalist fervor to the country. After hearing some speeches at the Devil's Feast, Mũturi goes to lead a revolt of the people against the tycoons of Ilmorog, but he is eventually arrested. Though he is freed at his trial, he is soon taken into custody again by the corrupt government. Additionally, late in the novel, it is revealed that Mũturi saved Warĩĩnga's life not once but twice—once as a security guard that prevented her from drowning herself in a school pool, and again as a samaritan who saved her from throwing herself in front of a train.
Wangarĩ
Wangarĩ is a peasant woman and a kind of counterpart to Mũturi. As a young woman, Wangarĩ participated in Mau Mau and fought for the independence of Kenya. As a result, she is deeply shocked in the present to find that the same exploitative conditions exist in Kenya as before the Mau Mau Uprising. She is particularly disgusted by the fact that certain Black people would work with foreigners in the exclusion and exploitation of their own kind. Warĩĩnga admires Wangarĩ greatly, but Wangarĩ suffers an ultimately similar fate to Mũturi, being arrested and freed, only to be arrested once more. During the novel, she travels to Ilmorog with the others in order to report the thieves and robbers there to the police of Nairobi, but she is double-crossed by the police in the end, who work in reality for the very tycoons and robber barons she seeks to expose and report.
Gatuĩria
Gatuĩria is a musician and professor from the university in Nairobi. Seeking to write a composition that embodies the national history of Kenya, he learns folklore from a storyteller but is unsure whether he believes in the literal and material manifestations of evil (e.g., ogres, demons) that occur in these stories. He is reluctant as an educated petit-bourgeois to take sides with either the Communist workers or the Capitalist tycoons throughout the novel, but by the end of the novel, he has taken up with Warĩĩnga, become inspired to write his music by the horrors he sees at the Devil's Feast, and at least nominally accepts the truth of the Marxist worldview and history of Kenya. At the same time, however, Gatuĩria's father is secretly the Rich Old Man from Ngorika, and he does not tell Warĩĩnga of his father's wealth for fear that she will abandon and leave him. However, this only serves to hurt Gatuĩria in the end, since Warĩĩnga kills his father and leaves him alone to deal with the consequences of her actions.
Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ
Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ is an international business major and scholar who joins the other characters in their journey to Ilmorog. Though he remains quiet for much of the ride to Ilmorog, he eventually reveals that his sympathies are in line with the capitalist business tycoons who exploit locals and make money from the ignorance of others. At the Devil's Feast, Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ speaks his mind and tells the guests there that they ought to reject foreign interference, and develop indigenous frameworks for theft and robbery without enslaving themselves in perpetuity to foreigners. This, however, garners an incredibly negative response from the audience, who agree to have him killed for his insolence before their foreign guests.
The Devil
The Devil is an important character in the text, not just as an allegorical figure or imagined presence but as a real and material presence that causes and effects change in the world. Not only is he allegedly the person who throws the feast in Ilmorog, but he is also the person who tempts Warĩĩnga on the Ilmorog golf course and offers her a life of luxury in exchange for a betrayal of her own experiences and ideals. Warĩĩnga rejects the Devil ultimately, but his presence throughout the text is undeniable, and his central role in the main allegory of the text (Warĩĩnga's recurring dream) is a severe and passionate indictment of capitalism and the neocolonial ways in which foreign governments control former colonies indirectly through opportunistic race and class traitors.
Boss Kĩhara
Boss Kĩhara is the boss of both Warĩĩnga and Mũturi, and he is responsible for both of them getting fired. He is a representative of corruption in modern Kenya, both of the piggishness and lasciviousness of rich men and of the avarice of wealthy businesspeople.
John Kimwana
John Kimwana is Warĩĩnga's former lover, a passionate and young student at the university. Though Warĩĩnga loves him deeply, he abandons her when she tells him of her experiences with Boss Kĩhara. He does not believe that Warĩĩnga was really able to reject her boss, and so he ironically rejects her in turn.
Gĩcaandĩ Player
The Gĩcaandĩ player is the narrator of Devil on the Cross. He is initially reluctant to tell the story of Warĩĩnga, but after being visited by the divine in the form of the collective voice of the people, he is moved to recite the majority of the novel. He is also shown to not necessarily be an entirely reliable narrator, which forces readers to consider the text he provides us with in light of several contexts—temporal, gendered, and so on.
