A Grain of Wheat

When A Grain of Wheat was first published in 1967, it was only four years after “uhuru” or political freedom (i.e. the end of British colonial rule) had come to Kenya. Yet in the very brief preface he wrote at the time, Ngugi had (while insisting on the fictionality of his characters) concluded: But the situation and the problems are real — sometimes too painfully real for the peasants, who fought the British, yet who now see all they fought for being put on one side (2).

This note of post-colonial disillusionment is not, however, the main thrust of the novel. The organisation of Kenyan indigenes who, eventually successfully, fought against British occupation of and rule over their country named themselves “The Kenya Land and Freedom Army”. However, they were known all over the world as the Mau-Mau terrorists. Britain declared a state of emergency in Kenya in 1953, when the latest in what had been a series of militant political resistance movements showed signs of especial intensity and fierceness.

In A Grain of Wheat, the author, concentrating on the few days before the celebration of the achievement of Kenyan independence in a rural settlement, gives readers — through long flashbacks and the depiction of personal and political crises — a sense of the Kenyan side of the story. It is a remarkably complex piece of writing: one of the great classics of the African canon. Ngugi achieved this by refusing to show us a society of pure and heroic individuals and by including some examples of the atrocities (killings of Christian leaders, rape and assassination) committed by the Kenyans. He shows us also the great, overarching crime and the atrocities of colonial occupation maintained by its own forms of terrorism — shootings, beatings, internment, razing of homes, and random or selective killings.

The image of the period of the Emergency (1953-1956) which emerges from the novel is one of the often unbearable hardships inflicted on the local inhabitants, the great majority of whom are not actual members of the liberation movement. The hardship is physical (forced labour, near starvation, concentration camps and internment centres, interrogations, etc.). Most difficult to deal with are the tremendous strains on people’s loyalties. A Grain of Wheat is not only a tale of heroics — it is a deeply compassionate and humane account of the many betrayals to which people are driven by the stresses of the time. Even the near-heroic figure, Kihika, is thought by his first beloved to have abandoned her for “politics” when he becomes a leader of the “forest fighters”, and when he tells a confidant about his successful shooting of a notoriously brutal District Officer, “there were tears in that whisper” (165). Kihika is eventually betrayed, and hanged. But his martyrdom haunts his society. He tells his beloved: “It is not politics, Wambuku, ... it is life. Is he a man who lets another take away his land and freedom? Has a slave life?” (85).

Ngugi makes his central character not Kihika, but the man who secretly “sold” him to the colonists — the incurably lonely Mugo, who believed that (by turning to him for refuge) Kihika had irrevocably invaded his (Mugo’s) precarious, hard-won security: “I wanted to live my life. I never wanted to be involved in anything. Then he came into my life, here, a night like this, and pulled me into the stream. So I killed him” (161). Mugo makes his confession to Kihika’s sister, Mumbi, with whom he has secretly been in love for many years. She, too, through the strains of the Emergency, had betrayed her husband sexually — and the mutual friend with whom she commits this act became a traitor to the Kenyan political cause, chiefly through his hopeless love of Mumbi. The web of betrayal and consequent suffering includes Gikonyo, Mumbi’s husband, who “confessed the oath” (of the Mau-Mau). These infidelities and the guilt and haunting fears they bring in their trail are presented in the vividly imagined setting of a small rural community, with public issues and the secret lives of individuals’ psyches constantly intertwining.

Those familiar only with touristy images of Kenya or with (say) the superficial glamour of films such as Out of Africa, will find this novel a revelation. Early on, in unobtrusive detail, Ngugi juxtaposes a reference to the “central position”, in the Rift Valley, of the Mahee police garrison, which “fed guns and ammunition to the other ... posts ... to protect ... the Kenya settlers”, with a description of “the walls of the escarpment”, the natural, “enchanting guard to one of the most beautiful valleys in the land” (16). The two styles and the differing purposes of these two types of guardianship tell their own tale.

A Grain of Wheat does not leave one with a sense of bleakness, but with a sense of the other kind of heroism required to accommodate our own and others’ weaknesses and failures, and the need to learn the difficult art of forgiveness — seeking as much as accepting it.

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