A Grain of Wheat has its own Kurtz. DO John Thompson is an idealist of Empire, who starts off with a vision of ‘one British nation, embracing peoples of all colours and creeds, based on the just proposition that all men are created equal’. He starts working on a book to be called Prospero in Africa, which will put forward an argument for this conception of human progress. Like Kurtz, Thompson is mocked for the ‘artful dodges’ language allows him. In an echo of Kurtz’s ‘Eliminate all the brutes’ scrawled over his treatise on progress, Thompson writes ‘Eliminate the vermin’ in his Prospero notes. From idealist he becomes a torturer, forcing confessions out of the detainees by any means possible, because that is the true meaning of colonial rule. Like Kurtz, Thompson comes to learn that violence and coercion are his unavoidable means. When eleven detainees die under torture at Rira camp under his command, Thompson, the rising man in the administration, is quickly transferred out of sight. Thompson, then, is offered as not only a critique of colonial methods but of the whole narrative of imperialism, which prefers the grandiose lying language of progress to ‘the horror’ of its actual practice.
Ultimately Thompson is denied humanity in the novel, because I don’t think Ngg is interested in him and his motivations, but in using him to demonstrate an argument. Not only is he an imperial tool, and the means of offering a critique of colonial method, but he is also shown as incapable of attachment or warmth. Imperialism’s self-deception and cruelty has turned him into an unfeeling brute. His story ends with his imminent departure on the eve of independence, demoralized and disillusioned, the ambitions of a lifetime transformed into inadequacy.
Ngg is, however, deeply interested in Mugo, and how to resolve the consequences of his debilitating aloneness. Mumbi’s confession of her adultery touches him in an unexpected way. She is beautiful, she is young, and her vitality and courage in speaking about what had happened to her shames Mugo. It reminds him of the futility of his life: ‘he was at the bottom of the pool, but up there, above the pool, ran the earth; life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful’. And so begins the process of Mugo’s reintegration into his community, as first he confesses to Mumbi that he betrayed Kihika, her brother, and then confesses to the whole of Thabai the part he had played in the execution of their hero.
A Grain of Wheat is a political narrative. It is political in its desire to show the development of an awarenes of a history of oppression. When the rebellion comes, the novel argues, it is the culmination of a long series of more restrained acts of defiance. The individual dramas become more prominent as the narrative progresses, but the rebellion is its point of reference. Mugo, Gikonyo, and Karanja betray the cause of freedom in their different ways, but they also betray themselves, as does Mumbi. Through the guilt they suffer, they arrive at a point of understanding and self-knowledge, and so in the end the novel offers a possibility of regeneration. In this sense, A Grain of Wheat is also a moral narrative.
Ngg has said of the 1967 version of A Grain of Wheat that his ‘peasant and worker characters’ had the ‘vacillating mentality of the petite bourgeoisie’. A lot had happened to the author between 1967 and 1987. He changed his name from James Ngg to the more correct Gkùy form of Ngg wa Thiong’o (Thiong’o was his father’s name). The change was not just a desire to be more culturally correct, it was also a rejection of that ‘missionary’ construction ‘James’. The legal change of name took place in November 1977, but by then Ngg had already publicly and repeatedly repudiated the influence of Christian missionary teaching. By the mid-70s he was writing in Gkùy as Ngg wa Thiong’o, working on agitprop plays in collaboration with other writers and in ‘peasant’ workshops. The thrust of his work by now was to see how writing could intervene in social change, how it could be instrumental to progress. It was this that finally panicked the government into detaining him for a year in December 1977. It was a powerful demonstration of Ngg’s argument about which writing language was appropriate for the African writer. It was not that the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) was making unprecedented criticisms, but that it was written in Gkùy and was comprehensible to ordinary citizens, and was therefore ‘subversive’, that led to his detention. Only a few months before his detention, Ngg had published Petals of Blood, which was sharply critical of the governing culture of Kenya without appearing to cause the authorities any anxiety. It was even launched by the Vice-President of Kenya Mwai Kibaki, in a public demonstration of the government’s commitment to ‘free speech’. A critical play in Gkùy, though, was another matter.
On his release, the government dismissed him from his academic job, and finally harassed him out of the country in 1982. The government that did this was led by the same Jomo Kenyatta who is everywhere lauded in A Grain of Wheat as the saviour of his people. The muted warning against betrayal of independence that Ngg had sounded in A Grain of Wheat had been proved devastatingly correct, and not only in his personal case. As Ngg’s work grew progressively more ‘radical’, it is only consistent that he should want the ‘world view’ of his peasants to reflect the historical triumph of the oppressed rather than a nagging conviction that progress comes at a heavy price. The 1987 revisions do not do very much to improve the novel, but nor are they deep enough to diminish the power and the subtlety of its narrative play and its compulsive drama. Ngg’s work has been influential and provocative from the beginning, and in that impressive body of work, A Grain of Wheat is his most humane and persuasive novel.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
2002
For Dorothy
Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.
1 Corinthians 15:36
Although set in contemporary Kenya, all the characters in this book are fictitious. Names like that of Jomo Kenyatta and Waiyaki are unavoidably mentioned as part of the history and institutions of our country. But the situation and the problems are real — sometimes too painfully real for the peasants who fought the British yet who now see all that they fought for being put on one side.
Ngg wa Thiong’o
Leeds, November 1966
A Grain of Wheat
One
Mugo felt nervous. He was lying on his back and looking at the roof. Sooty locks hung from the fern and grass thatch and all pointed at his heart. A clear drop of water was delicately suspended above him. The drop fattened and grew dirtier as it absorbed grains of soot. Then it started drawing towards him. He tried to shut his eyes. They would not close. He tried to move his head: it was firmly chained to the bed-frame. The drop grew larger and larger as it drew closer and closer to his eyes. He wanted to cover his eyes with his palms; but his hands, his feet, everything refused to obey his will. In despair, Mugo gathered himself for a final heave and woke up. Now he lay under the blanket and remained unsettled fearing, as in the dream, that a drop of cold water would suddenly pierce his eyes. The blanket was hard and worn out; its bristles pricked his face, his neck, in fact all the unclothed parts of his body. He did not know whether to jump out or not; the bed was warm and the sun had not yet appeared. Dawn diffused through cracks in the wall into the hut. Mugo tried a game he always played whenever he had lost sleep in the middle of the night or early morning. In total, or hazy darkness most objects lose their edges, one shape merging with another. The game consisted in trying to make out the various objects in the room. This morning, however, Mugo found it difficult to concentrate. He knew that it was only a dream: yet he kept on chilling at the thought of a cold drop falling into his eyes. One, two, three; he pulled the blanket away from his body. He washed his face and lit the fire. In a corner, he discovered a small amount of maize-flour in a bag among the utensils. He put this in a sufuria on the fire, added water and stirred it with a wooden spoon. He liked porridge in the morning. But whenever he took it, he remembered the half-cooked porridge he ate in detention.
How time drags, everything repeats itself, Mugo thought; the day ahead would be just like yesterday and the day before.
He took a jembe and a panga to repeat the daily pattern his life had now fallen into since he left Maguita, his last detention camp. To reach his new strip of shamba which lay the other side of Thabai, Mugo had to walk through the dusty village streets. And as usual Mugo found that some women had risen before him, that some were already returning from the river, their frail backs arched double with water-barrels, in time to prepare tea or porridge for their husbands and children. The sun was now up: shadows of trees and huts and men were thin and long on the ground.
‘How is it with you, this morning?’ Warui called out to him, emerging from one of the huts.
‘It is well.’ And as usual Mugo would have gone on, but Warui seemed anxious to talk.
‘Attacking the ground early?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s what I always say. Go to it when the ground is soft. Let the sun find you already there and it’ll not be a match for you. But if it reaches the shamba before you – hm.’
Warui, a village elder, wore a new blanket which sharply relieved his wrinkled face and the grey tufts of hair on his head and on his pointed chin. It was he who had given Mugo the present strip of land on which to grow a little food. His own piece had been confiscated by the government while he was in detention. Though Warui liked talking, he had come to respect Mugo’s reticence. But today he looked at Mugo with new interest, curiosity even.
‘Like Kenyatta is telling us,’ he went on, ‘these are days of Uhuru na Kazi.’ He paused and ejected a jet of saliva on to the hedge. Mugo stood embarrassed by this encounter. ‘And how is your hut, ready for Uhuru?’ continued Warui.
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Mugo said and excused himself. As he moved on through the village, he tried to puzzle out Warui’s last question.
Thabai was a big village. When built, it had combined a number of ridges: Thabai, Kamandura, Kihingo, and parts of Weru. And even in 1963, it had not changed much from the day in 1955 when the grass-thatched roofs and mud walls were hastily collected together, while the whiteman’s sword hung dangerously above people’s necks to protect them from their brethren in the forest. Some huts had crumbled; a few had been pulled down. Yet the village maintained an unbroken orderliness; from a distance it appeared a huge mass of grass from which smoke rose to the sky as from a burnt sacrifice.
Mugo walked, his head slightly bowed, staring at the ground as if ashamed of looking about him. He was re-living the encounter with Warui when suddenly he heard someone shout his name. He started, stopped, and stared at Githua, who was hobbling towards him on crutches. When he reached Mugo he stood to attention, lifted his torn hat, and cried out:
‘In the name of blackman’s freedom, I salute you.’ Then he bowed several times in comic deference.
‘Is it – is it well with you?’ Mugo asked, not knowing how to react. By this time two or three children had collected and were laughing at Githua’s antics. Githua did not answer at once. His shirt was torn, its collar gleamed black with dirt. His left trouser leg was folded and fixed with a pin to cover the stump. Rather unexpectedly he gripped Mugo by the hand:
‘How are you man! How are you man! Glad to see you going to the shamba early. Uhuru na Kazi. Ha! Ha! Ha! Even on Sundays. I tell you before the Emergency, I was like you; before the whiteman did this to me with bullets, I could work with both hands, man. It makes my heart dance with delight to see your spirit. Uhuru na Kazi. Chief, I salute you.’
Mugo tried to pull out his hand. His heart beat and he could not find the words. The laughter from the children increased his agitation. Githua’s voice suddenly changed:
‘The Emergency destroyed us,’ he said in a tearful voice and abruptly went away. Mugo hurried on, conscious of the man’s eyes behind him. Three women coming from the river stopped when they saw him. One of them shouted something, but Mugo did not answer or look at them. He raised dust like a man on the run. Yet he only walked asking himself questions: What’s wrong with me today? Why are people suddenly looking at me with curiosity? Is there shit on my legs?
Soon he was near the end of the main street where the old woman lived. Nobody knew her age: she had always been there, a familiar part of the old and the new village. In the old village she lived with an only son who was deaf and dumb. Gitogo, for that was the son’s name, spoke with his hands often accompanied with animal guttural noises. He was handsome, strongly built, a favourite at the Old Rung’ei centre where young men spent their time talking the day away. Occasionally the men went on errands for the shop-owners and earned a few coins ‘for the pockets only, just to keep the trousers warm’, as some carelessly remarked. They laughed and said the coins would call others (man! their relatives) in due time.
Gitogo worked in eating houses, meat shops, often lifting and carrying heavy loads avoided by others. He loved displaying his well-built muscles. Whispers current in Rung’ei and Thabai said that many a young woman had felt the weight of those limbs. In the evenings Gitogo bought food – a pound of sugar, or a pound of meat – and took them home to his mother, who brightened up, her face becoming youthful amidst the many wrinkles. What a son, what a man, people would say, touched by the tenderness of the deaf and dumb one to his mother.
One day people in Thabai and Rung’ei woke up to find themselves ringed round with black and white soldiers carrying guns, and tanks last seen on the road during Churchill’s war with Hitler. Gunfire smoked in the sky, people held their stomachs. Some men locked themselves in latrines; others hid among the sacks of sugar and beans in the shops. Yet others tried to sneak out of the town towards the forest, only to find that all roads to freedom were blocked. People were being collected into the town-square, the market place, for screening. Gitogo ran to a shop, jumped over the counter, and almost fell on to the shopkeeper whom he found cowering amongst the empty bags. He gesticulated, made puzzled noises, furtively looked and pointed at the soldiers. The shopkeeper in stupid terror stared back blankly at Gitogo. Gitogo suddenly remembered his aged mother sitting alone in the hut. His mind’s eye vividly saw scenes of wicked deeds and blood. He rushed out through the back door, and jumped over a fence into the fields, now agitated by the insecurity to which his mother lay exposed. Urgency, home, mother: the images flashed through his mind. His muscles alone would protect her. He did not see that a whiteman, in a bush jacket, lay camouflaged in a small wood. ‘Halt!’ the whiteman shouted. Gitogo continued running. Something hit him at the back. He raised his arms in the air. He fell on his stomach. Apparently the bullet had touched his heart. The soldier left his place. Another Mau Mau terrorist had been shot dead.
When the old woman heard the news she merely said: My God. Those who were present said that she did not weep. Or even ask how her son had met his death.
After leaving the detention camp Mugo had several times seen the old woman outside her hut. And every time he felt agitated as if the woman recognized him. She had a small face grooved with wrinkles. Her eyes were small but occasionally flashed with life. Otherwise they looked dead. She wore beads around her elbows, several copper chains around her neck, and cowrie-like tins around the ankles. When she moved she made jingling noises like a belled goat. It was her eyes that most disturbed Mugo. He always felt naked, seen. One day he spoke to her. But she only looked at him and then turned her face away. Mugo felt rejected, yet her loneliness struck a chord of pity in him. He wanted to help her. This feeling warmed him inside. He bought some sugar, maize-flour and a bundle of firewood at one of the Kabui shops. In the evening he went to the woman’s place. The hut was dark inside. The room was bare, and a cold wind whistled in through the gaping holes in the wall. She slept on the floor, near the fireplace. Mugo remembered how he too used to sleep on the floor in his aunt’s hut, sharing the fireplace with goats and sheep. He often crept and crouched near the goats for warmth. In the morning he found his face and clothes covered with ashes, his ha
nds and feet smeared with the goats’ droppings. In the end he had become hardened to the goats’ smell. Amidst these thoughts, Mugo felt the woman fix him with her eyes, which glinted with recognition. Suddenly he shivered at the thought that the woman might touch him. He ran out, revolted. Perhaps there was something fateful in his contact with this old woman.
Today this thought was uppermost in his mind, as he again felt another desire to enter the hut and talk to her. There was a bond between her and him, perhaps because she, like him, lived alone. At the door he faltered, his resolution wavered, broke, and he found himself hurrying away, fearing that she would call him back with mad laughter.
In the shamba, he felt hollow. There were no crops on the land and what with the dried-up weeds, gakaraku, micege, mikengeria, bangi – and the sun, the country appeared sick and dull. The jembe seemed heavier than usual; the unfinished part of the shamba looked too big for his unwilling muscles. He dug a little, and feeling the desire to pass water, walked to a hedge near the path; why had Warui, Githua and the women behaved that way towards him? He found his bladder had pressed him into false urgency. A few drops trickled down and he watched them as if each drop fascinated him. Two young women dressed for church, passed near, saw a big man playing with his thing and giggled. Mugo felt foolish and dragged himself back to his work.
He raised the jembe, let it fall into the soil; lifted it and again brought it down. The ground felt soft as if there were mole-tunnels immediately below the surface. He could hear the soil, dry and hollow, tumble down. Dust flew into the sky, enveloped him, then settled into his hair and clothes. Once a grain of dust went into his left eye. He quickly dropped the jembe in anger and rubbed his eye which smarted with pain as water tossed out from both eyes. He sat down: where was the fascination he used to find in the soil before the Emergency?