A Grain of Wheat Read online

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  Africa is a huge continent with a diversity of cultures and languages. Africa is not simple — often people want to simplify it, generalize it, stereotype its people, but Africa is very complex. The world is just starting to get to know Africa. The last five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories.

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  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  A GRAIN OF WHEAT

  NGG WA THIONG’O was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, he is the author of Weep Not, Child; The River Between; A Grain of Wheat; Homecoming; Petals of Blood; Devil on the Cross; Matigari; Decolonizing the Mind; Moving the Center; Writers in Politics; and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, among other works, which include novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and plays. In 1977, the year he published Petals of Blood, Ngg’s play I Will Marry When I Want (cowritten with Ngg wa Mri and harshly critical of the injustices of Kenyan society) was performed, and at the end of the year Ngg was arrested. He was detained for a year without trial at a maximum security prison in Kenya. The theater where the play was performed was razed by police in 1982.

  Ngg’s numerous honors include the East African Novel Prize; Unesco First Prize; the Lotus Prize for Literature; the Paul Robeson Award for Artistic Excellence, Political Conscience and Integrity; the Zora Neal Hurston—Paul Robeson Award for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement; the Fonlon-Nichols Prize for Artistic Excellence and Human Rights; the Distinguished Africanist Award; the Gwendolyn Brooks Center Contributors Award for significant contribution to the black literary arts; and the Nonino International Literary Prize for the Italian translation of his book Moving the Center. Ngg has given many distinguished lectures including the 1984 Robb Lectures at Auckland University, New Zealand, and the 1996 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University. He received the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Cabinet for “his uncompromising efforts to assert the values implicit in the mulitcultural approach embracing the experience and aspirations of all the world’s minorities.” He has taught in many universities including Nairobi, Northwestern, and Yale. He was named New York University’s Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies. In 2003 Ngg was elected as an honorary member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.

  ABDULRAZAK GURNAH was born in 1948 in Zanzibar, Tanzania. He is the author of the highly acclaimed novels Memory of Departure, Pilgrim’s Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize), Admiring Silence, By the Sea, Desertion, and The Last Gift. He teaches English literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England.

  NGG WA THIONG’O

  A Grain of Wheat

  Introduction by

  ABDULRAZAK GURNAH

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  First published by William Heinemann Ltd. 1967

  Revised edition published by William Heinemann Ltd. 1986

  Published with a new introduction in Penguin Books (UK) 2002

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Copyright © Ngg wa Thiong’o, 1967, 1986

  Introduction copyright © Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2002

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  ISBN: 978-1-101-58485-9

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  ALWAYS LEARNING

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  Contents

  Introduction by ABDULRAZAK GURNAH

  A GRAIN OF WHEAT

  Introduction

  Note: In discussing this story, it has sometimes been unavoidable that crucial elements of the plot have been given away. Readers encountering this story for the first time, therefore, might prefer to read this introduction afterwards.

  Ngg wa Thiong’o is now established as a major African writer and one of the continent’s foremost intellectuals, among the few most important of that gifted decolonizing era. He achieved his greatest fame during a
nd after his detention by the Kenya government in 1977–8, and later as a result of his arguments against African writers using English as their writing language. Although he did not initiate this debate about language, Ngg has become its most renowned and most determined advocate. His own fiction since the 1978 detention has been in Gkùy, followed by translation into English. His critical and political writing (and the two have overlapped from the beginning) has focused ever more sharply on issues of culture and language. A Grain of Wheat came at a crucial moment in the radicalization of Ngg’s thinking, most dramatically evident here in the way the writing moves from the single-character focus of the earlier novels to the social epic mode of the later ones.

  Ngg wrote A Grain of Wheat at Leeds University in England, in the years 1964–6, when he was a postgraduate student there on a British Council scholarship. In the event he did not receive the research MA he was working on (on the work of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming), because instead of completing revisions to his thesis, he read widely and wrote A Grain of Wheat. He was then twenty-eight and already the author of two novels, Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965), both of which were published while he was at Leeds. It was also during this period that he first read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, as well as Marx and Engels, and later cited these writers, and Engels in particular, as important to the writing of the novel. These influences became much more evident in his next novel Petals of Blood (1977) and beyond. Ngg revised A Grain of Wheat in 1987, to make the ‘world outlook’ of his peasants more in line with his ideas of the historical triumph of the oppressed. But if Fanon and Engels played their part in Ngg’s thinking during the writing of this novel, then so did Joseph Conrad. Ngg’s special subject for his undergraduate degree was the writing of Conrad, and one of the novels he studied was Under Western Eyes. There are parallels in method as well as subject between the two novels — we will return to these later.

  The present-time of A Grain of Wheat is the four days leading up to Kenya’s independence from British colonial rule in December 1963, although the unconfessed events which are the drama of the narrative mostly took place during the Emergency in the 1950s. The Emergency was declared in 1952 to suppress the Mau Mau, an armed rebellion against European settlements in the highlands of Kenya. European settlement in the central highlands, later to be called the White Highlands to describe the racial dimension of settler activity, had been preceded by the expulsion of the Gkùy people and their transformation into labourers and squatters on the land they had thought their own. Ngg’s writing is never far from the subject, and it is not surprising that this should be so. Settlement began just before the 1914–18 war and reached a peak in the 1930s, the era of Happy Valley and Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. Ngg was born in 1938, and grew up in the rural areas of heaviest European occupation, where memories of expulsion and displacement were within the life-time of the people. His elder brother joined the Mau Mau, and another brother, who was deaf and dumb, was shot by security forces in exactly the way Gitogo dies in the opening pages of A Grain of Wheat, unable to hear an order to stop running. Ngg’s first novel, Weep Not, Child, which is written from a child’s perspective, ends with the beginning of the Mau Mau rebellion and the approach of the Emergency. In A Grain of Wheat the Emergency has been over for seven years, the rebellion triumphant despite its military defeat, and independence is just days away. But for the rural Gkùy community of Thabai, the time of rejoicing and optimism is also edged with suppressed anxieties and guilts, the people are troubled by what it means to be free.

  One of the most striking aspects of A Grain of Wheat is the method of its narration. The framing voice is a third-person narrator, who at times speaks with a clear political awareness of the context of Kenya’s colonial history, and at other times slides quietly into the inclusiveness of the oral story-teller speaking to listeners who are familiar with the main events of the tale. ‘Many people from Thabai attended the meeting because, you’ll remember, we had only just been allowed to hold political meetings,’ the narrator says at one point, speaking as much to the reader as to invisible listeners presumed in the telling. Yet all the main figures tell their own stories in confessional encounters and in interior monologues, stories which intersect and challenge each other, and which in a formal sense are inaccessible to the narrator. In this way, the narrative frequently slips in and out of present-time and between narrating voices, creating some instability about what is known and what it means to know.

  The novel opens with the figure of Mugo. He was orphaned at a young age, was brought up by a drunken distant aunt who loathed and tormented him, and whom Mugo loathed in return and fantasized killing one day. He has grown into a tormented and isolated man, morose and self-doubting, agitated for reasons we do not at first fully know. ‘Mugo walked, his head slightly bowed, staring at the ground as if ashamed of looking about him.’ Yet this is not how Thabai sees him. To Thabai he is a hero, a long-suffering though steadfast victim of colonial violence. He had been arrested during the Emergency for intervening to stop a policeman from beating up a woman who, it was said, had refused him sex. In detention he had been obsessively tortured and harassed by the District Officer John Thompson for refusing to confess ‘the oath’. On his release from detention after the Emergency, he had come back, built himself a hut and farmed the piece of land leased to him by one of the elders. To his community Mugo is a hermit: a holy, quiet, self-sufficient, moral man. In reality he is as guilty as sin, although we have to wait until the last quarter of the novel before we know this for sure.

  Mugo then is alone from the beginning, orphaned and unloved, inarticulate and prone to visionary fantasies of messianic heroism. He hears the voice of God in his lonely wanderings. He is, very deliberately, on the edges of the community, because one of the questions the novel is interested in asking is, what are our responsibilities to ourselves and what are our responsibilities to our community?

  In contrast to Mugo is Kihika, who is loved by family and friends, and who has an articulate vision of his political and social responsibilities. Kihika understands the need to resist colonial violence, and when the time comes, he runs away to the forest to join the Mau Mau. He becomes renowned for daring and courage, a myth in the making. In time he is captured by the colonial authorities, perhaps betrayed, and he is publicly hanged from a tree in Rung’ei market as a demonstration of what Kipling calls holding the intransigent colonial ‘to strict account’. As the day of independence approaches in the present-time of the narrative, the Party notables of Thabai decide to celebrate Kihika’s ‘sacrifice’ on the very field where he had been hanged. And they ask Mugo, another hero of the Emergency, to speak in his praise.

  One of these Party notables is Gikonyo, whose estranged wife is Mumbi, Kihika’s sister. Gikonyo too was detained during the Emergency, but he so missed his wife that he confessed the oath in the hope of early release. He was not released as he had hoped, and so spent six unheroic years in detention, finally returning to Thabai, to find Mumbi the mother of a child who could not be his. The father, it turns out, was a youthful rival Karanja, who had joined the Home Guard, the colonial security force, and was now the Chief of the protected village which the authorities forced everyone to move to. Gikonyo ignored his wife after this, living in the same house but hardly speaking to her.

  So on the one hand there are these figures whose lives are interwoven and complicated, who wound and hurt each other, and fret over how to resolve their miseries. On the other there is Mugo, an outsider whose silence and inarticulateness is taken for depth and courage, but whose dearest wish, as we know from our privileged access to his thought, is to be left alone. With a tragic irony that would be comic were the issue not so fraught, it is Mugo that these other figures select as confidante and confessor. While they explain that they select him for his silent strength and his steadfastness, to Mugo it seems like another intrusion into the quiet space he has fashioned for himself, another demonstration
of his nothingness and isolation.

  Gikonyo seeks out Mugo to tell him about the breakdown of his marriage to Mumbi, something he has not talked about with anyone else, not even his wife. Mumbi in turn confesses her adultery with Karanja, and touches a vital nerve in Mugo, as it turns out. But first there was Kihika, who, after he assassinated DO Robson, Thompson’s immediate predecessor in Thabai, sought out Mugo to hide him. He could do this because he knew that Mugo lived on his own, was not part of any alliance, and had no one to tell. This one expedient act transforms Mugo’s life, and ends Kihika’s. In Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, Haldin selects Razumov’s lodgings as the place to hide after his assassination of de P- for similar reasons, though in both cases a stream of explanations by the assassins partially disguises the expediency of the choice. Mugo, like Razumov, is deeply repelled by his forcible implication in these heroics, and says of Kihika after he has gone: ‘He is not satisfied with butchering men and women and children. He must call on me to bathe in the blood. I am not his brother.’ Both Mugo and Razumov betray the hero to the imperialist authorities, and live a life of secrecy and sin, which is none the less misunderstood as one of quiet courage and humility.

  Conrad points to a well-rehearsed suspicion of the language of redemption. Remember Kurtz’s high-flown treatise on human progress in Heart of Darkness and its hollowness in the light of the degradations of colonial power. For Conrad all such language is duplicitous, a self-deceiving disguise of baser motives, or as Marlow puts it in Lord Jim: ‘it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge’. Ngg’s own use of this idea of redemptive language in A Grain of Wheat is more equivocal, not to point to its inescapable duplicity, but to demonstrate the unavoidable inhumanity of sacrifice. Mugo rightly insists on his human need to live as he chooses, but in the argument of this novel to live alone is a pathology, and to live in a community, especially one as historically oppressed as this, requires a sacrifice of those needs. So Kihika signifies an inhumane heroism which is necessary for freedom and justice. He is the ‘grain of wheat’ of the title, who must die for new life to begin.