This is Thiongo’s third novel and a significant step up from the first two. It’s the first one I’d recommend to other people to read. For the third time in a row he makes a point of mentioning the Gikuyu prophet, Mugo wa Kibiro, who predicted the coming of the white man, ‘dressed like butterflies’ (p.10).
This repetition struck me as emblematic of the repetitiveness of Thiong’o’s novels, which all make the same simple point: the white man came and took the black man’s land. In a little more detail, the white man sent his missionaries to soften up the locals with talk of God and love before settlers arrived who systematically stole the best land, and then the white man’s government arrived to impose alien laws and taxes on the conquered people.
Thiong’o is thought of as a highly political novelist but the risk of writing political novels is that the political situation you write about moves on, moves on so comprehensively that the issues you were so impassioned about turn into increasingly distant history. The political ‘analysis’ given in his first two books was not particularly impressive, in any case. The hero of The River Between spends the entire book thinking deeply about the situation before coming to the dazzling conclusion that the colonised people have to stick together in order to kick out the coloniser. Not that impressive as a political theory or platform. In any case, by the time the novel was published in 1965, the British had left, Kenya was independent, and the problem of how to deal with the British coloniser had evaporated to be replaced by a whole new set of more intractable problems.
Rather than address these problems – the challenges of poverty, tribalism and corruption – Thiong’o in his third novel sticks with the tried and trusted theme, the wickedness of white colonialism and the struggle to overthrow it.
That said this is a much more advanced and sophisticated book than his first two, in length, in variety of characterisation, in a number of technical aspects, and in the complex interweaving of memories and narratives. This is the first Thiong’o novel I’d recommend to anyone.
Boy, teenager, man
The central protagonists of Thiong’o’s previous novels, Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965), were a young boy and a teenager, respectively. I found the issues and ideas in them childish and naive, the characters thin and the prose clumsy and abrupt. A Grain of Wheat feels like a significant step forward, partly because it is, for the first time, entirely about adults. Reviewing the three books suggests a simple schematic, that the protagonists of his first three novels are – boy, teenager, man.
The novel is set in the village of Thabai in Gikuyuland and the present-day setting is the last few days of British colonial rule leading up to the day of Uhuru or independence, namely Thursday 12 December 1963. I say ‘present-day’ because what contributes to the novel’s length and complexity are the many flashbacks, to the characters early lives and experiences, which weave a beguiling, complex web of interlocking narratives although I did, fairly regularly, get a bit lost and never got a firm handle on the numerous minor characters who often had very similar-sounding names –Wanjiku, Wambuku, Wambui, Warui and the like.
Main characters
There are 30 or so of named characters but, as far as I understood it, about five main figures, four male and one female:
Kihika (‘a small man with a strong voice’, p.15), a legendary leader of ‘the Movement’ for Kenyan liberation, who led a famous raid by Forest Fighters on Mahee police station (pages 16 and 136). He became known as ‘the terror of the whiteman’ (p.16) who was eventually captured, tried and hanged (p.17). His lover, Njeri, followed him into the forest and was herself shot in a gun battle soon after his death.
Gikonyo is a gifted carpenter, whose sensitive wooing of the beautiful Mumbi 13 years before the novel’s ‘present’ (i.e. 1950; page 18), is described at length – but who is arrested and held in a British detention camp for 6 years, to emerge a different, broken, man (p.102). All that time he had held onto the vision of his beautiful wife and, indeed, caved into the authorities and admitted he had taken the Mau Mau oath, in order to get out of prisoin and be with her – only to get back to their village and discover that she has had a baby by his best friend, Karanja (p.113). Now the whole world feels like a detention camp.
Mugo had a harsh upbringing, his parents dying and leaving him in the care of a drunken aunt who beat him. He, also, survived internment in British detention camps, gaining fame for organising hunger strikes at the Rira camp. At Rira the whiteman Thompson beat him. Later, when they all had to labour to build a new village within a trench and fence which the police could guard more effectively, he gained widespread respect for intervening to stop a brutal overseer whipping a pregnant woman, even though it resulted in he himself immediately being set upon and beaten. He is a shy, taciturn, reluctant figure with, as it turns out, the Central Mystery at the heart of the novel.
Karanja when a young man worked at Githima Library. In the flashback sequences to when they’re young men, Karanja and Kihika are rivals for the affections the beautiful Mumbi, who Gikonyo eventually wins and seduces in a scene in the forest.
Gradually, he pulled her to the ground, the long grass covered them. Mumbi breathed hard but could not, dare not, speak. One by one Giyonko removed her clothes as if performing a dark ritual in the wood. (p. 90)
However, Karanja very much has the last laugh. First of all he does not go into the Forest as his peers did. Instead he joins the hated Homeguard i.e. the whitepeople’s black security force. He rises steadily until he is promoted to be a Chief. Gikonyo cannot believe it when he finds himself in Karanja’s office, listening to a man he once took the holy oath of the Mau Mau with, now defending white rule and threatening Gikonyo with imprisonment if he continues to be insubordinate. In chapter 9, Mumbi gives a long description of how Karanja went over to the whiteman, getting promoted to chief and then behaving far more strictly and vindictively towards his own people than the whiteman.
Broad outline
Broadly speaking, ‘it’ (the nominal present) is just a few days before the fateful declaration of Uhuru or independence i.e. December 12, 1963 and the narrative weaves what feels like an increasingly complex tapestry of stories and memories of the four main male characters (and to a lesser extent, the whiteman Thompson, see below) which jump back and forth in time.
One landing point in the past is when they were all innocent young men after the war, and this seems to be associated with the first arrival of the train from Nairobi at the local town of Rung’ei. The local young men and women turn the arrival of the daily train into a social event, hurrying to be there before it arrives, then hanging out, socialising, flirting etc. It is on one of these sociable evenings that Gikonyo succeeds in separating Mumbi from the crowd and seducing her in the forest.
Much more lengthy are the various scenes set in the detention camps (as the British called them) or concentration camps (as Thiong’o calls them). In one way or another what happened in the camps permanently scarred the surviving male leads, Gikonyo, Mugo and Thompson. Chapter 9 in particular is a long account of the stand-off between Thompson, CO of Rira camp on the coast, and Mugo, who refuses to acknowledge that he has taken the oath (that seems to be the focus of British interrogating; not to prove wrong-doing but just to extract confessions of who had, and had not, taken the Mau Mau oath) and ends up leading a famous hunger strike.
Secondary characters
Wanjiku Mumbi’s mother.
Kariuki Mumbi’s younger brother, now at college in Uganda.
Wambuku young woman, friend of Mumbi, beaten and whipped while making the trench around the new village.
Wambui young woman who carried messages between the guerrillas in the Forest and the villages (p.19).
Mwaura who Karanja fancies.
Whitepeople
There’s a white man, John Thompson (p.40 onwards), a District Officer based at the Githima Agricultural and Forestry Research Station. His promising career was blighted when he was mentioned in the British press and House of Commons after some Kenyans were beaten to death in Rira detention camp, which he was running (p.46). He’s never recovered and his bitterness knows no bounds. Thompson is the latest iteration of the angry, frustrated white man who appears in Thiong’o’s previous novels, Mr Howlands and Livingstone, respectively.
But here, as with all the other characters, Thiong’o investigates him in more detail than in previous novels. Thus we get a couple of pages showing how Thompson is a true believer in the moral mission of the British Empire, how it expresses a moral ideal of a world in which everyone, eventually, will be equal under enlightened British rule, a notion which is given at least passing credence (p.52).
Thompson endures an unhappy marriage with Margery who, to her own surprise, falls into an affair with Dr Henry Van Dyke, a fat drunk meteorological officers (pages 37, 49) ‘that pot-bellied Boer’ (p.152). After a number of groping hurried sexual encounters (‘Let’s go to the back seat,’ he breathed into her ear), which leave her breathless with self-loathing and excitement (the more she hated him, the more she knew his power over her, p.51), van Dyke drunkenly drives into the local train and is killed. She is bored and aimless. She invites the messenger Karanja into her living room for rather too long, enjoying a suburban thrill of illicit attraction to a Black man, and mortally embarrassing him (p.37).
All the usual Thiong’o themes are here:
White colonialism
Thiong’o is unremittingly hostile to everything related to white people. All whitepeople activity is exploitative and repressive, whether it be building missions, schools, train lines, you name it.
There’s a telling and heavily symbolic scene where Thompson watches a female plant pathologist at the Githima Agricultural and Forestry Research Station, Dr Lynd, walking her dog (mastiff) towards a group of young black men lounging on the grass. The mastiff starts barking, the young men are understandably scared, some, including Karanja, grab stones, then Dr Lynd starts accusing them of throwing stones at her dog. Thompson wades into this fracas but can’t win and all sides leave feeling bitter. It’s exacerbated because Dr Lynd is still traumatised by the fact that some black men broke into her house and tied her up while they robbed it, she thought they were going to kill her, so nowadays she shakes with a mixture of terror and uncontrollable anger in the presence of young black man (pages 41 to 45).
What comes over very strongly from this symbolic incident is that black and white people cannot live together, there is too much mutual mistrust. The association of a fierce dog with the assault, tying up and terrorising of a white woman reminded me of JM Coetzee’s disturbing novel Disgrace.
For someone like Mugo, who saw men beaten, chained, have bottles shoved up their backside and men’s penises broken with pincers, his bitterness against whitemen knows no bounds:
‘Now I know that a Mzungu is not a man – always remember that he is – he is a devil – devil.’ (p.179)
All Thiong’o’s characters and himself in his narrative voice, have a relentless, unforgiving hatred of the white man and all his crimes in Kenya. One aspect of this is the narrative’s habit of contrasting what the British and their lying press and their hypocritical politicians say, against the brutal reality of Britain’s actual rule – theft of the land, impoverishment of the population, grotesque violence to intimidate Kenyans, systematic cruelty, humiliation and oppression.
Black resistance
Extensive description of ‘the Movement’, which all the main male characters belong to. There’s an extensive account of the career of Harry Thuku (1895 to 1970), including the protests in 1922 in front of the prison where he was being held, when the police opened fire and killed at least 25 people (pages 13 and 81).
This develops into the career of Jomo Kenyatta (1897 to 1978) the leading Kenyan anti-colonial activist and politician, who governed Kenya as its Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964, and then as its first President from 1964 to his death in 1978.
And how, after ‘Jomo’ (as everyone refers to him) was arrested in October 1952, the really committed disappeared into the forest to, presumably, form the core of what became the Mau Mau movement (as Kikiha goes to the forest, p.99).
As with so many tightly bound resistance or underground movements (the Mafia as much as the Mau Mau) there is a peculiarly vicious hatred reserved for insiders who default, go bad, betray the cause, or are even suspected of betraying the cause.
We must find out traitor, else you and I took the oath for nothing. Traitors and collaborators must not escape revolutionary justice.’ (Movement leader General R, p.27)
Such internecine killing either maintaining revolutionary discipline or doing the whiteman’s job for him, according to point of view.
Second World War
In all three of these novels the Second World War plays a role because it’s set so long ago that a lot of the male characters were conscripted to fight for the British and brought their fighting skills home with them (along with a lot of bitterness about fighting and dying for their colonial oppressor).
That was before the Second World War, that is, before Africans were conscripted to fight with Britain against Hitler in a war which was never their own. (p.81)
The Indian problem
In their ‘political’ discussions, the leading male characters often express the simple sentiment, Africa for Africans, Kenya for black people and black people only.
Kenya is the country of blackpeople…Kenya is black people’s country. (p.64)
Kenya belongs to black people…The soil belongs to Kenyan people. (p.96)
Kenya, after all, was a black man’s country. (p.209)
The trouble with this approach is where does it leave the many Indian immigrants who the British had brought over to help build the railway, run shops, set up trade and commerce etc? As far as I can remember there’s only one Indian character in all of the first three novels, a shopkeeper who employs Waiyaki in the second novel, for a month or so before sacking him. The Indians are regularly denigrated by the Black characters, for making too much money, being too good at business, ripping off the poor blackpeople etc in a tone not a million miles away from European antisemitism.
For me this was another instance of Thiong’o dwelling on the Big Issue of the past i.e. getting rid of the colonial oppressor, and failing to address the issues of present (this book was published in 1967). The relentless emphasis on blackpeople, Kenya for blackpeople, blackpeople’s land for blackpeople etc made me wonder what the solution to ‘the Indian problem’ could possibly be except getting rid of them. And so made me think of the fate of Uganda’s Asians, kicked out by black chauvinist Idi Amin in 1972. And, at one remove, so to speak, of the Arab shop-keeping population of nearby Zanzibar which was massacred by Black nationalists in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.
Corruption
Actually, it’s not fair to say Thiong’o ignores contemporary issues. It’s more that they are overshadowed by his obsession with the Movement and the resistance and opposing whitepeople. Maybe his novels accurately capture the revolutionary mindset which looked forward to childishly sweeping change and failed to notice the premonitions of what post-independence Kenya would be like.
Gikonyo catches a bus to Nairobi. On the way it’s stopped by traffic police who have to be paid off. This kind of everyday extortion would go on to be a far bigger problem for ordinary Africans all over the continent than fancy talk about the morality of political action or religious belief.
Gikonyo has gone to meet his MP and get his support for a bank loan for Gikonyo to go shares in buying a whiteman’s farm. The MP shiftily says he’ll do what he can. Only a day later Gikonyo discovers that his MP has himself bought the farm.
Gikonyo has a little speech to Mugo lamenting that the new class of leaders, the new group of people running things on the brink of independence, had nothing to do with the Movement, never took part in the Struggle, they are the smooth talkers who ran to the shelter of schools and universities, who never experienced any privation – surely the universal plaint of all revolutionaries who see their hoped-for dreams taken over by bankers and businessmen (p.67). Compare the high hopes of all the East European intellectuals who thought the collapse of communism would herald new societies of freedom and fairness, and were horrified when their countries were taken over by management consultants.
Christianity
There is is the same troubled ambivalence about Christianity as in the previous novels, namely some characters convert and are genuinely devout, moved by the Christian idea of God etc. And yet, in the end, Christianity is always the whiteman’s religion and, as such, must be rejected, either by choice or force. Thus the revolutionary, Kihika, starts out as a fervent Christian, but is affected when his mentor, the Reverend Jackson Kigondu, is hacked to pieces by the Mau Mau (p.83) and abandons his faith in order to become a revolutionary.
The plot
In the last 60 or 70 pages a plot of sorts emerges from the web of flashbacks. It centres on the Uhuru celebrations planned for the Thursday. Gikonyo and colleagues from the Forest Fighter days want Mugo, hero from his days in the Rira detention camp, to make the big speech at the celebration. Mugo really, really doesn’t want to. The comrades send Gikonyo’s estranged wife, Mumbi, to talk him round. As usual, there is a lot of suppressed sexual tension in Mugo’s hut as she begs him.
But then Mugo snaps, becomes almost delirious, foaming, shouting, and reveals his terrible secret, the secret he has been harbouring – and Thiong’o has been signalling with louder and louder hints, for some time: it was he who betrayed the great hero of the resistance, Kihika. As he tells Mumbi, we enter his flashback, and are with him as he rests in his simple mud hut at the end of another tired, honest day’s toiling when he hears gunshots and screaming and, after some confusion, a quiet insistent knock at the hut door. When he opens it is Kihika who pushes in, sweating and stressed. He has just assassinated the hated District Officer, Tom Robson, by pretending to be an old man walking by the side of the road and when Robson’s jeep pulled over to bully him, Kihika straightened up, pulled out a gun and shot him point blank (although Robson is strong enough to drive himself to a hospital where he dies three hours later, p.182).
And here the psychology enters which reminded me of the moral plays of Jean-Paul Sartre. The more Kihika confides in Mugo who he is sure is an old schoolfriend and ally, the more Mugo comes to hate and loathe him. Three years into the Emergency, Mugo has managed to avoid being conscripted as a Homeguard or forced into the Forest, all he wants is to be left alone.
Above all, the more Kihika speaks, the more Mugo loathes him because Kihika has led a blessed life. To be specific, Kihika has a father and mother and sister and brother and wife and many friends, all of whom would miss and mourn him. His life has meaning, his heroic deeds and his death have meaning, too. And Mugo has nothing, nothing, and his life and death will go unmarked and unmourned.
Kihika who had a mother and a father, and a brother and a sister, could play with death. He had people who would mourn his end, who would name their children after him, so that Kihika’s name would never die from men’s lips. Kihika had everything; Mugo had nothing. (p.189)
So when the coast is clear, the hue and cry outside have died down, Kihika says he’d like to meet with Mugo and talk to him some more, explain the motives of the Movement, maybe recruit him, Mugo just nods in fear and agrees to a rendezvous on the edge of the forest.
Mugo spends a week in a delirium of anxiety and stress but, on the morning of the evening he’s due to meet Kihika, sees a poster offering a reward for turning him in, and so goes straight to District Officer Thompson’s office and says he knows where Kihika will be tonight.
The Uhuru games
Thiong’o gives a vivid description of the Uhuru celebrations at his village and a funny thing happens to the narrator’s voice: he suddenly starts talking about what ‘we’ saw on that day and ‘our’ celebrations, in a cosy confidential manner. Freedom has changed the narrator, who has become one of the people he describes.
The main event of the celebrations is an adult 12-mile race. As each of the leading male characters takes part in this, the narrative goes from one to the other, recapping their stories so far, telling us what is at stake for each of them, both in their country’s final independence, and on this particular day (when a lot of them are competing to impress the local beauty, Mumbi).
The race also echoes one which happened 15 years earlier, when the characters were playful young men, and raced through the woods to get to the famous station to see the train, the occasion when Karanja won the race but realised he’d left Gikonyo behind to make his decisive seduction of Mumbi. A week later Karanja proposed to Mumbi and she said no and he has been haunted by that refusal ever since.
Anyway, in the Uhuru race, Gikonyo trips over a tuft of grass and Karanja falls over him, leaving General R to storm to victory. Turns out Gikonyo has broken his arm so he’s taken to hospital.
This General R is also the main who steps up to the microphone after lunch and delivers an impassioned speech about freedom and independence. The whole crowd had been waiting to hear Mugo who, the narrator tells us, has acquired legendary magical powers with the local people.
Two things now come to a head. For 30 or 40 pages we have known that General R and Lieutenant Koina have both come to the conclusion that the man who betrayed Kihina all those years ago was Karanja. This conviction is mixed up with the way Karanja took the whiteman’s side, became a Homeguard and then a chief. The General and Lieutenant had made a point of luring Karanja to the celebrations because they wanted to get him up on stage, accuse him and get him to confess.
But all their plans are ruined when Mugo, in a shabby raincoat and sandals made out of lorry tyres, shambles onstage and, instead of making the Great Inspirational Speech everyone wants to hear, horrifies the crowd and destroys his reputation by saying is was him, Mugo, who betrayed the great hero Kihinga to his death. And then shambles off stage and through the crowd in a shocked silence.
So that is the Big Symbolic Moment of independence day – an admission of guilt, a confession by a man wracked by guilt for years, which destroys the entire population’s bubble myth delusions about him. Then it starts to rain. This almost feels as miserable and depressive as an English novel!
The aftermath
The last 30 or so pages follow the leading characters as they go their separate ways. Each one has a chapter named after them.
Only when General R began to speak from the stage did Karanja realise he’d been lured to a trap and would, if Mugo hadn’t turned up, in all probability been torn to death by a furious crowd. Now, the day after the celebrations, he packs up his stuff, clutches his bag and his guitar, and makes off in the rain, slowly, aimlessly, catches a bus to Githima, wanders down to the train station where they all used to hang out as young men with such high hopes.
Mumbi is returning from the hospital where she was visiting Gikonyo who studiously avoided her. She bumped into Karanja as the latter was getting on the bus she was getting off and, when he asked for her forgiveness and to see his son, she angrily told him to go and never see her again. Back at her hut she rants against Gikonyo’s rejection until her mother talks her down.
Mumbi and her mother-in-law go the next day to visit Gikonyo again, and tell him about Mugo’s Big Confession. To their surprise Gikonyo praises Mugo: can you imagine, he asks, the courage it took to say that, to reject his fame and blessed future and knowingly bring down on his own head the hatred of his people.
Mugo‘s feelings between his confession to Mumbi in his hut the night before Uhuru and then the big moment of his Great Confession. For a brief moment he felt cleansed and free. But then a great fear of the crowd came over him. He walks through the village as it starts to rain. He goes into the hut of an old woman who has irrationally entranced and obsessed him for reasons which, to be honest, I’ve forgotten and she is so senile she thinks he is someone else, maybe the dead Kihika.
Mugo leaves her hut and walks in the rain back to his where he sits on his bed staring blankly at the wall. Then General R and Lieutenant Koina arrive. They inform him that his trial by the Movement will be held tonight. it is unlikely he will escape the ultimate sentence.
Warui and Wambui An old man and an old woman, sitting in their hut looking out at the rain which has fallen every day since independence. Independence was not at all what they expected or hoped for:
‘It was not what I had waited for, these many years.’ (p.237)
The novel ends with Gikonyo in hospital. He remembers the seven detention camps he was kept in. He remembers that he eventually betrayed his oath (told the authorities he had taken the oath) in order to be freed early and allowed to return to Mumbi who, he was devastated to find, had slept with Karanja and had his child. So who is to say he is any better than Mugo who betrayed the hero Kihika or Karanja who didn’t bother joining the resistance but worked with the whiteman.
It’s as if, just a few days after independence, he considers them all equal in their fallibility.
But now, two things. He lies in bed and remembers a plan he conceived while labouring at one of the camps, to make a wooden sculpture with human figures, yes, he will recover his love of wood and carving. And when Mumbi doesn’t come to visit him one day he misses her. When she comes the next day he, for the first time, softens and wants to talk about her, about her son. But Mumbi has herself been toughened up by all these events. She says they can’t ignore what’s happened to both of them. they need to have a full heart-to-heart conversation, get everything out in the open, and then plan the lives they want to live.
Gikonyo is impressed by this new Mumbi, a strong independent woman. He agrees, she leaves, and he goes back to fantasising about his carving, the central figure of which will be a woman, a pregnant woman, symbol of the future.
Credit
A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was published by William Heinemann in 1967. All references are to the 2002 Penguin Classics paperback edition.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reviews
- Weep Not, Child (1964)
- The River Between (1965)
- A Grain of Wheat (1967)
Books & Boots 