A Grain of Wheat (4 page)

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 G
kùy
people and their transformation into labourers and squatters on the land they had thought their own. Ng
g
’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
. Ng
g
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. Ng
g
’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 G
kùy
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.