A Grain of Wheat (6 page)

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 Ng
g
’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 G
kùy
and was comprehensible to ordinary citizens, and was therefore ‘subversive’, that led to his detention. Only a few months before his detention, Ng
g
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 G
kùy
, 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 Ng
g
had sounded in
A Grain of Wheat
had been proved devastatingly correct, and not only in his personal case. As Ng
g
’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. Ng
g
’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.