A Grain of Wheat

-Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

• Maumau Emergency in A Grain of Wheat (1967) presented for the first time an African perspective on the Kenyan armed revolt against British Colonial rule during the 1950s.

• A GRAIN OF WHEAT marked Ngugi’s break with cultural nationalism and his embarking of fanonist Marxism.

• It is the allegorical story of one man’s mistaken heroism and a search for the betrayer of a Maumau leader.

• Ngugi wa Thiongo portrays the disruption of Kikuya society as a result of the invasive pressure of colonialism.

• He depicts the struggle against colonial rule that culminated in Kenya’s acquisition of independence 1963, and traces the betrayal, by a corrupt post colonial state, of the hopes which had been invested in self-government.

• Multi-narrative liens and multi-viewpoints unfolding at different times and spaces replace the linear temporal unfolding of the plot form a single viewpoint. The collective replaces the individual as the center of history.

• Ngugi’s fiction reflects his abiding concern for the poor of Kenya who have been displaced by white colonialists and by African opportunists who seized power after independence. His early novels, all explore the detrimental effects of colonialism and imperialism.

• Ngugi himself says :• I am a writer some have even called me a religious writer. I

write about my people. I am interested in their hidden lives and hates and how the very tension in their hearts affects their daily contact with other men. How in other words, the emotions stream of the man within interacts with the real type.

Characters:

• MUGO: The hero of the British concentration camps where he led a hunger strike and he also tried to stop a village guard from beating a pregnant woman to death.

• Mugo is a farmer, reared by his drunken aunt. He has always felt himself to be an outsider.

• Self-protective. He is especially envious of one of his peers, Kihika, who speaks in favour of independence. He also yearns to sacrifice himself for a larger purpose.

• The traitor of Kihika betraying him to the British in a selfish act to save himself.

• GIKONYO: An ambitious carpenter and business man who’s married to Mumbi. He confessed to taking the oath of the resistance while in a concentration camp, securing on early release only to find that his wife had had a child with his hated rival Karanja while he was away

• MUMBI: This character has a baby with another man while her husband is in a concentration camp. Mumbi, wife of Gikonyo and sister of Kihika. While Gikonyo was imprisoned she was ultimately forced to sleep with Karanja who had been appointed village chief by the colonial power through collaboration.

• KARANJA: He collaborated with the British and widely suspected to be the traitor who betrayed Kihika. This character chooses to join the government guards instead of the movement. He later has a baby with a married woman.

• KIHIKA: He is a resistance fighter who conquered a police station and killed the hated District Officer Robinson before being caught and hanged after being betrayed by Mugo.

• Waiyaki• Thomas Robson - District Officer• John Thompson - a warden• Warui, Wambui, General R.• Lieutenant Koina

Summary:

• British colonizers come to Kenya.• They strengthen their hold on the territory by building a great

railroad.• Waiyaki and other warrior leaders took up arms against this

imposition, but they were defeated. • Acceptance of new regime but he seeds of revolution spread

underground in “the Movement,” known to the British as Mau Mau.

• Gikonyo, Kihika, Mumbi forming a group of freedom fighters. Mugo disinterested in the ideal idea of freedom.

• Mugo thinks native Kenyans have no chance of successfully opposing the British, and he decides to do his job quietly and succeed in the new order of things.

• Karanja and Gikonyo are rivals to sought Mumbi’s hand for marriage. Mumbi marries Gikonyo.

• Karanja feels strongly the best policy is to accept the British as invincible.

• Kihika disappears into the forest with many other young men who arm themselves.

• Gikonyo, Mugo and ot her freedom fighters are arrested.• District Officer Thomas Robson is assassinated.• Mugo is taken to Rira camp, where John Thompson is the

warden. Though Mugo respects the British, in these circumstances he feels unjustly accused and refuses to cooperate.

• Mugo is released. Kihika meets him and tell the secret plan. Kihika reveals that he, disguised as an old man, killed Robson, the district officer.

• Kihika encourages him to lead an underground movement in the village and asks him to think about it and to meet him the next evening.

• Mugo betrays him and tells Thompson where Kihika will be the next night. The soldiers arrest Kihika and murder him.

• Gikonyo comes back to his village. Unwelcomed by his mother and Mumbi. Mumbi has given birth to a child- Karanja’s child.

• Karanja - risen from leader of the homeguards (who report to the British) to village chief.

• Kenya regains its independence (uhuru) on December 12, 1963. Thabai, like the other towns, celebrates with a large rally that all villagers attend.

• Warui, Wambui, General R., and Lieutenant Koina, who worked in the Movement for many years, are planning to use the occasion to unmask Kihika’s betrayer. All their suspicions fall upon Karanja, who is the most notorious collaborator in the village.

• Karanja resigns as chief and goes to work in the library.• Mugo, burdened with guilt, refuses and asks to be left alone. Mumbi

tries to change his mind, so he tells her the truth. She warns Karanja not to attend the rally, but he ignores her advice.

• Then the people dispatch a delegation that drags Mugo into their midst, where they await his triumphant speech. They call him “Kihika-born-again.” Instead, he stands before them all and reveals himself as the traitor.

• Mugo’s aunt died. Wambui, General R., and Lieutenant Koina visit him, confirm his guilt, and execute him.

• Karanja, who placed all his hopes on the British, recognizes how dangerous his situation is when Thompson leaves the country. Karanja flees, but he knows he has nowhere to go.

• Warui and Wambui, who were with the Movement for such a long time, now feel empty. Gikonyo and Mumbi, on the other hand, reconcile and look forward to the future.

THE ANTICOLONIAL STRUGGLE:

• The action of the novel focuses on the protagonists’ remembrances of the events of the ‘Mau Mau’ Revolt- the birth of a new Kenya

• The novel is set in Thabai, an imaginary gĩkũyũ village of Kenya’s White Highlands, in the days preceding and following 12 December 1963, the day Kenya got its Independence.

• Uhuru – Freedom• The definition of the actual meaning of Uhuru is an open political

and social question: the new Kenyan bourgeoisie sees it indeed as the possibility to replace the colonizer without changing the existing social, political and economical structure, whereas for gĩkũyũ peasants Uhuru means a profound break with the colonial past, a rebirth which has to bring about the restitution of the lands usurped by the white settlers and the eradication of poverty.

• The meaning of Uhuru – The central question• The former ‘Mau Mau’ guerilla General R. states in his

Independence speech “We get Uhuru today. But what’s the meaning of ‘Uhuru’ ? It is contained in the name of our Movement: Land and Freedom” (216-7)

• The Novel - a collective act of recalling and reflecting on the events leading to Uhuru, in order to understand what actual meaning it should/could have for Thabai peasants.

• Recalling and reflecting on the past that A Grain of Wheat constructs a narration of the nation

• National conscience• The construction of the nation in A Grain of Wheat represented

as a narration. • Refracted revolt : through the conscience of its heroes and

heroines: it is their narration which is represented, and it is through their narration that those historical events are relived

• “Imagined community” - rural community - peasants • The countryside as an environment where human beings can live in

harmony with nature, whereas the city is represented as a place of corruption and deceit ruled by that same elite that escapes its national duties and keeps at a distance rural masses.

• Relationship between land and people is a topos of nationalism • Heroism and sacrifice• This digression is central in the narration of the nation, as here the modern

history of Kenya is identified with the story of the resistance to colonization and of the development of the liberation movement.

• Nearly everybody was a member of the Party, but nobody could say with any accuracy when the Party was born: to most people, especially those in the younger generation, the Party had always been there, a rallying centre for action. It changed names, leaders came and went, but the Party remained, opening new visions, gathering greater and greater strength, till on the Eve of Uhuru, its influence stretched from one horizon touching the sea to the other resting on the great Lake. Its origins can, so the people say, be traced to the day the whiteman came to the country […]. (AGOW: 11, )

• The narration of resistance becomes the nation.• The voice of the storyteller with narrating the story of the

conquest of Kenya by the British: • the whiteman came to the country, clutching the book of God

in both hands, a magic witness that the whiteman was a messenger from the Lord. His tongue was coated with sugar; his humility was touching. For a time, people ignored the voice of the Gikuyu seer who once said: there shall come a people with clothes like the butterflies. They gave him, the stranger with a scalded skin, a place to erect a temporary shelter. Hut complete, the stranger put up another building yards away. This he called the House of God where people could go for worship and sacrifice. (AGOW: 11)

• The arrival of white missionaries is seen with curiosity by the gĩkũyũ: The whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the Agikuyu. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had been peeled off. The hot water must have gone into his head. (AGOW: 11)

• Using Christianism as a knife to tear apart their society : The few who were converted, started speaking a faith foreign to the ways of the land. They trod on sacred places to show that no harm could reach those protected by the hand of the Lord. Soon people saw the whiteman had imperceptibly acquired more land to meet the growing needs of his position. He had already pulled down the grass-thatched hut and erected a more permanent building. Elders of the land protested. They looked beyond the laughing face of the whiteman and suddenly saw a long line of other red strangers who carried, not the Bible, but the sword. (AGOW: 12)

• National community• The first of these leaders is Waiyaki, whose death, as the grain

of wheat of the title, is a source of new life for the resistance: • Then nobody noticed it; but looking back we can see that

Waiyaki’s blood contained within it a seed, a grain, which gave birth to a political party whose main strength thereafter sprang from a bond with the soil. (AGOW: 13)

• The Party was temporarily dismayed. But it was at this time that the man with the flaming eyes came to the scene. Then few knew him. But later, of course, he was to be known to the world over as the Burning Spear. (AGOW: 14)

• Mugo, reputed by all to be the heir of Kihika: A Grain if Wheat, therefore, both constructs and demystifies the narration of the nation .

• Kenyan independence is textured by post-independence disappointment

• Mau Mau a male nationalist movement – Women’s contribution is excluded.

• Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. John

• What happens at the end of the growing season? The harvest comes, but it wouldn’t be possible if not for the grain. It did its part by dying to produce a crop. The field is re-plowed, reseeded with grain, and the growing process starts again. Just as the field must be replanted season after season, our process must repeat itself over and over again until we enter heaven.

Of Violence:

• Decolonization: meaning• Decolonization is a violent event• Decolonization is quite simply the substitution

of one "species" of mankind by another.• The substitution is unconditional, absolute,

total, and seamless.• Decolonization, which sets out to change the

order of the world, is clearly the agenda for total disorder

• Decolonization, we know, is a historical process: In other words, it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement.

• Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation.

• Their first confrontation was colored by violence and their cohabitation -or rather the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer. The colonist and the colonized are old acquaintances. And consequently, the colonist is right when he says he "knows" them. It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject. The colonist derives his validity, i e., his wealth, from the colonial system.

• Decolonization never goes unnoticed. It is truly the creation of a new man.

• It can be called a process of liberation.• Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to

thoroughly' challenge the colonial situation.• The decolonized society is reorganized• The colonized world is a world divided in two.• The colonized sector is a famished sector, hungry.• Dreams of possession. Every type of possession• Violence, exploitation

• Private/public responsibility of the natives• Wickedness of the oppressors but with the weakness of the

indigenous people • Theme of betrayal : • Individual’s betrayals are representative of the vast betrayal of

the whole society by its power elite • Novel is based on Heathen Africans and Heartless Europeans• Decolonization- neocolonialism• Ngugi Wa Thiong’o sets his novel in post colonial world where all

participants are complicit with the forces of colonialism. • Afrocentric v/s Eurocentric• Decolonization unifies this world by a radical decision to remove

its heterogeneity, by unifying it on the grounds of nation and sometimes race.

• Decolonization- the result of the narcissistic monologue of the colonists bourgeoisies

Thank You