A Grain of Wheat (5 page)

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’. Ng
g
’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.

A Grain of Wheat
has its own Kurtz. DO John Thompson is an idealist of Empire, who starts off with a vision of ‘one British nation, embracing peoples of all colours and creeds, based on the just proposition that all men are created equal’. He starts working on a book to be called
Prospero in Africa
, which will put forward an argument for this conception of human progress. Like Kurtz, Thompson is mocked for the ‘artful dodges’ language allows him. In an echo of Kurtz’s ‘Eliminate all the brutes’ scrawled over his treatise on progress, Thompson writes ‘Eliminate the vermin’ in his
Prospero
notes. From idealist he becomes a torturer, forcing confessions out of the detainees by any means possible, because that is the true meaning of colonial rule. Like Kurtz, Thompson comes to learn that violence and coercion are his unavoidable means. When eleven detainees die under torture at Rira camp under his command, Thompson, the rising man in the administration, is quickly transferred out of sight. Thompson, then, is offered as not only a critique of colonial methods but of the whole narrative of imperialism, which prefers the grandiose lying language of progress to ‘the horror’ of its actual practice.

Ultimately Thompson is denied humanity in the novel, because I don’t think Ng
g
is interested in him and his motivations, but in using him to demonstrate an argument. Not only is he an imperial tool, and the means of offering a critique of colonial method, but he is also shown as incapable of attachment or warmth. Imperialism’s self-deception and cruelty has turned him into an unfeeling brute. His story ends with his imminent departure on the eve of independence, demoralized and disillusioned, the ambitions of a lifetime transformed into inadequacy.

Ng
g
is, however, deeply interested in Mugo, and how to resolve the consequences of his debilitating aloneness. Mumbi’s confession of her adultery touches him in an unexpected way. She is beautiful, she is young, and her vitality and courage in speaking about what had
happened to her shames Mugo. It reminds him of the futility of his life: ‘he was at the bottom of the pool, but up there, above the pool, ran the earth; life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful’. And so begins the process of Mugo’s reintegration into his community, as first he confesses to Mumbi that he betrayed Kihika, her brother, and then confesses to the whole of Thabai the part he had played in the execution of their hero.

A Grain of Wheat
is a political narrative. It is political in its desire to show the development of an awarenes of a history of oppression. When the rebellion comes, the novel argues, it is the culmination of a long series of more restrained acts of defiance. The individual dramas become more prominent as the narrative progresses, but the rebellion is its point of reference. Mugo, Gikonyo, and Karanja betray the cause of freedom in their different ways, but they also betray themselves, as does Mumbi. Through the guilt they suffer, they arrive at a point of understanding and self-knowledge, and so in the end the novel offers a possibility of regeneration. In this sense,
A Grain of Wheat
is also a moral narrative.

Ng
g
has said of the 1967 version of
A Grain of Wheat
that his ‘peasant and worker characters’ had the ‘vacillating mentality of the petite bourgeoisie’. A lot had happened to the author between 1967 and 1987. He changed his name from James Ng
g
to the more correct G
kùy
form of Ng
g
wa Thiong’o (Thiong’o was his father’s name). The change was not just a desire to be more culturally correct, it was also a rejection of that ‘missionary’ construction ‘James’. The legal change of name took place in November 1977, but by then Ng
g
had already publicly and repeatedly repudiated the influence of Christian missionary teaching. By the mid-70s he was writing in G
kùy
as Ng
g