A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Today Karanja was determined to find out the truth, an inkling of which he had once tasted, when, as a chief, he had been told that Gikonyo and the other detainees were coming back to the village. Now he would go to Thompson and say: Sir, are you really abandoning Kenya? Not that between Karanja and John Thompson there had developed a relationship that might be called personal; nor was the consciousness of dependency mutual; only that to Karanja, John Thompson had always assumed the symbol of whiteman's power, unmovable like a rock, a power that had built the bomb and transformed a country from wild bush and forests into modern cities, with tarmac highways, motor vehicles and two or four legs, railways, trains, aeroplanes and buildings whose towers scraped the sky--and all this in the space of sixty years. Had he himself not experienced that power, which also ruled over the souls of men, when he, as a Chief, could make circumcised men cower before him, women scream by a lift of the finger?

Ngugi wa Thiongo's novel A Grain of Wheat takes place during the days leading up to Kenya's independence from Britain: Uhuru Day. It's a time of great anticipation, as people wonder how the country will change as it returns to Kenyan hands, but also a moment of looking backward. For some, this means commemorating the great deeds of the Mau Mau and forest fighters whose successful rebellion brought the nation to the brink of independence; for others it means reckoning with vast stores of guilt over what the heat of the "Emergency" forced them to do. A Grain of Wheat follows three men who make this reckoning: Mugo, Karanja, and Gikonyo.

Mugo is a loner who has no family, no connections. His experience in the British-run detainee camps has left him broken, but unlike others, he had no wife or mother to return to when the camps emptied. He becomes withdrawn, isolated, but his fellow villagers interpret his silence as a kind of stoicism and modesty that turns him into a kind of folk hero. They urge him to make a speech at the Uhuru Day festival, but they don't know his deep secret: he was the one who betrayed the freedom fighter Kihika, alerting the British authorities to his whereabouts and leading to his murder.

Suspicion of this act has fallen instead on Karanja, a childhood friend of Kihika and Gikonyo who took a radically different path during the Emergency, allying himself to the white power structure, assuming it to be an irreversible feature of the Kenyan body politic. Karanja, who once was installed as chief and now functions as a kind of errand boy for the local British-run research station, is terrified by Kenya's upcoming independence. He watches without recourse as the "whiteman's" power dwindles in Kenya, and his white bosses make plans to leave the country, leaving him behind to face the consequences of his actions.

The third man, Gikonyo, is another former detainee, who throughout the six years of his detention and torture dreamed of nothing more than returning to his beautiful wife, Mumbi. When he returns, however, he finds that Mumbi has had a child with Karanja, his old rival. Gikonyo's anger consumes him; the life he had hoped to resume has vanished--what to him, one wonders, is a day of independence? He spills his cares to the silent Mugo, as Mumbi does, and many others. Against his will Mugo bears all the suffering of the village; in this way he fits into an archetype of the unwilling Christ figure--the role of Christianity in advancing, or rebuking, the Kenyan revolution is an important theme here--that reminded me of characters as different as McCullers' John Singer, Greene's Whiskey Priest, and Lagerkvist's Barabbas. But the role of a Christ figure cannot be complete until a great sacrifice is made; Thiong'o makes us wonder, will Mugo confess what he has done or let Karanja take the fall?

A Grain of Wheat was an interesting book to read alongside Imbolo Mbue's more recent How Beautiful We Were, a book I didn't like much at all. The time and setting are very different--we're talking about the other side of Africa here, so let's not press the connection too much--but both are preoccupied with questions about the ethical and practical response to the ravages of colonialism. The specificity and detail of A Grain of Wheat felt revitalizing after the veiled Cameroon-but-not-Cameroon of How Beautiful We Were. But perhaps more importantly, Mbue's novel has what struck me as a jejune belief in the power of personal charisma to bring change; a belief that is, in a way, satirized by the lionization of the tortured Mugo. Ngugi's novel is a compelling picture, rather, of what happens to individual men and women caught in the web of history: Karanja and Mugo make choices that strike us as pusillanimous, but who can say they would choose any differently? Ultimately, A Grain of Wheat is a novel about the limitations of revolutionary success: whatever happens on Uhuru Day, the scars of colonialism cannot easily be erased.

With the addition of Kenya, I have now read a book from 51 countries!