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 He becomes withdrawn, isolated, but his fellow villagers interpret his silence as a kind of stoicism and modesty that turns him into a kind of folk hero.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!

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

If I know a song of Africa,--I thought,--of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me?  Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?

Early in 2013 I read a couple of books about Africa--subconsciously, I think, because it was freezing outside and my mind wanted to wander somewhere warm: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease.  In December, with the temperature dropping once again, I was compelled to finally pick up the copy of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa that's been sitting on my shelf for ages.

Dinesen was really Karen Blixen, a wealthy Danish woman who owned and lived on a coffee plantation in Kenya, near a tribe named the Kikuyu.  (Who knows why she needed the pseudonym--she calls herself "Karen" throughout.)  Out of Africa is her story of her life on the plantation, which, though cut short by financial difficulties which forced her to move back to Denmark, she clearly considered her spiritual home.  In the book, she describes how her position as a large white landowner makes her something of the center of Kikuyu life.  Clearly she cares deeply about the surrounding tribes, to whom she provides amateur medical care and adjudication of tribal disputes.  And yet, at times she can be startlingly dismissive and obtuse in a way that offends modern sensibilities:

I was much interested in cookery myself, and on my first trip back to Europe, I took lessons from a French Chef at a celebrated restaurant, because I thought it would be an amusing thing to be able to make good food in Africa.

Or here, where comparing them to dogs isn't the worst thing about this paragraph:

The Deerhounds, from having lived for innumerable generations with man, have acquired a human sense of humour, and can laugh.  Their idea of a joke is that of the Natives, who are amused by things going wrong.  Perhaps you cannot get above this class of humour, until you also get an art, and an established Church.

So those are the grains of salt with which one must take Out of Africa.  But despite them, it is a tremendously beautifully written book, maybe one of the most beautifully written I have ever read.  Blixen, not a native English speaker, manages to capture (what I imagine is) the majestic grandeur of the African landscape as only one who truly loves it must be able to.  I particularly like this passage, in which Blixen's Kikuyu servant Kamante wakes her up to witness a grass fire on the nearby hill:

"Msabu," he said again, "I think that you had better get up.  I think that God is coming."  When I heard this, I did get up, and asked him why he thought so.  He gravely led me into the dining-room which looked West, towards the hills.  From the door-windows I now saw a strange phenomenon.  There was a big grass-fire going on, out in the hills, and the grass was burning all the way from the hill-top to the plain; when seen from the house it was a nearly vertical line.  It did indeed look as if some gigantic figure was moving and coming towards us.  I stood for some time and looked at it, with Kamante watching by my side, then I began to explain the thing to him.  I meant to quiet him, for I thought that he had been terribly frightened.  But the explanation did not seem to make much impression on him one way or the other; he clearly took his mission to have been fulfilled when he had called me.  "Well yes," he said, "it may be so.  But I thought you had better get up in case it was God coming."

I also want to share with you, apropos of nothing else, a couple turns of phrase that really stayed with me, if just for future preservation.  Once, Blixen describes the task of charcoal-burning, describing the charcoal as "[s]mooth as silk, matter defecated, freed of weight and made imperishable, the dark experienced little mummy of the wood."

That's one for the metaphor pantheon: The dark experienced little mummy of the wood.  And then there's this statement, in a sketch entitled "Of Pride," which affected me greatly: "Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when he made us."  Of course, that really terrific sentence is preceded by a brief discourse on the difference between the pride of the "barbarian" and the "civilized being"--not a direct reference, I think, to the Kikuyu, but certainly resounding with the same conflicted attitude.

 The final chapters of the book, in which she is forced to leave Africa and cut ties with the tribe and her house staff are surprisingly bittersweet, and made moreso by the plane-crash death of her lover, British aviator Denys Finch-Hatton, who is buried in the Kenyan hills that Blixen regrets she will not be buried in herself:

Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of his life; it is an optical illusion that it seemed to wind and swerve,--the surroundings swerved.  The bow-string was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills.

Blixen asks in the passage I quoted at the top: Does Africa know a song of me?  In fact, there is still a suburb of Nairobi named "Karen" today, a fact of which she was quite proud.  Though I found her attitude toward the Kikuyu to be a bit suspect at times, Out of Africa is ultimately a very moving paean to a place and a people.