A Grain of Wheat (African Writers Series)

Each of the major characters commits an act of betrayal to attain a greater goal, whether it's the British officer who wants to create a happy, harmonious colony and finds himself torturing and murdering in pursuit of this vision, or whether it's the Kenyan rebel who betrays his comrade to save his own life, feeling that he must survive to perform important tasks for his people.

Each one chooses less-than-perfect means to an imagined end. But what we and they learn, is that the "end" never comes, and we are left living day-to-day in the rubble of our "means." The betrayals that crisscross the novel scar all the characters with heavy losses, representative of the losses and betrayals that scarred Kenya as it stood on the threshhold of independence, divided between those who had collaborated with British occupation and those who had rebelled. And yet the final note is one of hope, that somehow reconciliation and transcendence of past injuries can be attempted.

I took to heart two messages: that those of us who struggle for justice in today's world must never betray our own principles in pursuit of some supposed higher good--because we too will be left only with our betrayals and no higher good in sight. And, that even after betrayals and years of conflict, there is still a spark of hope for renewal.


Uhuru at last?   December 9, 1999
SUN (Taiwan)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

A brand new perspective upon the emancipation of so-called Third World Country! On the verge of Kenya independence, both colonizers and colonied were bewildered and confused. White colonial agents lost faith on their lifelong commitment, and Kenyans were cast into a precarious future which they had been longed for and at the same time, worried about. National passion became a nostalgia censorship, and those who did not contribute to this "exploit" or those who chose to save his own skin or family and betray his to the movement bore a brand "Cain" on their forehead forever. A vivid description of the struggle between nation and individual.


An even-handed, complex, masterful study of a revolution   June 17, 2001
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

A Grain of Wheat is a remarkable book, which manages to intertwine personal tragedies and joys with national ideologies and events quite effortlessly. The novel is partly the story of a nation - of Kenya's (ultlimately successful) struggle to rid itself of British domination - but mainly the book deals with the toll that this long fight has taken on individuals; the impact, both for good and evil, that it has made on individual lives.

Another reviewer mentioned that the book's fluid chronology - which keeps flashing back and forth between present and past - made the book difficult to follow. For me, this style of writing only enhanced the book's strengths - throughout the course of the story you are allowed to see the same events through many different sets of eyes (and it is amazing how different the same thing can look to a British Army officer and a Kenyan freedom fighter.)

To sum up - A Grain of Wheat works very well, both as an exploration of Kenya's painful history, and as a realistic look at the toll that any war will take on the people who fight in, and live through, it. Definitely reccomended!


Exodus from Africa   April 17, 2002
Robert E. Olsen (McLean, VA United States)
13 out of 16 found this review helpful

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, born into Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Gikuyu, in 1938, was educated at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and the University of Leeds. His "Weep Not, Child," published in 1964, was the first novel in English to be published by an East African author. "A Grain of Wheat," Ngugi's postcolonial novel of political, social, sexual, and religious struggle, death, and rebirth, was published in 1967, when he had begun working, first, as a reporter and, then, as a university professor. In December 1977, shortly before the death of Kenya's first president Jomo Kenyatta, vice president Daniel arap Moi, who would later rule Kenya with an iron hand, had Ngugi detained for a year as a political prisoner for what Moi regarded as the unsettling political message of Ngugi's popular play "I Will Marry When I Want". With the play, Ngugi turned his attention from Kenya's emergence from British occupation to the political corruption of independent Kenya. After his release from prison, Ngugi was unable to resume his university post. He left Kenya in 1982 and now publishes exclusively in his native Gikuyu, because he views the structure of the English language as containing a European, and hence foreign, vision of Africa. Ngugi is regarded as one of the leading African authors of the last half-century.

"A Grain of Wheat" is not realism in the Western style. It does not set out to tell one story from one character's point of view. It does not rely on finely drawn character development, interior monologue, dilemmas established early and worked out late, and the sort of rational choices which characters exercising free will make in Western fiction. Rather, it is fiction in a Marxist-Homeric style with Biblical overtones, told from many points of view, and crossed, perhaps, with an African oral tradition. In "A Grain of Wheat" birth is destiny, struggle is inevitable, the Lord disposes, and until the very end of the novel destiny is therefore imposed on each of the imperfect village characters, rolling over them, grinding them into an "earth smoked grey like freshly dropped cow-dung", reminding them of dogs tearing the limbs off a rabbit and running "with blood-covered pieces" in different directions. (215, 229)

Kenya, Kenya's history since the late 19th century, and Kenya's emancipation from the Brits during the 1950s is the story of "A Grain of Wheat," and that story is told through the complex interactions of Kihika, a resistance leader; his beautiful, universally desired sister Mumbi; their friend Mugo, who wrestles with his conscience even as he is revered as a hero of the resistance; Kajanga, a quisling who becomes chief of their village and lusts after Mumbi; and Gikonyo, the husband of Mumbi, who, after seven years as a political prisoner, rejects his wife when her single flaw is exposed. Primal emotions fluctuate and move them. The changes of point of view are abrupt. The effect, kaleidoscopically, is to create a picture of an entire society in turmoil.

It may be difficult for Westerners to bond with the central characters. Their actions may sometimes seem strange. There is no program to identify them and no roadmap for the gradually developing plot. But it is a wonderful tapestry Ngugi creates, the politics are provocative, and the unvarnished images of Africa roll off Ngugi's pen like the waves of a wine-dark sea. This book is well worth reading.


A brutal tragic analysis life in confict   February 10, 1999
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

This is a tragic situation, where there can be no winners. It does not have heroes, heroes do not exist in tragedies- rather it has real people with real feelings, who due to the nature of the system, and their beliefs brought about by years of conditioning must come face to face with brutal realities. The book painfully traces the genesis of the conflict, and as demónstrated with Mugo, everybody is affected, you cannot be a bystander, niether are the people neccessariry evil, but rather are as a result of complex situations that comfronts them. Though, we do not want to believe, its with the quilt admition by Mugo, that makes him great, and which inevitably starts a healing painful process that must be addressed.