Customer Reviews

A Grain of Wheat (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I loved this book. The story itself is compelling, detailing both African and European characters' perspectives on Kenyans' struggle for independence from Britain. Just for the story alone, the book is an intriguing page-turner that completely satisfies. But beyond that, it has a powerful and inspirational moral message that I have taken with me and hope never to forget.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

This book was very interesting.Despite Ngugui's flashback format A Grain Of Wheat is certainly an attention keeper. Kenya at the brink of Uhuru (freedom) from the British, as experienced through the eyes of some interesting and greatly entertaining characters. Amazingly in the midst of this historical event the story is filled with love and betrayal.

Centered on the pre-Independence Kenyan struggle between the Mau Mau liberation fighters and the British colonial government, A GRAIN OF WHEAT gives a portrayal of the struggle that few writers have ever depicted. One gets a good picture of the Mau Mau fighters, the attitude of the Colonialists, their the detention camps, the nature of the war, the bloody encounters, the ruthlessness of some of the soldiers of Colonial army and the direction to independence for the African continent. Betrayal, hopes and dreams, horrors and loss are all parts of the story.

A particularly amazing thing about this story is that like in Triple Agent Double Cross, we learn that the tragic nature of this story reveals the futility of conflicts which in the end produces no winners, because humanity loses when the majority of the people emerge from a war scarred for life, having lost the innocence that epitomizes the freedom of the soul.

The novel treats the problems of the independence struggle in Kenya against British rule during the fifties. The central figure is Mugo, a quiet, reserved man who gets caught up in the turbulance of the revolution. Mugo's betrayal of Kihika is the central moral dilemma of the story. Should he go about his business or should he help the revolution? The answer to this question costs him his life.The characterizations are vivid and easily keep the reader's attention.The attitudes of the British are portrayed in the colonial administrator John Thompson. A fascinating book which requires the reader to reflect on the tangled issues of justice and freedom

Ngugi Wa Thiongo who is one of the best African writers describes the situation in his native Kenya at the threshold of independence.The story is told through the lives of 5 main characters who came of age then Kahiki the revolutionary,Gikonyo and Mumbi who provide a compelling love story in the midst of the chaos.There is also Karanja and Mugo.The story is told from an African perspective,it also deals with the Emergency period during the Mau Mau revolution of Jomo Kenyetta.It describes also the issues faced by the British as they withdraw from Kenya.This novel takes numerous twists and turns but gives a clear picture of the situation then.I wholeheartedly reccomend it.

Returning to a masterpiece to re-examine its brilliance is always a risky business. There is always the threat of disappointment, a gradual realisation that an earlier decade's evaluation might now reveal merely one's own naiveté, the contemporary - and no doubt illusory sophistication of falsely-assumed wisdom. Perhaps it might all be just appear a little mundane from new detachment.

So it was with some trepidation that I again began A Grain Of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. I first read it in the 1970s when I lived in Kenya. In those days, the author still answered to `James' and the novel was on the Literature in English syllabus for the East African Certificate of Education. Our students came from a poor area, weren't the most academic and studied in their third language. I wonder daily at their commitment, hard work and achievement. A Grain Of Wheat is not an easy book. Over-simplification of a complex world was not amongst its author's intentions.

I read it again a couple of times a decade later. Then I found layers that as a relative youngster I had missed. This was no longer just a work of historical fiction offering illustration and interpretation of Kenya's struggle for independence. It was now also a committed political novel, never a polemic, however, since it was via the actions of its characters that the images and relationships were defined. And this time, nearly twenty more years on, I find the book's stature has grown again. Not only has it passed the test of time, its themes have, if anything, become even more pertinent. And this time, confirming the book's now unquestioned status as a masterpiece I find yet another strand of meaning laced into its construction. It is not merely a masterpiece. Indeed, it ought to required reading for British students, just in case there might be anyone left with any doubts about the reality of colonialism.

A Grain Of Wheat is a novel. It is set in Kikuyuni, ridges rising north from the Nairobi area towards Mount Kenya, Kirinyaga, Girinyaga. The setting is real. Its story is placed firmly within a particular place and time. We are in the last years of Kenya's struggle for independence, the goal of Uhuru. But Ngugi describes and illustrates this history via the lives and experiences of characters who inhabit a small town, Thabai. History tells us blankly the sum of their efforts, the eventual victory against the British, the lowering of the Union Jack in December 1963 and its replacement by Kenya's black red and green. But via fiction, Ngugi gives us far more than this. We feel history develop via the experience, the detail, the suffering, the commitment, the inadequacies and the treachery of people who lived through the time.

Thabai has a small town's usual share of freedom fighters, collaborators, colonial officers, whites of both sexes, beautiful girls, ambitious men. There are Christians, traditionalists, traitors, old codgers and plenty of others who claim to be human. Acts perpetrated by the colonial administrators and their lackeys are sometimes nothing less than raw sadism. They seem to be motivated by a keen, though unjustifiable sense of superiority, an apparent mission to Anglicise an unwilling world. Ngugi could have concentrated on these acts, vilified their perpetrators and thus created simple bad-boys to serve his plot. But A Grain Of Wheat is much more subtle than that. In many ways, these people are victims as well. Their only advantage is that, for a while, they have power on their side. And it is the struggle of motivated people that must wrest this advantage from them.

A Grain Of Wheat presents characters who suffer for what they do, struggle to achieve what they want to become. They want to remain faithful to their convictions, but in a time of strife motives are often provided by the most pressing influence, and often that does not have right on its side.

What comes across this time from reading A Grain Of Wheat is the book's intense Christian allegory. Joseph and Mary here are Gikonyo and Mumbi, perhaps an original coupling of legend. He is even a carpenter and Mumbi's child actually belongs to someone else, Karanja. He is a man tainted with the sins of a previous age and surely he has passed these on to his child, who is born with their originality. And as far as Gikonyo is concerned, Mumbi's child is a virgin birth.

The child, of course, is the new Kenya, born with all the injustices and sins of the past, but charged with its own independence, its potential to develop into its unknown future. The fact that it will be offered in sacrifice on the cross of capitalism is a reality lived in Ngugi's later work.

A Grain Of Wheat not only bears re-reading. It is a powerful enough vision to sustain re-interpretation, though of course only at the level of detail. The book's message was always clear, though always subtly drawn. It is a great, great achievement.