A Grain of Wheat

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  John Thompson had worked as a District Officer in many parts of Kenya. He worked hard and his ability to deal swiftly and effectively with Africans was widely recognized. A brilliant career in the colonial administration lay before him. During the Emergency he was seconded to detention camps, to rehabilitate Mau Mau adherents to a normal life as British subjects. At Rira, the tragedy of his life occurred. A hunger strike, a little beating and eleven detainees died. The fact leaked out. Because he was the officer in charge, Thompson’s name was bandied about in the House of Commons and in the world press. He had suddenly become famous. A commission of inquiry was set up. He was whisked off to Githima, an exile from the public administration he loved. But the wound had never healed. Touch it, and it brought back all the humiliation he had felt at the time.

  As he now stared at their eyes, he saw in them a new and terrible significance: would he have had to endure another inquiry, this time under a black government, had anything happened to Karanja?

  He could not work and yet the afternoon passed quickly. Maybe he would come back tomorrow to finish the job. He shut the window and again relived the scene and his fear. At the end of the corridor, Karanja waited for him. What did he want? What did he want?

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I took the letter.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I want to thank you.’

  Thompson remembered his lie; he stared at the boy and passed on. On second thoughts, he called Karanja.

  ‘About that dog—’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, eh? I’ll deal with the matter.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  And Thompson went away raging within. Did he have to pacify Karanja? What have we come to!

  He felt tears at the edges of his eyes. Blindly he rushed to the car.

  Five

  John Thompson wanted to tell Margery about Dr Lynd; he was struck by the coincidence that she had told him about the death of her dog when he was thinking about the death of another dog; twice he had opened his mouth and only ended by complaining about the day’s heat. He tried to fix his mind on to the future: the farewell party tomorrow; their flight home the day after; their new life in Britain. But his mind only dwelt on the past and the trivial side of it: like the dog incident earlier in the day.

  ‘What were you doing in Nairobi?’ she asked him, sensing his unease amidst her own thoughts.

  ‘I didn’t actually manage to get there,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Too much work in the office,’ he murmured, picking up an old issue of Punch as if to protect himself from her.

  ‘I hope everything is all right now – I mean, in the office.’

  ‘Yes. I was checking a few files. There are a few more to do tomorrow and a few urgent letters to answer. All set for the new man.’

  ‘Have they found anybody?’

  ‘Yes – no – I don’t think so.’

  ‘Maybe an African? I suppose they’re Africanizing everywhere now?’

  He put down the paper on his knees. He became stiff, as if a pin had pricked his buttocks. His earlier vision in the day came back now even more vividly: broken jars and test-tubes on laboratory floors now included his office filled with unanswered letters, with dust and paper on the floor. He felt jealous of his office, of the order he had created; felt hatred for the man who would follow him, and wished he could at least protect his chair from any abuse. Thompson felt that silent pain, almost agony that people feel at the knowledge that they might not be indispensable after all; that the school they have left, the university, the club, would accept new men, however reckless and irresponsible, without regrets, as if they had never existed, as if they had never made their mark on the things they used to call their own. And for no apparent reason, Thompson felt this anger turn against his wife; he wanted to ask her a question, throw a challenge at her, to find if she too was against him. What he really wanted to know was this: If he had died yesterday, at Rira, at Kinenie Forest, if he died today, would she turn to another man? Suddenly he put the Punch down and walked to the next room without answering the question Margery had asked him. A few minutes later, he came back with a file consisting of notebooks and papers and started going through them.

  Margery rose to clear the cups and saucers. She lingered over his cup, looked at him, and remembered the days before they joined the colonial service when he used to open his heart to her, carrying her high on the waves of his moral vision and optimism. That was after John returned to Oxford from the African campaigns in the Second World War. Softened by this memory, she now saw the strain on his face and for a second wanted to smooth it away, gently, for ever. And then impatient thoughts and memories killed the desire: when, precisely, had they started moving along their separate ways? She hurriedly collected the remaining things and went to the kitchen. Perhaps it was the work that had taken him away. For as he became engrossed in the daily business of administration with his eyes on promotion, his vision seemed to fade and she had found it increasingly difficult to penetrate his inscrutable face till it became eventually painful to summon even a minimum of emotion and tenderness for him. During the Rira disaster she made excessive efforts to give him support and comfort. But where was the real sympathy she, as a wife, ought to have felt? She could not share in his agony. Instead, she had felt the shame of a child who sees a grown-up suddenly caught in the act of chasing a butterfly over fields and roads.

  Margery never allowed one thought to dominate her for long. Now in the kitchen, washing dishes, she found herself reviving the warmth she had felt earlier in the day. How ridiculous, she told herself, recalling every detail of that brief encounter with Karanja. Perhaps it is because I am leaving Africa. No, maybe I’m growing old. They say the African heat does these things to women. She quietly laughed but abruptly stopped: was she really using this kitchen for the last time? Would she never, never see Githima again? Would her flowers mean anything to whoever would take her place in this house? Every corner of the house, the chairs, the table, the beds and even the walls, held a memory for her; in her wanderings from district to district all over Kenya, no other house, no other place was so intimately bound up with her. No other place had given her such a sense of release, of freedom, of power.

  It was at Githima that she had met Dr Van Dyke and something in her, something she never knew she had, had been violently awakened. She felt weak, exhilaratingly weak, before the man. And yet how disgusting were his drinking habits, his excessively loud laughter. He was certainly a contrast to John, who was always correctly dressed, knew how to behave, and never allowed himself to get drunk. None the less, Margery was suffused with new energy; the secrecy, the daring, the anarchic joy of breaking a law, sharpened the excitement of their affair. The first night had been specially wonderful, a moment pregnant with fear and curiosity and wonder. She knew something would happen the second her husband excused himself from the dance. When Van had offered to take her home, she felt so grateful she could have squeezed his arm. In the car, parked in one of the many planted forests at Githima, she closed her eyes and his lips touched hers.

  ‘Let’s go to the back seat,’ he breathed into her ear.

  ‘Not today, Van, not today,’ she whispered weakly.

  ‘Today. Now,’ he said almost pulling her clothes off as he climbed into the back seat.

  She followed him obediently, hardly able to speak.

  ‘Please let us be careful.’ She found her voice, as she felt him.

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Be gentle—’ she cried, and her words were interrupted by the thrust of his body; she clung to him, fearing the car and the whole world would give way beneath her. The silence in the dark, the incessant buzz in the forest, added to the moment. After it, she wept, wondering how she could ever face her husband.

  ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘My husband.’

  ‘Hell!’ He swore under his breath.

  Theirs was never a
happy affair. She became increasingly jealous. At parties she hated seeing him talk or laugh with other women. But she could not make a scene in public, or openly claim him. So their quarrels and fights occurred in private, in the precious moments, because stolen, when they ought to have been happy. One day, John Thompson went to a conference in Uganda. Dr Van Dyke came into the house and for the first time he talked to her about his work. He spoke soberly, without swearing, a streak of pride in his work.

  ‘People don’t realize what we are faced with in Kenya. You see, in a country like Britain, which is relatively flat, it is easy to determine the movements of, let’s say, a low pressure area over the country. But in Kenya, where the high altitude tends to effect sudden and unexpected changes in the pressure areas, it is much more difficult to predict the weather.’

  ‘But you must have compensations?’

  ‘Oh, yes. With so many factors to be considered, it makes meteorology in places like Kenya or South Africa much more exciting …’

  She entered a new world in which she saw there was more to what she had learnt at school about rain-gauges, wind-vanes, isobars, troughs of low pressure, air-masses. She knew he was born and educated in South Africa, that he had worked in Southern Rhodesia, that in each place he had felt himself haunted by things he could not understand; he kept on running away, so to speak, until he came to Githima, where only drink, so she had concluded, kept him reconciled to himself. But this was the first time he had spoken about his work. Gradually the talk drifted to their lives and she started probing into his affairs with other women. ‘Hell! I am not your husband!’ he shouted at her, and walked out in the middle of the night, leaving her on the sofa, lonely, miserable. ‘I never want to see him again,’ she told herself. The following day she sent a note to him, asking him to come back to her quickly.

  Often she was in a mood of ruthless self-analysis. She would take a fresh look at her relationship with her husband. It could not be denied that John had a hold over her, that it was to him that she really belonged. Was this the sole meaning of marriage? At such moments, wading through the nightmare of guilt and self-hatred, she would feel tender towards him. The impulsive desire to confess, to clean her breast, was very strong. She hated Dr Van Dyke. But the more she hated him, the more she knew his power over her: she wanted his body, the wild plunge into darkness unknown, an orgy of revulsion, desperation and attraction. Jealousy and fear of what he was doing behind her back ate into her rest and peace.

  And then, unexpectedly, the train claimed her lover: to her surprise, she felt neither sad nor anything; in fact, the first reaction was a vision of peace regained. Soon, however, she was restless, like a person who misses something without knowing, in particular, what he has lost. She started growing flowers (she had neglected this hobby during the affair) with a new vigour.

  All these things streamed through her mind as she washed the dishes. The sadness melted into fatigue and impatience at her husband. They were on the brink of change, she reflected, and still he would not talk. Uhuru had brought their lives into a crisis and he behaved as if nothing was happening. Not that she knew exactly what she wanted him to say: but let a man and wife at least share their anxieties about everything: their past, the party tomorrow, their flight home on Wednesday.

  Yes, she would compel him to talk, tonight, she resolved, and stopped wiping the dishes, walking back to the sitting-room with determination. John was peering into the mass of notebooks and papers before him, occasionally scribbling something with a hand that appeared to be shaking. She bent behind him, put her arm around his neck, and lightly touched the lobe of his left ear with her lips. She was surprised at herself, since she had not done this for years. Suddenly her grim determination to force their relationship into the open crisis subsided.

  ‘Good night.’

  ‘Good night.’

  ‘And don’t be late,’ she called on her way to the bathroom and then to bed.

  Thompson first came to East Africa during the Second World War, an officer, seconded to the King’s African Rifles. He took an active part in the 1942 Madagascar campaigns. Otherwise most of his time was spent in Kenya doing various garrison and training duties. After the war he returned to his interrupted studies in Oxford. It was there, whilst reading history, that he found himself interested in the development of the British Empire. At first this was a historian’s interest without personal involvement. But, drifting into the poems of Rudyard Kipling, he experienced a swift flicker, a flame awakened. He saw himself as a man with destiny, a man poised for great things in the future. He studied the work and life of Lord Lugard. And then a casual meeting with two African students crystallized his longings into a concrete conviction. They talked literature, history, and the war; they were all enthusiastic about the British Mission in the World. The two Africans, they came from a family of Chiefs in what was then Gold Coast, showed a real grasp of history and literature. This filled Thompson with wonder and admiration. His mind started working. Here were two Africans who in dress, in speech and in intellectual power were no different from the British. Where was the irrationality, inconsistency and superstition so characteristic of the African and Oriental races? They had been replaced by the three principles basic to the Western mind: i.e. the principle of Reason, of Order and of Measure. For days and weeks he thought about this with one recurring impression: the two Africans seemed proud of their British heritage and tradition. Thompson was excited, conscious of walking on the precipice of a great discovery: what, precisely, was the nature of that heritage? He woke up one night, elated, and saw his destiny dressed in the form of an idea.

  ‘My heart was filled with joy,’ he wrote later. ‘In a flash I was convinced that the growth of the British Empire was the development of a great moral idea: it means, it must surely lead to the creation of one British nation, embracing peoples of all colours and creeds, based on the just proposition that all men were created equal.

  ‘For me, a great light had shone in the darkness.’

  Transform the British Empire into one nation: didn’t this explain so many things, why, for instance, so many Africans had offered themselves up to die in the war against Hitler?

  From the first, as soon as he set his hands on a pen to write down his thoughts, the title of the manuscript floated before him. He would call it: PROSPERO IN AFRICA. In it he argued that to be English was basically an attitude of mind: it was a way of looking at life, at human relationship, at the just ordering of human society. Was it not possible to reorientate people into this way of life by altering their social and cultural environment? Prospero in Africa was a result of an assiduous dive into English history, and the General History of Colonization from the Roman times to the present day. He was influenced by the French policy of Assimilation, but was critical of the French as he was of what he called ‘Lugard’s retrograde concept of Indirect Rule’.

  ‘We must avoid the French mistake of assimilating only the educated few. The peasant in Asia and Africa must be included in this moral scheme for rehabilitation. In Great Britain we have had our peasant, and now our worker, and they are no less an integral part of our society.’

  It was to Margery that he often revealed his ambitions. She was first attracted to him by the sadness and distance in his face. She admired his brilliance. His moral passion gave life a meaning. Once they went for a walk in London. They stood, for a time, at St James’s Park, their eyes raised towards Westminster Abbey, the British House of Commons and beyond. Margery inclined her head on his shoulder as if she wished he would carry her with him to those lands he talked about. He did. A few years later, Mr and Mrs Thompson sailed for East Africa, to be at the centre of the drama in the Colonial administration.

  ‘I am delighted,’ he had written on arriving at Mombasa, ‘to touch the red earth of Kenya. I was here during the war and I liked the climate. Then I never knew I would come back on a different mission.’

  He always remembered those words. And even today, on the eve o
f his departure from East Africa, the touch of Margery’s fingers had brought back a flicker of the faith that then imbued him. His faith in British Imperialism had once made him declare: To administer a people is to administer a soul. He was then talking with a group of officers at the New Stanley Hotel. After dinner, he had written the words in his diary – no, not a diary but a mass of notes he scribbled at various times and places in his career, hoping to incorporate them into a coherent philosophy in Prospero in Africa. These were the notes that were now in front of Thompson; he went through them, lingering over the entries that struck his mind.

  Nyeri is full of mountains, hills and deep valleys covered with impenetrable forests. These primordial trees have always awed primitive minds. The darkness and mystery of the forest, have led him (the primitive man) to magic and ritual.

  What’s this thing called Mau Mau?

  Dr Albert Schweitzer says ‘The Negro is a child, and with children, nothing can be done without the use of authority.’ I’ve now worked in Nyeri, Githima, Kisumu, Ngong. I agree.

  I am back in Nyeri. People are moving into villages to cut the connection between them and the terrorists. Burning houses in the old village, suddenly I felt my life was coming to a cul-de-sac.

  Colonel Robson, a Senior District Officer in Rung’ei, Kiambu, was savagely murdered. I am replacing him at Rung’ei. One must use a stick. No government can tolerate anarchy, no civilization can be built on this violence and savagery. Mau Mau is evil: a movement which if not checked will mean complete destruction of all the values on which our civilization has thriven.

  ‘Every whiteman is continually in danger of gradual moral ruin in this daily and hourly contest with the African.’ Dr Albert Schweitzer.