A Grain of Wheat

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  The rhetoric tone was seized by the detainees who rose to speak. They talked of suffering under the whiteman and illustrated this with episodes which revealed their deep love of Kenya. In between each speaker, people would sing: Kenya is the country of black people. These speeches were summed up by one detainee who said: ‘What thing is greater than love for one’s country? The love that I have for Kenya kept me alive and made me endure everything. Therefore it is true, Kenya is black people’s country.’

  It was at this stage in the proceedings that a few detainees who had heard of Mugo’s case in Rira pushed him forward. Among these was Nyamu (later to be elected the secretary of the local branch of the Party) who had also been at Rira the week the eleven detainees were beaten to death. Mugo stood before the crowd. His voice, colourless, rusty, startled him. He spoke in a dry monotone, tired, almost as if telling of scenes he did not want to remember.

  ‘They took us to the roads and to the quarries even those who had never done anything. They called us criminals. But not because we had stolen anything or killed anyone. We had only asked for the thing that belonged to us from the time of Agu and Agu. Day and night, they made us dig. We were stricken ill, we often slept with empty stomachs, and our clothes were just rags and tatters so that the rain and the wind and the sun knew our nakedness. In those days we did not stay alive because we thought our cause strong. It was not even because we loved the country. If that had been all, who would not have perished?

  ‘We only thought of home.

  ‘We longed for the day when we would see our women laugh, or even see our children fight and cry. When we thought that one day we would return home to see the faces and hear the voices of our mothers and our wives and our children we became strong. Yes. We became strong even in days when the cause for which blood was spilt seemed – seemed—’

  At first Mugo enjoyed the distance he had established between himself and the voice. But soon the voice disgusted him. He wanted to shout: that is not it at all; I did not want to come back; I did not long to join my mother, or wife or child because I did not have any. Tell me, then, whom could I have loved? He stopped in the middle of a sentence and walked down the platform towards his hut.

  After the meeting, Mugo took refuge in reticence. People went on with their daily work, reconstructing that which had been broken. Elections came. People voted the Party into power and resumed their toil. Mugo thought Thabai had forgotten him. But legends have thrived on less fertile ground. People in the meeting said the man was so moved he could not speak any more. And whenever Warui commented on this meeting he never forgot to say: ‘Those were words from no ordinary heart.’

  Mugo walked determinedly, as if intent on reaching his destination early. His mind would suddenly see his whole past in a flash – like when lightning cuts the night in two. His whole life would be compressed into the flash. Then he would single out events trying to skip over the ones that brought him pain. He remembered that meeting – then his mind reverted to last night’s gathering. ‘He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break down in pieces the oppressor.’ The words thrilled him; a flicker once more danced within him. He stood, transfixed. Then, as suddenly, other thoughts rushed in and blew out the flicker. Unless they had suspected him could General R. have asked those pointed questions? Meeting somebody after a week? Karanja? Yes, could they really have asked him to carve his place in society by singing tributes to the man he had so treacherously betrayed?

  Mugo was weighed down with these fears, hopes and doubts when in the evening Gikonyo said ‘hodi’ at the door and entered. For a time they stood, each embarrassed by the other’s presence.

  ‘Take a seat.’ Mugo offered him a stool near the fire.

  ‘I’m sure you did not expect me,’ Gikonyo started awkwardly after he had sat down.

  ‘It is nothing. I suppose you have come to hear my decision.’

  ‘No. It is not that which brought me here tonight.’ He told Mugo about his visit to Nairobi and his meeting with the MP.

  Mugo, who sat on the bed opposite Gikonyo, waited for him to continue. The fire contained in the hearthplace by three stones glowed between them.

  ‘But it is not that which brought me here. It is my troubles, troubles of the heart.’ Gikonyo smiled and tried to sound casual. ‘I was really coming to ask you a question,’ he finished with a dramatic pause.

  Mugo’s heart sagged between fear and curiosity.

  ‘Do you know that you and I were once in the same detention camp?’ Gikonyo said, feeling his way into a talk.

  ‘Were we? I can’t remember.’ Though slightly relieved, Mugo was still suspicious. ‘There were so many people,’ he added quickly.

  ‘It was at Muhia camp. We knew you were to be brought there. We had, of course, heard about you in connection with the hunger-strike at Rira. The authorities did not tell us. It was supposed to be a secret, but we knew.’

  Mugo vividly remembered Rira and Thompson, who beat him. Of Muhia, he could only recall the barbed-wire and the flat dry country. But then most camps were in such areas.

  ‘Why do you tell me all this? I don’t like to remember.’

  ‘Do you ever forget?’

  ‘I try to. The government says we should bury the past.’

  ‘I can’t forget … I will never forget,’ Gikonyo cried.

  ‘Did you suffer much?’ Mugo asked with sympathy.

  ‘No, I did not. I mean … Do you know I was never beaten, not once. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘There were some who were not beaten, I know.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘Yes. Many times.’

  ‘You were brave not to confess. We admired your courage, and hid our heads in shame.’

  ‘There was nothing to confess.’

  ‘We confessed. I would have done anything to come back home.’

  ‘You had a wife. And a mother.’

  ‘Yes. You understand.’

  ‘No, I don’t understand, I don’t understand anything,’ Mugo declared in a raised voice.

  ‘Why did you speak like that, then?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At that meeting! Remember? Many of us talked like that because we wanted to deceive ourselves. It lessens your shame. We talked of loyalty to the Movement and the love of our country. You know a time came when I did not care about Uhuru for the country any more. I just wanted to come home. And I would have sold Kenya to the whiteman to buy my own freedom. I admire people like Kihika. They are strong enough to die for the truth. I have no such strength. That’s why in detention, we were proud of you, resented you and hated you – all in the same breath. You see, people like you, who refused to betray your beliefs, showed us what we ought to be like – but we lacked true bones in the flesh. We were cowards.’

  ‘It was not cowardice. I would have done the same.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘You want to know, do you?’ Mugo said, forgetting himself. Then the temptation fleeted away.

  ‘I had no home to come to,’ he said quietly, without emotion. ‘I suppose I did not want to come back.’

  ‘No, it is not that,’ Gikonyo said in a gale of genuine admiration. ‘You have a great heart. It is people like you who ought to have been the first to taste the fruits of Independence. But now, whom do we see riding in long cars and changing them daily as if motor cars were clothes? It is those who did not take part in the Movement, the same who ran to the shelter of schools and universities and administration. And even some who were outright traitors and collaborators. There are some who only the other day were singing songs composed for them by the Blundells: Uhuru bado! or Let us carve Kenya into small pieces! At political meetings you hear them shout: Uhuru, Uhuru, we fought for. Fought where? They are mere uncircumcised boys. They knew suffering as a word. They should have listened to your speech that day. All of them. As you spoke, I felt you were reading my heart …’

  ‘Was it hard wa
iting, for you?’ Mugo spoke abstractedly as if he wanted to change the subject of conversation. Gikonyo needed only small encouragement.

  ‘Yes. Because I thought I would never come back. You see with the experience of hardship in detention, I knew that if I could get out I could make something great out of my life with Mumbi.’

  Gikonyo talked of a world where love and joy were possible. Why was he now troubled, then, Mugo wondered. He had all that a man needed to be happy: wealth, position, and relations who cared for him.

  ‘You love your wife,’ Mugo observed.

  ‘I did!’ Gikonyo said slowly and emphatically. The hut was silent. The fire still glowed between them. The oil-lamp went on fluttering.

  ‘She was my life, all my life,’ Gikonyo declared, staring fixedly at the hearth. ‘Do you know,’ he went on in the same quiet tone, ‘do you know that when I finally came back, well for me everything had changed; the shambas, and the villages, and the people …’

  ‘Mumbi?’

  ‘She too had changed,’ Gikonyo said, almost in a whisper. ‘God, I sold my soul, for what? Where is the Mumbi I left behind?’

  Seven

  Then, as now, Thabai Ridge sloped gently from the high ground on the west into a small plain on which Rung’ei Trading Centre stood. The centre was a collection of tin-roofed buildings that faced on another in two straight rows. The space enclosed served as a market where women from various ridges congregated to sell and buy food and exchange gossip. Indian traders from Nairobi had also discovered this market, where they often came, haggled over prices with the women, let slip one or two dirty words which sent the women into fits of dirty laughter, and then took the vegetables and other wares to Nairobi where they disposed of them to the city people at a much higher price. Other Indians had settled in the area; a few minutes’ walk from the African shops brought you to the Indian place, where buildings, also in two straight rows, were made of corrugated-iron sheets. These Indians also brought potatoes, peas, beans, and maize grain from Rung’ei Market during the harvest. But they stored them at the back of their shops, and later sold them during the hard times.

  The African shops, though often roofed with rotting tin, had the unsurpassed virtue of having stone or brick walls. People claimed that Rung’ei was the first centre with such buildings in all Gikuyu country. Rung’ei had other virtues, too. The iron snake had first crawled along this plain before climbing up the escarpment on its way to Kisumu and Kampala; for a long time Thabai was the envy of many ridges not so graced with a railway line. Even people from ridges bordering the Masai land paid visits once in a while just to see the train coughing and vomiting smoke as it rattled along. Thabai was proud of Rung’ei. They felt the centre belonged to the ridge, that even the railway line and the train had a mystical union with Thabai; were they not the first to welcome the rail and the train into the heart of the country? Of the story, current to this day in other ridges, which told how men, women and children deserted Thabai for a whole week when the iron snake, foreseen by the Gikuyu seer, first appeared on the land, they kept discreet silence. They ran for refuge to the neighbouring ridges, so the story goes, and only trickled back, and that cautiously, after the warrior spies, armed with spears and simis, brought news that the snake was harmless, that the red strangers themselves were touching it.

  Later, the railway platform became the meeting place for the young. They talked in groups at home, they went for walks in the country, some even went to church; but in their minds was always the train on Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, the passenger train to Kampala and the one to Mombasa met at Rung’ei station. People did not go there, as it might be thought, to meet friends arriving from Mombasa, Kisumu or Kampala – they just went there to meet one another, to talk, to gossip, to laugh.

  Love-affairs were often hatched there; many marriages with their attendant cry of woe or joy had their origin at the station platform.

  ‘Will you go to the train today?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Leave me not behind, friend.’

  ‘Then you must be ready on time. It takes you a whole day just to put on your clothes.’

  ‘That’s a lie in clear daylight.’

  Girls normally went to the river on Saturday to wash their clothes. Sunday morning was the time for pressing the clothes and also making their hair. By lunchtime, they were ready to walk or run to the station. Men had no such rituals. They were ready all the time, and in any case, most of them spent their time at the Rung’ei shops, only a short distance from the station.

  The train became an obsession: if you missed it, sorrow seized your heart for the rest of the week; you longed for the next train. Then Sunday came, you went there on time, and immediately you were healed.

  From the station they normally went to dance in Kinenie Forest overlooking the Rift Valley. Guitar players occupied a place of honour in this community; beautiful girls surrounded them and paid tribute with their eyes. Men bought dances. When a person bought a dance, the guitarist played for him alone, praising his name, always the son of a woman. The man danced to the rhythm alone or invited his friends to join him while others only watched. Nobody else could come in. The conventions governing the dances in the wood were well understood.

  Often the dances ended in fights. Again this was well understood and men came prepared, at times courting danger with provocative words and insulting songs. The men organized themselves in groups according to the ridges of origin. Thabai was famous because men from there successfully fought other groups and took away their women. Girls loved men from Thabai, anyway, so that taking them captive was not exactly a difficult feat.

  At the platform things were different. Nobody thought of starting a fight. There, the man who beat you the previous Sunday and took away your woman, was a friend. You talked and laughed together. But he knew later in the wood you would look for a chance to stab him and take away his woman.

  ‘I rarely missed the train,’ Gikonyo now remembered, years later, when this was only a myth. ‘I loved to rub shoulders with the men and the women.

  ‘Yet the day I missed the train was the happiest in my life,’ he told Mugo.

  Then Gikonyo worked as a carpenter in Thabai. Though an immigrant to the ridge, he and his mother had been absorbed into the community and its daily rituals. He came to Thabai, a child strapped on the mother’s back, from Elburgon area in the Rift Valley province where his father, Waruhiu, worked as a squatter on European farms. Being a hard-working man, it was not long before Waruhiu found himself the centre of attraction to many women. He got new brides and complained that the thighs of the first wife did not yield warmth any more. He beat her, hoping that this would drive her away. Wangari stuck on.

  Eventually, Waruhiu ordered her to leave his home and cursed mother and son to a life of ever-wandering on God’s earth. But Wangari did not wander for long; surely she could find welcome in Gikuyu land? ‘Waruhiu thinks I will die because I am poor and have nothing to eat,’ she one day said to herself sitting on a stone near Elburgon station. ‘But there is no home with a boy-child where the head of a he-goat shall not be cooked,’ she said, and holding the child to her breast she hurled an unspoken challenge to Waruhiu by boarding a train which took her to Thabai.

  Wangari sent her son to school. But Gikonyo did not stay there for long because the woman had not enough money for fees. Fortunately at school he had learnt a little carpentry, and this he determined to use and make a living.

  He loved carpentry.

  Holding a plane, smoothing a piece of wood, all this sent a thrill of fear and wonder through the young man. The smell of wood fascinated him. Soon his senses developed sharp discrimination, so that he could tell any type of wood by a mere sniff. Not that the young carpenter made it appear so easy. In fact, Gikonyo used to act out a little ritual the performance of which varied depending on who was present. The drama went like this:

  A woman has brought a piece of wood – she wants to know what type of wood it i
s. The carpenter takes it, gives it a casual glance, and then carelessly flings it onto a pile of other pieces. He continues with the job in progress. The woman stands there admiring the movement of his muscles. After a while, he lifts the piece of wood, its far end resting on the table. He shuts the left eye and peers at the wood with his half-open right eye. Then he closes his right eye and repeats the performance with the other eye. This finished, he knocks at it swiftly, rhythmically, with the knuckle of the right front finger as if he is exorcizing spirits from the wood. Next he takes the hammer; strike, listen, strike, listen. Then he sniffs the wood carefully (that is, professionally), and gives it back to the woman. He resumes the other job.

  ‘What is the wood? It is podo—?’ the woman ventures to ask, overwhelmed by the professional sniffs and pauses.

  ‘Podo? Hmm. Bring it.’ He sniffs at it again, slowly turns the wood round and round, nodding his head knowingly. Then he spends a few minutes explaining why the piece of wood is not podo.

  ‘It’s camphor. Have you ever heard of it? Grows mostly in the high ground in the Aberdares and around Mount Kenya. Very good timber. Why else do you think that the white people appropriated that land to themselves?’ the carpenter pronounces with quiet wisdom.

  The workshop was a small table set against the wall of Gikonyo’s hut. Towards sunset, Wangari always came to the workshop, rummaged through the wood shavings, hoping to collect one or two unwanted pieces for the fire.

  ‘Do you need this?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘Oh, leave that, mother. You can never see a piece of wood without wanting to burn it. It costs money you know. But that is what a woman will never understand.’

  ‘What about this?’ Wangari was not easily daunted. She loved to hear the voice of the son admonishing her.