A Grain of Wheat

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  ‘I tell you, if you see an Englishman, fear him,’ he would say in a voice suggesting greater knowledge of the whiteman’s secrets than Kamau cared to reveal. ‘I saw with my own eyes what he did to Hitler. And I tell you the Germans were not boys, either. What do you think Kihika and his men can do with their unpredictable home-made guns, rotting pangas and blunt spears?’

  Warui, however, placed his faith in the God of the nation and what he cryptically called the spirit of the black people. He believed, in turns, that people like Harry and Jomo had mystical power; their speeches always moved him to tears; at such times he would tell the story of the 1923 procession and end with the same refrain: ‘Perhaps if we had the guns …’ He had a similar faith in Mugo, he wished his sons had grown to be a man like him, and used the same formula which over the years had made him predict, with a prophetic accuracy that surprised him, the national heroes: you can see it in his eyes, he often told his wife. But now Mukami had died, and his sons had failed him.

  After a few inconsequential words, Gikonyo plunged into the subject of his visit.

  ‘Mugo says that he will not lead in the ceremony.’

  ‘What do you say? But I was with him today, this afternoon, and he did not say a thing.’

  ‘Still, he says he’ll not lead; he is a strange man, hard to understand.’

  ‘Now that I think about it, he did seem troubled when I talked to him.’

  ‘I’ve come so that you and I can go there to see him again. Else we shall have to choose another man, and time is short.’

  On the way to Mugo’s hut, Gikonyo told Warui his disappointment over Green Hill Farm.

  ‘And he did not tell you he had bought it when you saw him yesterday?’ Warui asked.

  ‘No, he did not tell me. I could see, though, that he did not want to look at me in the eyes.’

  ‘The gods who rule us,’ Warui said with sympathy. He wanted to tell Gikonyo the story of how people once rose against women-rulers who enriched themselves and forgot the responsibility of their office, but only muttered: ‘They’ll only raise wrath against the hearts of their worshippers.’

  Gikonyo did not answer, and nothing further was said on the subject until they were near Mugo’s hut.

  ‘It is the old saying come true: Kamwene Kabagio ira,’ Warui said.

  When a young boy, Mugo once went to the railway station at Rung’ei to look at the trains. He walked along the platform, awed by the goods-train with its many coaches. In some of the coaches were horses, big powerful animals. One of the horses fixed him with its eyes and then yawned, opening wide its strong jaws. Mugo shook with terror and for a time was unable to move. He feared being trampled to the ground by horses’ hooves.

  Mugo had felt the same irrational terror on leaving Mumbi and General R. He felt pursued from behind, and he could not escape. He wanted to return to his hut, and even quickened his steps to do so. But he was irrevocably drawn to the lives of the villagers. He tried to think of something else – himself, his aunt – but he could not escape from his knowledge of Gikonyo’s and Mumbi’s lives.

  The sun was fiercely hot. Children – there were always children – played in the streets. And yesterday, on Sunday, he had seen these huts as objects that had nothing to do with him. Yesterday, this morning, before Mumbi told her story, the huts had run by him, and never sang a thing of the past. Now they were different: the huts, the dust, the trench, Wambuku, Kihika, Karanja, detention-camps, the white face, barbed-wire, death. He was conscious of the graves beside the trench. He shuddered cold, and the fear of galloping hooves changed into the terror of an undesired discovery. Two years before, in the camps, he would not have cared how Wambuku lay and felt in the grave. How was it that Mumbi’s story had cracked open his dulled inside and released imprisoned thoughts and feelings? The weight of her words and the face of General R. dissolved into acts of the past. Previously he liked to see events in his life as isolated. Things had been fated to happen at different moments. One had no choice in anything as surely as one had no choice on one’s birth. He did not, then, tire his mind by trying to connect what went before with what followed after. Numbed, he ran without thinking of the road, its origin or its end.

  Mugo abruptly stopped in the middle of the main village street, surprised that he had been walking deeper and deeper into the village. Incidents tumbled on him. He stirred himself with difficulty, to cut a path through the heap. He was again drawn to the trench and seemed impotent to resist this return to yesterday. The walls of the trench were now battered: soil had fallen and filled the bottom. Potato peelings, rotting maize husks, bits of white paper, bones and remains of rotting meat were strewn on top and on the banks of what was now a shallow ditch.

  Three women, bent double with loads of wood, crossed over the ditch into the village.

  Mugo walked along hoping, with a guilty curiosity, to come to the section he himself had helped to dig. Fear and restless expectation raged inside. He would fix his eyes on the scene, and he would not flinch.

  The whole scene again became alive and vivid. He worked a few yards from the woman. He had worked in the same place for three days. Now a homeguard jumped into the trench and lashed the woman with a whip. Mugo felt the whip eat into his flesh, and her pained whimper was like a cry from his own heart. Yet he did not know her, had for the three days refused to recognize those around him as fellow sufferers. Now he only saw the woman, the whip, and the homeguard. Most people continued digging, pretending not to hear the woman’s screams, and fearing to meet a similar fate. Others furtively glanced at the woman as they raised their shovels and jembes. In terror, Mugo pushed forward and held the whip before the homeguard could hit the woman a fifth time. More homeguards and two or three soldiers ran to the scene. Other people temporarily stopped digging and watched the struggle and the whips that now descended on Mugo’s body. ‘He’s mad,’ some people later said, after Mugo had been taken away in a police van. To Mugo the scene remained a nightmare whose broken and blurred edges he could not pick or reconstruct during the secret screening that later followed. He only saw behind the table the inscrutable face of the whiteman, whose cold eyes examined Mugo from head to foot. The voice when at last it came as from a dead body, carried venom.

  ‘You have taken the oath.’

  ‘No, no, Effendi.’

  ‘Take him back to the cell.’

  Two policemen pulled him out; they poured cold water on him and locked him in. Strange how often Mugo forgot the hob-nailed shoes dug into his flesh, but always remembered the water on the cement floor.

  Mugo looked across to the men and women who worked on the narrow shambas, enclosed by the thick and unkempt hedges that spread from the ditch, once the trench. He seemed to be seeing things as if they were new. Were people always doing this, day in, day out, coaxing the hard soil for food?

  Suddenly the curiosity which had driven Mugo back to the trench, died, and he wanted to escape from the trench and the memories drumming inside. He crossed into the village. His hut appeared now the only safe place. He wanted to resume that state, a limbo, in which he was before he heard Mumbi’s story and looked into her eyes. The dust he raised as he went back to the hut whirled low behind him.

  That was the time Warui had met Mugo in the street. Warui was coming from a small crowd that had gathered outside the old woman’s hut. To Mugo, Warui was a particularly irksome apparition at the present time. He despised Warui without being able to say why. Warui’s face was troubled with thought, but Mugo did not see this.

  ‘Long ago such things could happen,’ he started at once, as if Mugo already knew the subject of Warui’s thoughts.

  ‘What things?’ They walked slowly in the same direction.

  ‘Have you not heard?’

  ‘Not anything unusual.’

  ‘This one is unusual. Of a truth, such things used to happen, not often, once or twice maybe, but they did occur. When a man or a child died, he was thrown into the forest. When I was young, thes
e, my eyes, saw a man who had come from the dead.’

  ‘What has happened?’ Mugo asked impatiently.

  ‘You know the old woman. You know she had a son who from birth could not speak or hear.’

  At the mention of the old woman, Mugo became agitated. The nausea he had felt at the sight of Warui disappeared. He could hardly wait for Warui to tell the story at his own pace. Mugo remembered only last Sunday he had almost entered her hut. Had she died?

  ‘And what happens to her son? He was killed. A bullet picks on him, in the heart, during the Emergency. As you can imagine, this was great pain to her. All these years she has not left her hut, and she has not spoken a word to anybody. And then now she begins to speak. Just like that. What does she say? Her son has come back; she says she has seen him twice.’

  ‘It’s strange,’ Mugo commented.

  ‘Once he went into the hut. And then he went out again, without speaking. So she has kept the door open thus many a day so that Gitogo could come back. She says that he came back recently, stood at the door, and then went away again without speaking. She is talking, talking all the time.’

  ‘It’s strange,’ Mugo said again, fearing.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I say. It’s strange in our village, and I cannot stop saying it to myself when I see things that happened one, two, three – many years ago, come to disturb a woman’s peace and rest. Those buried in the earth should remain in the earth. Things of yesterday should remain with yesterday.’

  When at long last Mugo extricated himself from Warui, he found the incident had disturbed him in a way he could not explain. He wandered through the streets thinking about the old woman and that thrilling bond he felt existed between them. Then he tried to dismiss the incident. But as he went on, he found himself starting at the thought of meeting a dead apparition. Life itself seemed a meaningless wandering. There was surely no connection between sunrise and sunset, between today and tomorrow. Why then was he troubled by what was dead, he thought, remembering the old woman. And immediately he heard Mumbi’s voice in his heart and saw General R.’s face looking at him. He stood at an open space in the village. His lower lip dropped: he felt energy leave him. Weak in body, he leaned against a small tree and gradually slipped down on to the grass. He held his head in both hands. It is not me, he whispered to convince himself. It is not me, it would have happened … the murder of women and men in the trench … even if … even if…. He was moaning. Mumbi’s voice was a knife which had butchered and laid naked his heart to himself. The road from his hut led to the trench. But would it not have happened? Christ would have died on the cross, anyway. Why did they blame Judas, a stone from the hands of a power more than man? Kihika … crucified … the thought flashed through him, and a curious thing happened. Mugo saw thick blood dripping from the mud walls of his hut. Why had he not seen it earlier, he now wondered, almost calmly, without fear. But he was shaking as he walked to his hut, resolved to find out if the blood was really there.

  He saw nothing on the wall. He sat on his bed and again propped his head on both hands. Was he cracking in the head? He started at the thought and again looked at the walls.

  It was dark, in the evening, when Gikonyo and Warui called on Mugo.

  ‘I fear I am not well in the head,’ he told them. ‘I cannot, I cannot face so many eyes.’

  ‘Take Aspro, it will clear your head,’ Warui said, unable to penetrate the enigmatic gloom in the hut. ‘What does the man sing? Aspro ni dawa ya Kweli.’ He quietly laughed alone and then abruptly kept silent, remembering the earlier conversation with Mugo about the old woman.

  ‘Please think again,’ Gikonyo told him. Warui and Gikonyo left the hut. Gikonyo was puzzled by the look of terror on Mugo’s face. Warui remembered that he had not yet told Gikonyo about the old woman.

  ‘It’s only pictures in the head.’ Gikonyo dismissed the story, now thinking of Mumbi. Suddenly he felt the urge to beat her, really beat her, and keep her in her place. This time he would not let his mother interfere.

  Warui turned to Wambui’s place and told her of Mugo’s refusal. Wambui and Warui went to a few other huts and told the same story. And so the word passed from one hut to the next. The man who had suffered so much had further revealed his greatness in modesty. By refusing to lead, Mugo had become a legendary hero.

  To whom does one turn, Gikonyo mused, as he hurried to vent his anger on Mumbi. He was angry with everybody: the MP (why should these men be elected only to enrich themselves), and Mugo (what does he think he is?), and Mumbi (I had thought marriage would bring happiness). He trembled with excitement outside the house. Nobody would hold him back. He would thrash Mumbi until she cried for mercy.

  He pushed the door open, with force, and only stared into Wangari’s eyes.

  ‘She has gone back to her parents. See how you have broken your home. You have driven a good woman to misery for nothing. Let us now see what profit it will bring you, to go on poisoning your mind with these things when you should have accepted and sought how best to build your life. But you, like a foolish child, have never wanted to know what happened. Or what woman Mumbi really is.’

  In normal circumstances, Gikonyo knew that when Wangari adopted that cool controlled voice, she was angry, or deeply wounded. Now he too was angry and unable to turn into words the many thoughts that passed through his mind.

  ‘Let her never come back,’ he shouted, glaring at his mother, including her in the whole conspiracy against his life. Wangari stood up and shook her front right finger at him.

  ‘You. You. If today you were a baby crawling on your knees and eating mud and dust, I would pinch your thighs so hard you would learn. But you are a man, now. Read your own heart, and know yourself.’

  She went out and left Gikonyo standing alone inside his new house.

  Thirteen

  Most of us from Thabai first saw him at the New Rung’ei Market the day the heavy rain fell. You remember the Wednesday, just before Independence? Wind blew and the rain hit the ground at an angle. Women abandoned their wares in the open and scampered to the shops for shelter, soon crowding together in narrow verandahs. Water dripped down the sack and the pieces of clothing with which they covered their heads; little pools formed on the cement floor. People said the falling water was a blessing for our hard-won freedom. Murungu on high never slept: he always let his tears fall to this, our land, from Agu and Agu. As we, the children, used to sing:

  Ngai has given Gikuyu a beautiful country,

  Never without food or water or grazing fields.

  It is good so Gikuyu should praise Ngai all the time,

  For he has ever been generous to them.

  It had rained the day Kenyatta returned home from England: it had also rained the day Kenyatta returned to Gatundu from Maralal.

  We saw the man walk in the rain. An old dirty basket filled with vegetables and potatoes was slung on his back. He was tall, with broad shoulders, and he walked with a slight stoop that created an impression of power. The fact that he was the only man in the rain soon attracted the attention of people along the pavements and shop verandahs. Some even forced their way to the front to see him.

  ‘What is he doing, fooling in the rain?’

  ‘It is a dumb and deaf man he is.’

  ‘Showing off, if you ask me.’

  ‘Maybe he has a long way to walk, and he fears the night will catch him.’

  ‘Even so be it, he should let the rain break a little, for tell me, what’s the profit to him when he arrives home carrying pneumonia in his bones?’

  ‘Or maybe he has something heavy in his heart.’

  ‘That’s not anything to make him drench himself ill. Which of us does not carry a weight in the heart?’

  The man neared the corner at the far end of Rung’ei shops. Women discussed all the risks people ran by exposing themselves to water. Soon the man disappeared, lost behind the shops.

  ‘What prevents him from taking cover?’

  ‘Mugo is
a strange man,’ Wambui said reflectively.

  Mugo had gone to the market to buy some food. As he pushed his way among the people, between the columns of sitting women, he felt himself watched and regretted coming to the place at all. Then suddenly the sun seemed to die prematurely; the country and the sky turned dull and grey. A cold wind started to blow carrying with it bits of white paper, pieces of cloth and grass and feathers whirling in the air. Clouds were fast collecting in the sky. A few flashes of lightning were followed by a faint rumbling thunder. And abruptly the rain fell. Mugo had another frightening sensation of re-enacting dead scenes come to life. He remembered the women’s devils at the Indian shop long ago, and took flight.

  Somewhere, a woman started the song of the trench, at one time the village anthem. Others took up the thread.

  And he jumped into the trench,

  The words he told the soldier pierced my heart like a spear;

  You will not beat the woman, he said,

  You will not beat a pregnant woman, he told the soldier.

  Work stood still in the trench

  The earth too was silent,

  When they took him away

  Tears, red as blood, trickled down my face.

  Mugo’s name was whispered from ear to ear. Mysterious stories about him spread among the market women. This would not have happened on an ordinary market day. But this was not just another day. Tonight Kenya would get Uhuru. And Mugo, our village hero, was no ordinary man.

  Wambui put it in his way: Independence Day without him would be stale; he is Kihika born again. She went around the market place determined to put her secret resolve into practice. Women had to act. Women had to force the issue. ‘And, after all, he is our son,’ she told women at the market place at an impromptu gathering after the rain. Wambui’s fighting spirit had never died.