The African literature

1.  Presented by : Sanjay A. Dharaiya
Paper no. 14 : ( The African Literature )
 Topic : “The Politics and Spaces of Voice: Ngũgĩ's A Grain
of Wheat”
 Course Sem : 4
 Roll no. : 23
 Email id : Dharaiy9@gmail.com
 Submitted to : S.B.Gardi Department of English MKB
University

2.  The novels, essays and lectures which is collaboration in
A) Homecoming (1972),
B) Writers in Politics (1981),
C) Barrel of a Pen (1983),
D) Moving the Centre (1993), and
E) Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998).
 In Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature,
Ngugi mentioned that African-language literature as the only authentic
voice for Africans and stated his own intention of writing into only in
Kikuyu or Kiswahili from that point on. Such works earned him a
reputation as one of Africa’s most articulate social critics.

3.  Ngugi’s third novel is ‘ A Grain of Wheat’ which set background at Kenya
on the event of Independence deals mainly with the events leading up to
Independence.
That’s culminated in the formation of a party led by Jomo Kenyatta and
Harry Thuku in the struggle for freedom.
 However, it was the story of the white men who established their rules
and right to suppress the freedom struggle and capture and imprison
members of the Mau-Mau.
 They put them in detention camps where they doing cruelly like
physically or mentally tortured for handled to revolt against the colonial
government or British government.
 As John Thompson, the white administrative secretary writes in his diary:
“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.”

4.  Here in the novel Ngugi try to put the social circumstances through his
characters of the novel.
 specially put into the background of a Mau Mau refusal to accept
movement against pioneer government which these figures lived their lives.
He showed the causes of the refusal to accept and he given very much at
pains.
 for example,
 In the novel one of the character tortured through the speeches and actions
who used as the freedom fighter and to make his readers to know the
genuineness of the struggle.
 The novelist mainly wants to examine the frailty of human being which
was revealed through the states of mind of the characters who the producer
of the violence of the independence struggle.

5.  In the novel there were four central characters who are Mugo, Gikonyo,
Mumbi, and Karanja. Their dominated by their lives through
remembrance of Kihika who was betrayed to the British by one of the
villagers and was hanged.
 Ngugi has skill of make every moments in to current time and he used
flash back technique and the narrative technique.
 he adopts in conformity with T.S.Eliot Seminal Critical essay, “Tradition
and the Individual Talent”.
 So that he stripped away from the layers of their lives and each character
at the end of the novel also stands fully revealed.
 Out of the recollections of these people we come to know Kihika and
understand the motives which made him a forest fighter.

6.  Uhuru Day celebrted as a solemn day for the people of Thabai in South
Africa. A hero’s played role as surveyed and found wanting. Through him
the revolution was betrayed.
 General R. also surveys the causes and achievement of the independence
movement. He finds that the revolution has been betrayed.
 As we know that Human beings sometimes allow themselves to become
content with the status quo by going along with what is undemanding
or less stressful.
 This seems to have been the case amongst many of the Kikuyu people
during the Mau Mau revolt, as alluded to by Ngugi wa Thiongo in his
fictional narrative.
 In A Grain of Wheat, one of the women (Wumbuka, Kihika’s wife), for
instance, tries to talk Kihika out of revolting against the British.

7.  In the novel’s one of the character Gikonyo’s confession of the Mau
Mau Oath is an act of betrayal at the end.
 Betrayal Gikonyo was impact by his desire to join his Mumbi who
described as pure, an incorruptible reality in a world of changing
shadows. Her purity crashed by him.
 Gikonyo return home only to be disillusioned. Mumbi became mother
of one child by Karanja during his absence. Karanja admitted his oath
and as a betrayed by his friend’s wife.
 It is extremely painful to Gikonyo. He says:
“There is nothing so 132 painful as finding that a friend, or a man you
always trusted, has betrayed you.” (122)
 According to him,
“Mugo’s purity, Mumbi’s unfaithfulness, everything had conspired to
undermine his manhood.” (123).

8.  The novel begins with Uhuru celebration,
Here Uhuru means freedom or fight for
the independence but in the novel after
few days away.
 Mugo faced with a new challenge: the
Party has questioned that he was a hero
of the Kenyan struggle who lead to the
lJhuru ceremonies in Thabai. He must
now came to terms with himself.
 The only honourable course is to admit
to himself his own perfection and frailty
and to confess the responsibility for
Kihika's death before the village.

9.  The challenges laid before Kihika and Mugo differed
in several respects. Kihika's enemy was the British, a
plain and external threaded.
 His strategy was that physical combat in which he
risked his life. I contrasted that Mugo's enemy is his
own fears and desires, he has an internal, mental
struggle in which he may loosed both his life and his
fragile honour.
 Kihika's objective had cleared and straightforward in
front of the expulsion of the British but Mugo's had
less obvious and he rewarded less certain, for there
will be no honour when Mugo true to himself at last,
admits his crime.

10.  Kenya was colonized by the British in 1895 and it was not independent
until 1963.
 In the subsequent years of the country struggled to negotiate a post-
colonial reality in which the divisions caused by political and economic
oppression, the Emergency, violence, racism, exploitation of rivalry and
competition amongst Kenyans, and psychological trauma endured and
deepened.
 Even though Ngugi did not take his readers into the days after
colonialism, Ngugi hinted at the difficulties the characters will face.
 Thompson's claimed that Africa will always need Europe may not be
true in the sense he wishes it to be, but it was prescient in that Europe's
involvement in the region can never fully be erased.
 Finally, on a more personal level, all of the characters lived or affected
by colonialism whether they are in detention camps or the Movement or
losing their homes and land or trying to repair their fractured families
or dealing with paternalistic colonial administrators.

11.  Some outsiders probably thought it cruel and barbaric that so many
innocent lives were taken during the revolt, especially those of innocent
children who had no say or part in the matter.
 Mowever, thought otherwise and felt that all opposed to the revolt should
be put to death. Interestingly, some in the latter group were women who
were determined to help in every way they could to end their suffering
under British rule.
 Thus, Ngugi wa Thiong’o insightfully employs fictional characters such
as Njeri, Wambuku’s friend, to illustrated that sentiment.
 Unlike Wambuku who was unwilling to live outside of her comfort zone,
Njeri had an entirely different view on the matter. She, though partly out
of her love for Kihika, is determined to help Kihika fight against the
British in an effort to prevent them from exercising dominance over their
land.
 Even though petite in stature, Njeri was depicted as being robust, detests
“women’s weaknesses” and at one stage calls out toward the forest,
promising Kihika that she will join him in the fight against the British.

12.  At the end in the conclusion, other hand one can only
speculated about what would have happened if the Mau Mau
uprising had not taken place.
 Would Kenya still have been under British rule or would the
Kikuyu still have been deprived of their land today?
 I am of the opinion that Ngugi wa Thiong’o proficiently
accomplishes bringing history to life in ‘A Grain of Wheat’.
 His depiction of the role of women during the Mau Mau
emergency was a detailed correspondence of what actually
occurred, hence an extremely insightful piece of literature.