A Grain of Wheat

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  ‘Do you think that he was going to meet a woman?’ Koina now asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Karanja is really our man if what you tell me about him is true.’

  ‘Everybody in Githima tells me the same story. If you touch him from behind, he shakes uncontrollably. He never walks in the dark alone. He never opens his door to anybody after seven o’clock in the evening. All these are signs of a guilty man, but—’

  ‘God! If the louse had anything to do with Kihika’s crucifixion!’ General R. said, jumping to his feet. He paced up and down the room. ‘We all took the oath together. We took the oath together.’

  Koina sat on the bed, surprised by the passion and vehemence in the General’s voice. Koina had always feared him and even felt small in the other’s presence. Both had been in the Second World War; the General had fought in Burma. But he, Koina, never rose beyond the rank of a cook. After the war, the General worked as a tailor. Koina moved from job to job. His last job was with Dr Lynd, an ugly white spinster, whom Koina hated at first sight. He and the General really knew one another in the forest. In the battles, General R. emerged without betraying emotion. When Kihika was arrested General R. had remained calm, had shown no surprise or any sign of loss. With years Koina, who had wept at the time, forgot Kihika’s death and did not feel any urgency for revenge. Now it was the General who trembled with passion. Koina looked around the bare hut, avoiding the pacing figure. A sufuria, two plates, empty bottles and a water-tin lay on the floor, rather disconsolately. He cleared his throat:

  ‘Perhaps it is no use. Perhaps we ought to forget the whole thing.’

  General R. abruptly stopped pacing. He looked at Koina, weighing him up and down. Koina fidgeted on his seat, feeling the antagonism in the other’s stare.

  ‘Forget?’ General R. asked in a deceptively calm voice. ‘No, my friend. We must find our traitor, else you and I took the oath for nothing. Traitors and collaborators must not escape revolutionary justice. Tomorrow you must go back to Githima and see Mwaura about the new plan.’

  The other three delegates walked some distance from Mugo’s hut before anyone spoke.

  ‘He is a strange man,’ Wambui commented.

  ‘Who?’ Warui asked.

  ‘Mugo.’

  ‘It is the suffering,’ Gikonyo said. ‘Do you know what it was to live in detention? It was easier, perhaps, with those of us not labelled hard-core. But Mugo was. So he was beaten, and yet would not confess the oath.

  ‘It was not like prison,’ Gikonyo went on, surprised at his own sudden burst of feelings. ‘In prison you know your crime. You know your terms. So many years, one, ten, thirty – after that you get out.’

  As suddenly Gikonyo checked himself. He could not clearly see Wambui or Warui in the dark. It seemed to him that he had only spoken to empty air.

  ‘Sleep well,’ Gikonyo called outside the house he had recently built.

  Warui and Wambui went away without answering. The empty silence harrowed Gikonyo. He did not want to enter the building. Light from the sitting-room showed through the curtains and glass windows. Mumbi, then, must still be waiting for him. Why can’t she go to bed? He walked away from the light, without knowing where he was going. He resented his recent outburst in the presence of Wambui and Warui. Why could he not control his emotions in Mugo’s hut? A man should never moan. And for Gikonyo, hard work had been a drug against pestering memories.

  He had built a house, one of the best and most modern in the village; he had wealth, albeit small, and a political position in the land: all this a long way from the days of the poor carpenter. Yet these things had ceased to have taste. He ate, not because he enjoyed the food, but a man had to live.

  The village was now far behind. Darkness had thickened. It struck him, like a new experience, that he was alone. He listened. He seemed to hear, in the distance, steps on a pavement. The steps approached him. He walked faster and faster, away from the steps. But the faster he walked, the louder the steps became. He panted. He was hot all over, despite the cold air. Then he started running, madly. His heart beat harder. The steps on the pavement, so near now, rhythmed with his pounding heart. He had to talk to someone. He must hear another human voice. Mugo. But what were mere human voices? Had he not lived with them for six years? In various detention camps? Perhaps he wanted a voice of man who would understand. Mugo. Abruptly he stopped running. The steps on the pavement receded into a distance. They would come again, he knew they would come to plague him. I must talk to Mugo. The words Mugo had spoken at a meeting two years before had touched Gikonyo. Lord, Mugo would know.

  But by the time he reached Mugo’s hut, the heat of his resolution had cooled. He stood outside the door, wondering if he should knock or not: what, really, had he come to tell Mugo? He felt foolish standing there, alone. Maybe he had better come tomorrow. Maybe another time he would know how best to tear his heart before another person.

  At home, he found Mumbi had not yet gone to bed. She brought him food. This reminded him that he had hardly eaten anything the whole day. She sat opposite him and watched him. He tasted a little food and then pushed the rest away. He had lost his appetite.

  ‘Make me a cup of tea,’ he said between his teeth.

  ‘You must eat,’ Mumbi appealed. Her small nose shone with the light from the lamp. The appeal in her eyes and voice belied the calm face and the proud carriage of her well-formed body. Gikonyo stared at the new, well-polished mahogany table. Perhaps he should have called on Mugo for a talk between men.

  ‘I don’t want anything to eat,’ he grunted.

  ‘It’s my food you don’t want.’

  Gikonyo kept quiet. In detention, he had longed to come back to Mumbi. Was this the same woman? He looked at her. She had turned her face to the door. Maybe she was crying.

  ‘I don’t feel like eating, that’s all,’ he said, relenting a little.

  ‘It is all right,’ she whispered. She went to another room in the house and brought cups, a pot, tea-leaves, milk and sugar. She added more charcoal into the burner and carried it out to have it wind-fanned into flames. She stayed out in the dark.

  Gikonyo took out an old exercise-book from an inner pocket of his jacket. He fumbled for a pencil, got it, saw it was broken, and sharpened it with a penknife. He wrote down figures; he added, subtracted, multiplied, cancelled; they stole his concentration so that Gikonyo temporarily forgot other things outside the day’s returns and prospects for business tomorrow.

  Mumbi brought back the fire. She put the pot, full of water, on the fire, and sat again to watch her husband. She appeared expectant, a bird ready to fly at the first sign or word from the master. But Mumbi had learnt to school her desires, to accept what life and fate gave her.

  ‘Did you see Mugo?’ she ventured to ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he say he would lead us?’

  ‘He will think about it.’ Gikonyo did not raise his head from the exercise-book.

  ‘Wambui told me about it.’ She broke into his thoughts. He did not answer.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about it?’ she continued. ‘Don’t forget that Kihika and I come from the same womb.’

  ‘Since when did you and I start sharing secrets?’

  Immediately he hated himself for adopting that tone. He had vowed he would always be polite to her, that he would never let this voice betray any bitter emotion or his inner turmoil.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said, humiliated. ‘I had forgotten that I am a nobody.’

  Tea was soon ready. She poured him some and filled a cup for herself. Then, as if compelled by a great power within, Mumbi left her seat and stood in front of her husband. She put her small hands around his neck, resting them on his shoulders. Her eyes glowed. Her lips trembled.

  ‘Let us talk about it,’ she whispered.

  ‘About what?’ he asked, and raised his head.

  ‘The child.’

  ‘There is nothing to talk about,’ he said with acid
emphasis.

  ‘Then, come to my bed tonight. I have waited for you only, these years.’

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ Gikonyo pulled her arms from around his neck and slightly pushed her away. ‘Please go and sit down. Or better, go to sleep. You are tired.’

  Mumbi stood there, cold. Her breasts heaved up and down. She opened her mouth as if to shout. Then suddenly she grabbed her knitting from the ground and ran to her bedroom. In fact, it was Gikonyo who felt tired, tired and aged. He propped his head with his left hand, the elbow planted on the table. He lifted the pencil with the right hand and tried to scribble a figure. But his hand was not steady, he let the pencil drop. With effort he rose from the seat, took the lamp and for a few seconds stood outside Mumbi’s door. Then he resolutely moved away, towards his bedroom.

  And the Lord spoke unto Moses,

  Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him,

  Thus saith the Lord,

  Let my people go.

  Exodus 8:1

  (verse underlined in red in Kihika’s personal Bible)

  Four

  In the days when European and Indian immigrants wrestled to control Kenya – then any thought of a black person near the seat of power was beyond the reach of the wildest imagination – Mr Rogers, an agricultural officer, travelling by train from Nairobi to Nakuru one day, saw the thick forest at Githima and suddenly felt his planning mind drawn to it. His passion lay, not in politics, a strange thing in those days, but in land development. Why not a Forestry Research Station, he asked himself as the train rumbled towards the escarpment and down to the great valley. Later he went back to Githima to see the forest. His plan began to take shape. He wrote letters to anybody of note and even unsuccessfully sought an interview with the Governor. Mad they thought him: science in dark Africa?

  Githima and the thick forest, like an evil spirit, possessed him. He could not rest; he talked to himself about the scheme, he talked about it to everybody. One day he was crushed by a train at Githima crossing, and he died immediately. Later a Forestry Research Station was set up in the area, not as a tribute to his martyrdom, but as part of a new colonial development plan. Soon Githima Forestry and Agricultural Research Station teemed with European scientists and administrators.

  It is said that the man’s ghost haunts the railway crossing and that every year the rumbling train claims a human sacrifice from the Githima settlement; the latest victim was Dr Henry Van Dyke, a fat, drunken meteorological officer, who had always sworn, so the African workers said, that he would kill himself if Kenyatta was ever set free from Lodwar and Lokitaung. His car crashed into the train soon after Kenyatta’s return home from Maralal. People in Githima, even his enemies, were dismayed by the news. Was this an accident, or had the man committed suicide?

  Karanja, who worked at Githima Library dusting books, keeping them straight in their shelves and writing labels, remembered Dr Van Dyke mostly because of a strange game he sometimes played: he would come up to the African workers, put his arm around their shoulders and then suddenly, he would strike their unsuspecting bottoms. He used to let his hand lie on their buttocks feelingly, breathing out alcohol over the shoulders of his victims. Then unexpectedly he would burst into open and loud laughter. Karanja resented the laughter; he never knew whether Dr Van Dyke expected him to join in it or not. Hence Karanja always settled into a nervous grin which made him hate Dr Van Dyke all the more. Yet the news of the man’s death, his car and body completely mangled by the train, had made Karanja retch.

  Karanja picked a clean stencil from a pile on the table and started writing labels. The books recently bound at Githima belonged to the Ministry of Agriculture, Nairobi. Soon Karanja’s mind lost consciousness of other things. Uhuru or Dr Van Dyke, and he concentrated on the label in hand: STUDIES IN AGRONOMY VOL. – Suddenly he felt a man’s presence in the room. He dropped the stencil and swung round. His face had turned a shade darker. He tried, with difficulty, to control the tremulous pen in his hand.

  ‘Why don’t you people knock at the door before you rush in?’ he hissed at the man standing at the door.

  ‘I knocked, three times.’

  ‘You did not. You always enter as if this was your father’s thingira.’

  ‘I knocked at this door, here.’

  ‘Feebly like a woman? Why can’t you knock hard, hard, like a man circumcised?’ Karanja raised his voice, and banged the table at the same time, to emphasize every point.

  ‘Ask your mother, when I fucked her—’

  ‘You insult my mother, you—’

  ‘Even now I can do it again, or to your sister. It is they who can tell you that Mwaura is a man circumcised.’

  Karanja stood up. The two glared at one another. For a minute it looked as if they would fall to blows.

  ‘You say that to me? Is it to me you throw so many insults?’ he said with venom.

  Mwaura’s lower lip fell. His stomach heaved forward and back. His breathing was quick and heavy. Then he seemed to remember something. He held his tongue.

  ‘Anyway, I’m sorry,’ he suddenly said but in a voice edged with menace.

  ‘So you ought to be. What do you want here?’

  ‘Nothing. Just that Thompson wants to see you, that is all.’ Mwaura went out. Karanja’s mood changed from tension to anxiety. What did Thompson want? Perhaps he would say something about pay. He dusted his khaki overall, passed a comb through his mole-coloured hair and hurried along the corridor towards Thompson’s office. He knocked boldly at the door and entered.

  ‘What is it? Why do you people knock so loud?’

  ‘I thought, I thought you sent for me, sir,’ Karanja said in a thin voice, standing, as he always did before a white person, feet slightly parted, hands linked at the back, all in obsequious attention.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes. You know my house?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Run and tell Mrs Thompson that I’ll not be coming home for lunch. I am going – eh – wait a minute. I’ll give you a letter.’

  John Thompson had, over the years, developed a mania for writing letters. He scribbled notes to everyone. He rarely sent a messenger anywhere, be it to the Director, to the stationery office for paper, or to the workshop for a nail or two, without an accompanying note carefully laying down all the details. Even when it might be easier to see an officer personally he preferred to send a letter.

  Karanja took the note and lingered for a second or two hoping that Thompson would say something about the pay increment for which he had recently applied. The boss, however, resumed his blank stare at the mass of paper on his table.

  John Thompson and Mrs Dickinson used Karanja as their personal messenger. Karanja accepted their missions with resentful alacrity: weren’t there paid messengers at Githima? Mrs Dickinson was the Librarian. She was a young woman who was separated from her husband and she made no secret of living with her boyfriend. She was rarely in the office, but when she was in, men and women would flock to see her and laughter and high-pitched voices would pour out all day. An enthusiast for the East African Safari, she always took part, co-driving with her boyfriend, but she never once finished the course. Her missions were the ones Karanja hated most: often she sent him, for instance, to the African quarters to buy meat for her two dogs.

  Today as he rode his creaking bicycle he was once again full of plans: he would certainly complain to John Thompson about these trivial errands. No, what Karanja resented most was not the missions or their triviality, but the way they affected his standing among the other African workers. But on the whole Karanja would rather endure the humiliation than lose the good name he had built up for himself among the white people. He lived on that name and the power it brought him. At Githima, people believed that a complaint from him was enough to make a man lose his job. Karanja knew their fears. Often when men came into his office, he would suddenly cast them a cold eye, drop hints, or simply growl at them; in this way, he increased their fears and insecurity. But he also feared the men
and alternated this fierce prose with servile friendliness.

  A neatly trimmed hedge of cider shrub surrounded the Thompsons’ bungalow. At the entrance, green creepers coiled on a wood stand, massed into an arch at the top and then fell to the hedge at the sides. The hedge enclosed gardens of flowers: flame lilies, morning glory, sunflowers, bougainvillea. However, it was the gardens of roses that stood out in colour above the others. Mrs Margery Thompson had cultivated red roses, white roses, pink roses – roses of all shades. Now she emerged from this garden of colour and came to the door. She was dressed in thin white trousers and a blouse that seemed suspended from her pointed breasts.

  ‘Come into the house,’ she idly said after reading the note from her husband. She was bored by staying in the house alone. Normally she chatted with her houseboy or with her shamba-boy. At times she quarrelled with them and her raised voice could be heard from the road. Both boys had now left and it was during these few days that she had come to realize how they had been an important part of the house.

  Karanja was surprised because he had never, before, been invited inside the house. He sat at the edge of the chair, his unsteady hands on his knees, and idly stared at the ceiling and at the walls to avoid looking at her breasts.

  Margery felt a sensual power at the fear and discomfiture she inflicted on Karanja. Why did he not look at her? She had often seen him, but never thought of him as a man. Now she was suddenly curious to know what thoughts lay inside his head: what did he think of the house? Of Uhuru? Of her? She let her fancy flow. She warmed all over and stood up, slightly irritated by the thrill.