ROAPE celebrates the life and work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who turned 85 in January this year. Ngũgĩ is a renowned Kenyan writer and scholar, admired for his contributions to African literature and his advocacy of African languages and cultures. Born in Kamiriithu, Kenya, he grew up in a traditional Gikuyu community in the lead-up to Kenyan independence. While at Makerere University in Uganda, Ngũgĩ began writing and became involved in the burgeoning African literary movement. In 1977, he published his famous novel Petals of Blood, which attacked the elite that ruled Kenya after independence. Later that year, he was briefly imprisoned by the Kenyan government for his radical writing and community organising. As part of his commitment to decolonising African literature, Ngũgĩ switched from English to Gikuyu in his own literary practice, and became a lifelong proponent of African writers embracing their indigenous languages.  

To mark the occasion, we share an extract on Ngũgĩ’s early novel A Grain of Wheat (1967), adapted from Sarah Jilani’s forthcoming book Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film (Edinburgh University Press). Jilani explores a selection of Anglophone and Francophone post-independence texts (1950s–1980s) from Africa and South Asia to consider what ‘decolonising the mind’ could mean, and entail. Guided by the psycho-political thought of Frantz Fanon, the book demonstrates how a selection of literary and cinematic narratives from this period help us understand the transformation of subjectivities themselves as a part of the broader, unfinished project that is decolonisation.

 By Sarah Jilani

In a 1975 essay, Chinua Achebe writes: ‘the nationalist movement in British West Africa after the Second World War brought about a mental revolution which began to reconcile us to ourselves’ (145). Achebe here singles out the revolutionary impact nationalist movements could have at the ‘mental’ level, possibly going a great way in bringing about what he calls ‘a reconciliation with oneself’. As Achebe’s words suggest, the power of mid-century nationalist movements at a psycho-political level were considerable. Frantz Fanon describes such mobilisations as conducive to remaking people’s ways of relating to themselves and to their own circumstances, ‘creat[ing] a real dialectic between [the] body and the world’ (Fanon 1952, 83). Yet we also know that the diverse kinds of anti-colonial nationalisms across the Global South had uneven effects. Their darker outcomes in post-independence contexts, like territorial secessions and ethnic conflict, left lasting legacies. The lived experiences and effects of anti-colonial nationalisms are therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, grappled with time and time again in the literary production of the post-independence decades in Africa, from novels to plays, films to poetry.

One example is the 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. An early work that is often overlooked for Ngũgĩ’s later novels such as the polemical Devil on the Cross (1980) or the magisterial Wizard of the Crow (2006), A Grain of Wheat was published as part of the Heinemann African Writers Series when the author was still writing in English as James Ngũgĩ. This novel acknowledges complex and politically urgent questions around the psycho-political possibilities and limits of anti-colonial nationalisms. Following the struggles of two protagonists, Gikonyo and Mugo, A Grain of Wheat works from Fanon’s ‘dialectic between [the] body and the world’ (1952, 83) to explore how people change their relationships to themselves, each other, and to the political energies that marked the Kenyan independence struggle. However, as Gikonyo and Mugo work through the psychic scars of violent anti-colonial resistance and find re-integration into community, women’s subjectivities remain something outside, or other than, the Fanonian ‘self–world’ dialectic that Ngũgĩ’s novel affirms. This makes visible important fault lines in the relationship between the experience of anti-colonial nationalist struggle – even with its powers of ‘mental revolution’ – and its actual outcomes.

The charged relationship between anti-colonial nationalism and gender in A Grain of Wheat is latent. It requires, as scholar Brendon Nicholls proposes, reading against the grain of Ngũgĩ’s main narrative preoccupations in the novel, working both ‘strategically within, and against, the dominant symbolisms of A Grain of Wheat in order to discover the spaces that these texts make available to a female sexual and revolutionary subject’ (Nicholls 2010, 115). Featuring flashbacks and diversions into 150 years of Kenyan history, Wheat focuses on the protracted liberation struggle of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (‘Mau Mau’) from 1952–1960 against British colonial rule. The main narrative takes place over four days in 1963, leading up to Uhuru celebrations that will honour the fallen fighters of the anti-colonial struggle. But several of Wheat’s characters are still grappling with the psychic afterlives of resistance, including guilt, shame, and anger. Various histories (including both Gĩkũyũ and Christian myths) are woven throughout the novel into the daily rhythms of village life, as these characters try to reconcile personal traumas with a collective narrative of victory.

Ngũgĩ’s vision of the Kenyan anti-colonial nationalist struggle and beyond is itself a complex and at times contradictory one. On the one hand, Ngũgĩ himself identifies that ‘the [African] writer in this period was still limited by his inadequate grasp of the full dimension of what was really happening in the sixties: the international and national realignment of class forces and class alliances’ (1986, 11). Yet others have pointed out that this period of his writing was engaged in a multi-dimensional manner with questions of political and social transformation after independence. The novel articulates the principle of community unity, but also foregrounds the lasting effects of violent anti-colonial struggle on individual psyches. It argues decolonisation is only possible if cycles of betrayal are disrupted, yet gives us characters who struggle to move past having betrayed or been betrayed. And it ‘critically investigate[s] the links between nativist politics and hegemonic masculinities’ (Hammond 2011, 115), but cannot entirely sever its dialectical vision from certain patriarchal supports. While all of these are related, it is within the latter tension that we see Ngũgĩ grapple with the possibilities and limits of Fanon’s psycho-political dialectics of liberation.

Many have already read gender as a blind spot in Ngũgĩ’s revolutionary vision, but for reasons as different from one another as Elleke Boehmer’s (2005), who critiques Ngũgĩ’s accentuation of class at the expense of gender, to Peter Mwikisa’s, who proposes that ‘Ngũgĩ is ultimately grappling with issues of his Christian faith’ (2010, 249) rather than advancing revolutionary gender ideals. I am more interested in how this blind spot is consequential to the novel’s politics of decolonisation. More consequential than trying to determine the author’s personal inclinations with regards to women is why the novel excludes them from the kind of dialectical becoming that facilitates Wheat‘s politics.

Wheat positions Gĩkũyũ women as both the moral facilitators of post-independence reconciliation, as well as symbols via which Gĩkũyũ male subjectivities may be re-constituted after the trauma of violent struggle. In this way, the novel is able to reimagine Gĩkũyũ masculinity in ways that serve social healing and nation-building, as critics Kenneth Harrow (1985) and Andrew Hammond (2011) have explored – but at the expense of granting that its female characters could undergo similar psycho-political transformation. Presented as driven either by exclusively political-heroic motivations (Wambui, Mary Nyanjiru) or exclusively sexual-romantic ones (Njeri, Mumbi), Wheat’s women seem to exist outside of the ‘real dialectic between [the] body and the world’ (Fanon 1952, 83) that the story grants its male characters, who move from states of solitary distress to communal wellbeing. This difficulty in imagining that women are also shaped by their lived experiences over time undercuts the psycho-political power Wheat seeks to invest in nation-building.

Collective histories

To trace this, we can first consider how the novel conceives of subjectivity as an accumulation of collective history and lived experience. Both recent (Emergency-era) history and distant history (Gĩkũyũ and biblical mythologies) are consistently woven into daily life in the fictional village where the novel is set. Via flashbacks to the 1950’s, the novel iterates how a sense of the collective past served as a means of resilience during the resistance: ‘Karanja and others collected [in Gikonyo’s workshop] in the evenings, hurled curses and defiance in the air, and reviewed with pride the personal histories of the latest men to join Kihika’ (Ngũgĩ 1967, 101). These stories allow Wheat’s male characters to reassure one another of their loyalty to the struggle. They recall Fanon’s words on how, in a colonial context, ‘disalienation will come from refusing to consider their reality as definitive’ (1952, 201) for the colonised. Here, men living daily with the fear of being captured remember the past and present of Gĩkũyũ resistance, imagining future victory. Fanon’s theorisations as to where the ‘raw material’ (1952, 113) for processes of disalienation may be found here takes the form of the relational and psychic power of shared histories.

These characters’ collective emotional investment in the trial of the Kapenguria Six also functions in this way. Learning of the sham trial’s outcome galvanises the political detainees into action, including the novel’s troubled protagonist Gikonyo: ‘They refused to look into one another’s eyes in order not to read what the other was thinking… Then one night, suddenly, they believed the news, all of the detainees to a man. They did not say their belief to one another, it was only that they gathered together in their compounds and sang’ (104). The inmates sing the Gĩkũyũ creation myth. A connection between the mythological past and political present, performed through song and the memory it sustains, helps them ‘look into one another’s eyes’ (104). The individual shame they had felt in desiring life over martyrdom now turns into unity and resolve.

Christian mythology also grounds the novel’s understanding of subjectivity as, among other things, a location of shared histories. Brendon Nicholls points to Ngũgĩ’s ‘residual sympathy towards Christianity and individualism,’ which for him ‘problematises Ngũgĩ’s Marxian sympathies, because the fictional representatives of collective resistance emerge only as savage killers (Gen. R) or rapists (Koinandu) or self-styled Messianic heroes (Kihika)’ (2010, 87). Nicholls does not elaborate on why the two (Christianity and individualism) are implied to be analogous, when Ngũgĩ’s choice of biblical myths are distinctly informed by ones that help illustrate an anti-individualistic conception of subjectivity. For instance, in a scene describing the Uhuru celebrations, biblical parallels are written into the community’s recitation of resistance history: ‘They sang of Jomo (he came, like a fiery spear among us), his stay in England (Moses sojourned in the land of Pharaoh) and his return (he came riding on a cloud of fire and smoke) to save his children’ (214). Despite occasionally bordering on messianic declarations, the militant character of Kihika also frequently adopts biblical myth to emphasise the motivations behind nationalist struggle. He exclaims: ‘Can’t you see that Cain was wrong? I am my brother’s keeper. Take your whiteman, anywhere, in the settled area. He owns hundreds and hundreds of acres of land. What about the black men who sweat dry on the farms to grow coffee, tea, sisal, wheat and yet only get ten shillings a month?’ (96)

With such links gestured towards between subjectivity and relational histories, Wheat, however, then withholds the same kind of dialectical becoming from women. Where the former should result in the narrative presenting us women’s subjectivities of a similar historicity, they instead appear static. This re-routes what could have been a radical politics of decolonisation in the novel: one that may have brought full circle the novel’s psycho-political investment in anti-colonial nationalism.

The symbol of Woman

Wheat configures women’s bodies as sites of male reconciliation, even when it invests in women as society’s depositories of a latent reconciliatory potential. As Elleke Boehmer points out, ‘it is by singling out female voices, by fixing women beneath the evaluative epithets “vibrant” and “beautiful”, that Ngũgĩ gives way to that tendency to objectify women which qualifies his attempt to grant them a leading role in the revolutionary struggle for Kenyan liberation’ (2005, 42). One way this occurs is through the novel’s reliance on positioning ‘Woman’ as symbol, with the function of making or breaking male bonds. That Mumbi, for example, ‘arous[es] other characters to a better knowledge of themselves’ (Sharma 1984, 207) and ‘is the catalyst that prompts [Mugo] to public confession’ (Nnolim 1984, 219) renders her a disembodied trope that can take on various meanings.

These include becoming a stand-in for psycho-social healing in conversations that facilitate the relationship between Gatu and Gikonyo, and between Mugo and Gikonyo. During detention, Gikonyo experiences a ‘terrible bond being established between [Gatu and himself]. He struggled against this but in the end gave up, so that it was he who first opened his heart to Gatu’ (107). His confession centres around Mumbi, or rather, around all the imaginative weight Gikonyo has assigned her. By recounting their marital bliss, Gikonyo is able to confess (via the sign that is Mumbi/Woman) his guilt about the fact that returning to domestic life, rather than the abstract notion of Kenya’s freedom, is what sustains him throughout imprisonment. When Gatu answers Gikonyo’s confession with a disclosure of his own about a missed opportunity at marriage – where, again, Woman functions as a symbol of ‘all our losses for the cause’ – Gikonyo thinks, ‘weak, weak like any of us’ (108). The having of ‘Woman’ and the loss of her becomes a stand-in for what these men have sacrificed by joining the resistance: patrilineal futurity, psychic unburdening, and sexual comfort.

Sam Radithalo (2001) proposes that, in Wheat, Ngũgĩ invites us to see women’s facilitatorship of male bonding as a vital role that benefits all of society. In his anthropological studies, Richard Werbner (2002) similarly argues that it is often the very undergoing of subjection which constitutes a ‘persuasively influential and dignified female subject in postcolonial intersubjective relations’ (8). The asymmetries of this, however, are stark. Throughout the novel, it is the reclusive Mugo who is assumed by others to be the facilitator of reconciliation, on the basis of an incorrect rumour about his heroism. This is later resolved in Mugo’s narrative; during the Independence celebrations, he confesses he betrayed Kihika’s whereabouts to the colonial authorities, and subsequently feels ‘a load of many years lifted’ (232). Ending his self-imposed isolation, he is free to earn re-integration into community, and to re-constitute his subjectivity. The actual women themselves, like Mumbi, remain symbolic guides, confidants and healers of men.

In addition to the promise of communal re-integration for men, it is not insignificant that Mumbi-as-symbol also becomes the site of a struggle between Gikonyo and the novel’s antagonist, Karanja. The representation of land in Wheat speaks to a historical crux of the Kenyan anti-colonial struggle: the demand for the redistribution of the fertile central uplands in Kenya (still sometimes called ‘The White Highlands’). The British colonial government’s Swynnerton Plan, a colonial agricultural policy aimed at expanding cash-crop productions, was implemented in Kenya in 1954. It concentrated land ownership with the strategy of establishing a new middle class of loyalists in response to the ‘Mau Mau’ uprising. The result was that ‘a new Gĩkũyũ society was born – propertied and propertyless – and left to face an uncertain future in face of the politics of independence’ (Ogot and Ochieng 1995, 25). Mumbi’s body is laden with land symbolisms that speak to these tensions. Unless her body is utilised by the man with the ‘right’ to do so (her husband, the peasant revolutionary Gikonyo), the implication is that it could, vassal-like, be claimed by the ‘wrong’ kind of man (the middle-class loyalist, Karanja). Eventually, Gikonyo’s successful claim upon Mumbi’s body symbolically maps onto (for Ngũgĩ) the righteous claim of the Gĩkũyũ peasant to the land. To that end, the novel’s final moments feature Gikonyo’s political-sexual fantasy: ‘He had never seen himself as father to Mumbi’s children. Now it crossed his mind: what would his child by Mumbi look like?’ (241). The questionable legitimacy of this land claim – especially given the majority advantages of the Gĩkũyũ after independence – diverts the reader from the class irresolutions of Kenyan independence.

Some scholars argue we misinterpret Ngũgĩ’s ‘marked sensitivity to women as nationalists’ (Radithalo 2001, 9) if we miss the autonomy in the female characters’ sexual choices, like Mumbi’s choosing Gikonyo over Karanja. But it would be inconsistent to reach for this limited lens to read Wheat – a novel that, as discussed above, otherwise sustains a dialectical relationship between history and subjectivity. In fact, considering reproductive sexuality in the novel reveals a flip side to the seemingly empowering final reconciliation between Mumbi and Gikonyo. While ‘[Mumbi] was now really aware of her independence. Gikonyo was surprised by the new firmness in her voice’ (242). This hint at her transformation in consciousness is overshadowed by the image that closes the novel: ‘I will carve a woman big — big with child’ Gikonyo thinks to himself (243). This prophetic pronouncement on the nation-about-to-be-born counterpoises the woman with the ‘new firmness in her voice’, and what the latter could mean for the future of decolonisation.

The ‘new man‘ and nationalist struggle

While the symbol of ‘Woman’ in this way functions in the service of male bonding and nation-building, Wheat’s secondary cast of female characters complicate this. Applying Nicholls’ (2010) idea of an ‘interested reading’ that must to an extent ‘work strategically against’ the novel’s dominant symbolisms, we can explore this paradox as an irresolution: one that is potentially fruitful for understanding the complex triangulation between gender, subjectivity and history in this post-independence novel. In Wheat, a chain of events implicate all characters in the nation’s making, regardless of their personal desires for non-involvement. Wangari, Gikonyo’s mother, becomes an important character in this regard. Whereas Mumbi’s mother admonishes her daughter for excessive pride when Mumbi returns to her childhood home after Gikonyo slaps her, Wangari challenges her son. ‘Wangari stood up and shook her front right finger at him. ‘You. You. If today you were a baby crawling on your knees I would pinch your thighs so hard you would learn,’ (172) she says to a raging Gikonyo. Wangari here sees through her son’s anger and knows it to be a misplaced attempt at dealing with his ‘thingification’ under detention. This word with psycho-political inflections was coined by Aimé Césaire (1950, 43) and echoed later by Fanon: ‘the “thing” which has been colonised’ (1961, 37). In not ‘knowing himself’, his mother seems to imply, Gikonyo is losing sight of the pending task of his own ‘dis-subjection’ (Cherki 2000, 262) – of refusing to ‘thingify’ others because he himself was ‘thingified’ by colonial violence. Wangari repeatedly reminds Gikonyo that decolonisation involves reconstituting his subjectivity: ‘Let us see what profit it will bring you, to go on poisoning your mind […] Read your own heart, and know yourself’ (172). In doing so, she raises a question the novel does not pursue: did what the anti-colonial fighters go through during the Emergency indeed have psycho-politically transformative results?

Bethwell A. Ogot (2003) describes how Mau Mau was not an exclusively Gĩkũyũ anti-colonial movement, pointing out that several Gĩkũyũ leaders who occupied positions of power after independence did not accept its radical redistributive demands. As such, a generalisation cannot be made about one ‘kind’ of Mau Mau strategy, recruit, or experience. Evan Mwangi (2009) also notes that, while ethnicity and class have been discussed by historians of the Mau Mau movement, ‘gender and sexuality as analytic categories in Kenyan historiography of decolonisation as presented in art have not been systematically explored’ (90). In light of these ambiguities around what Mau Mau was and how it continues to be narrated, Wangari’s question is a discomfiting but important one to ask – especially for a novel that maintains that to live in, and for, community is the condition of collective transformation out of the legacies of colonialism. Wangari’s warning to Gikonyo implies those who fought in anti-colonial nationalist struggle cannot straightforwardly assume to have ‘decolonised their minds’ (Ngũgĩ 1986). An ontological re-alignment with others and commitment to (self-)transformation is necessary, too, of the moral victors of the struggle.

So while the novel condemns collaborators like Karanja for not having sacrificed much, it also gestures to a problem that concerns peasant freedom fighters like Gikonyo and Mugo. Looking to undo the emasculating experience of detention via enacting gendered violence brings Gikonyo no peace. Interestingly, in this way, Ngũgĩ both strategically minimises the question of Mau Mau men’s political consciousness, and writes a peripheral woman who flags up the path of inquiry left untrodden. Individuals who are ‘involved in the active work of destroying an inhibitive social structure and building a new one begin to see themselves,’ Ngũgĩ writes in Homecoming (1972, 10). Wangari’s call to Gikonyo to ‘know himself’ (172) suggests that, Gikonyo is not yet thinking in terms of Fanon’s ‘real leap’ of ‘introducing invention’ (1952, 204) at either the intimate or social level.

Sexual politics and/in resistance

 Decolonisation in Wheat is a sacrificial project that involves the complex coming-to-terms with one’s own betrayals and fears, as part of the process. All can then emerge with a new consciousness, directing collective labours towards nation-building. But just as the novel struggles to incorporate Mumbi into this dialectical view, the same transpires with the character of Njeri, a woman who contends for Kihika’s affections. In contrast to Mumbi’s function as facilitator of male-to-male relations, the novel’s treatment of a militant woman, Njeri, genders the politics of nationalist motivation. She is one of few in a story deeply occupied with the notion of loyalty — to oneself, to one’s community, and to anti-colonial struggle — who emerges perhaps faultless. Njeri taunts Kihika’s lover Wambuku for expecting Kihika to remain out of the action. Instead, ‘letting loose her long-suppressed anger… [Njeri pledges,] “I will come to you, my handsome warrior,” trembling with the knowledge that she had made an irrevocable promise to Kihika’ (101). Honouring her sexual and political promise, she joins Kihika in the forest and dies as Mau Mau. Where does this leave the subjectivity of a character like Njeri, whose actions we are told stem from ‘long-suppressed anger’ towards the trappings of her gender on the one hand, and from her desire for Kihika, on the other?

Njeri’s loyalty and passion (which men like Gikonyo wrestle with trying to sustain, then grapple with the shame of failing to) seem the ‘wrong’ kind for nation-building. Indeed, Njeri’s actions are written through the assumption of their stemming from a rage that emasculates. Despite her reputation as a fighter preceding her attraction to Kihika, the novel suggests her political militancy arose solely out of jealousy: ‘[Njeri] felt superior and stronger and she could not help her contempt for Wambuku’ (100). Whereas the narrative affirms that Mau Mau men’s lived experiences – both of land dispossession and torture at the hands of colonial forces – motivates their resistance, it struggles with the implications of a political consciousness borne of lived experience in women. The combination of rage (at her social powerlessness) and desire (for both Kihika the man and the political ideal) that motivate Njeri’s actions are deemed inappropriate at a time when Gĩkũyũ masculinity is fragile.

Recent scholarship has established that Mau Mau women’s detention and punishment were similar to that of their male counterparts. The British detained approximately 8000 women under the Emergency (Bruce-Lockhart 2014). Why, then, would Njeri’s anger and loyalty mark her an outlier? Sociologist Srila Roy’s discussion of gender as central to the moral economy of radical political violence helps illuminate this: ‘Given that women have been historically and conceptually excluded from the public realm, and marked as “other” even upon inclusion, political participation entails varying degrees of “ontological complicity”, including acquiescing in the power hierarchies within which they are located’ (2014, 183-4). This raises the question of what is at stake in ‘attaining “composure” through normative (political) identities’ (Roy 2014, 183), which is precisely what Njeri defies when she arrives at political commitment through sexual rebellion.

As we have seen that, in Wheat, ‘female identities and anatomies became symbolically bound to motherhood and to the nation — at the expense of female political agency and female sexual agency’ (Nicholls 101), Njeri’s choice is significant. Like Wangari, she presents an unfulfilled opportunity for the novel to pursue the full complexity of gender vis-a-vis radical nationalist politics. In what ways — other than requiring the ‘ontological complicity’ of women — could the relationship between gender and nationalism inform the transformation of subjectivities? How would such transformations effect the trajectory of decolonisation? Wheat hurries over its markedly ‘other’ woman, whose actions bring to mind how, for Fanon, ‘the beginnings of decolonisation’ are to be sought ‘within life itself’ (Clare 2013, 63), where we desire and act upon desires.

In some of the above ways, A Grain of Wheat centres the re-socialisation of Gĩkũyũ men to the project of decolonisation. Despite its political vision, the novel struggles to imagine women’s subjectivities in a dialectical relationship with their material conditions. The latter transform over the course of the narrative only insofar as doing so makes a revolutionary masculinity possible after the trials of anti-colonial struggle. When women’s actions are deemed in ‘excess’ to this task (as are Njeri’s and Wangari’s), the narrative intriguingly acknowledges, but does not pursue, this challenge. As such, although Ngũgĩ builds a dialectic that conceives of subjectivity and its transformation as an historical and embodied, the reduction to symbols of a complex set of female characters’ subjectivities weakens the dialectical becoming that is at the heart of this post-independence novel. While there is no doubt that Wheat remains a milestone in Anglophone African writing, its grappling with gender invites deeper reading into the possibilities and limits of understanding anti-colonial nationalism as a source of ‘mental revolution’ (Achebe 1975, 145) during the independence period. Ngũgĩ’s text crucially brings into view how any vision of liberation must overcome a tendency to treat the re-constitution of subjectivities – of ‘decolonising the mind’, in Ngũgĩ’s own words (1986) – as a process that men undergo, and women merely facilitate.

Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in Anglophone world literatures at City, University of London. Her research interests include subjectivity, decolonisation and political consciousness in African and South Asian novels and films. She has published widely and broadcast radio programmes on a range of related topics.

Featured photograph: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o giving a talk in 2019 (Wiki Commons)