Ngugi WA Thiango:-
He was
born in January 5th, 1938 is a Kenyan author, formerly working in
English and now working in Gikuyu. He is the founder and editor of the
Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiri. His famous works are,
·
Hermit(1996)
·
Weep Not,
child(1964)
·
The River
between(1965)
·
A Grain of
wheat(1967)
He arises the concept such as
negritude nation and nationalism. Fanon
defined anti-colonial nationalism. He might recap following points in the
novel. He asserts the rights of colonized peoples to make their own
self-definition, rather than he defined by colonizers. He offers the means to
identify alternative histories, cultural tradition and knowledge which conflict
with the representations of colonial discourse. He presents the cultural
inheritance of the colonized people in defense of colonial discourse, etc. his
prime focus is on ordinary people, not their leaders. His narrative constitutes
a vital attempt to give voice to the people’s collective identity and history.
A Grain of Wheat:-
A Grain
of wheat is set during the four days leading up to Uhuru. Its central
characters are the member of peasant society of Thabai Ridge, and through their
memories Ngugi examines how the struggle for independence impacted on the
ordinary lives. Much of the novel occurs in flashback and hears witness to the
Mau Mau rebellion rule.
Each
character have their own chequred past of them, Kihika is remembered as one of
the heroes of the anti-colonial movement and had fought as a freedom fighter in
the hills. Another key is Mugo. He is celebrated for defending female
villagers, Wamburu, from being beaten while digging a trench for the
authorities. The novel focuses on a specific location common to all the
character. Kihika attended a Church of Scotland school where he received a
Christian education and became obsessed with the story of Moses and the
children of Israel. Kihika’s knowledge of the Bible is used to resist the
colonial teaching he is exposed to Kihika finds inspiration in the Biblical
story of Moses which provides him with a way of rationalizing and mitigating
Kenyan resistance Kihika preaches the importance of collective action that is
rather than individual endeavor in his advocacy of anti colonial resistance.
Throughout
the novel there remains a tension between individual and collective action that
is never fully resolved. A grain of wheat presents the village of Thabai as a
community whose characters are obsessed with the discovery of a betrayer of the
‘Mau Mau’ revolution in the week before Kenyan independence. While uncovering
the “Judas” betrayer other betrayals of the community are explored. ‘A Grain of
Wheat’, with no central character, the communal consciousness is the village of
Thabai itself.
Novel
published in 1967, which is his third novel. ‘A Grain of wheat’ more focuses on
the sociopolitical domains, depicting the long-standing struggle of the
peasants against British rule. He allows the reader to delve more deeply into
the complicated psychology of the main characters both as individual subjects
and community members who are profoundly affected by colonialism in different
ways.
The Representation of
the Mau Mau Movement:-
Mau Mau
rebellion has been known in Africa and worldwide as an anti-colonial movement,
it has been recorded in the British memory and history as an atavistic and
fanatic movement which resisted western modernity and civilization.
“What’s this thing called Mau Mau?”
A grain
of wheat can be called a traditional novel for Ngugi as its thematic focuses
moves toward militant nationalism. Mau Mau has long been a controversial
historical topic not only among the Europeans but the Kenyans themselves as
they argue over whether or not it was a primitive and irrational movement lead
by the religiously fanatic Gikuyu and how it should be remembered in national
history. In a nationalist reading, a grain of Wheat can be said to be Ngugi’s
project to speak for the Mau Mau movement as he tries to contest the history of
the Mau Mau as written by the British. The contestation is significant in a
sense that it aims at re-consolidating the collective identity of Kenyans in the
post-independence era.
Hybridity and
anti-colonial resistance in ‘A Grain of wheat’:-
“Decolonization
never takes place unnoticed,
for it influences individuals and modifies
them fundamentally.” -------- (Fanon)
Although
Hybridity theory is steadily gaining currency in the academic realms of
literary and cultural studies, its critical opponents continue to assert the
need to conceptualize identity in oppositional terms in context of
anti-colonial resistance. Colonial structures are virtually impenetrable
monoliths: they are able to withstand and co-pot potentially disruptive influences
from the margins, while forcefully inundating those margins with dis-empowering
colonial ideologies which act to strengthen and perpetuate colonialism.
In many
ways Ngugi WA Thiango’s ‘A grain of wheat’ validates such as a critique of
Hybridity, for it demonstrates that synthetic process between colonized and
colonizers are, if not of entirely unidirectional, at least heavily weighted in
favor of the British at the expense of the Gikuyu. Hybridity operate to expose
the contradictory violence inherent in the idea of a benevolent colonialism,
the potentially disruptive process in neutralized, if not by the inherent
rigidity of the Manichean colonial mind-set, then most certainly by the force
of its supporting governmental structures.
Gikonyo
and Mumbi figure prominently in Ngugi’s critique of western individualization:
the only hope for the renewal of their relationship and of the larger Gikuyu
community whom they symbolize lies in a rejection of western influence in favor
of the retrieval of pre-colonial conceptions of identity. Thiango qualifies
this point, however, by demonstrating, through the character and example of
Mumbi, that certain aspects of tradition (i.e. its patriarchal emphasis) must
be revalued if the effects of Uhuru are to be pervasive and meaningful within
Gikuyu culture.
In
terms of Gikuyu British relations, the text reveals the need for oppositional
conceptions of identity crystallized in violent resistance to colonial
oppression. On the other hand, however, the text gestures toward a
whole-hearted embracement of a hybridized conception of identity within Gikuyu
society as the basis for the revitalization of a community brutalized by the violence
of the colonial encounter.
A grain
of wheat is firmly grounded in western cultural and literary conventions. The
novels very title carries an intertextual reference to Christian discourse; and
although Ngugi subverts the teaching contained in the scriptural passage by
associating the “gain” with the Gikuyu tradition of anti-colonial resistance,
the intertextual echoes which remain in the title point not to a discrete Gikuyu
cultural identity but rather to a Gikuyu-European cultural syncretism.
Thiango’s
employment of a realist mode of representation throughout the novel, while
serving to emphasize the horror of British colonialism by creating what M. H. Abrams
refers to as,
“the illusion of actual and ordinary experience”
demonstrates once again the extent of Thiango’s own
westernization and concern with British cultural conventions. Although novel
was written prior to the author’s personal “radicalization”, however, the move
toward decolonization and cultural self-apprehension, though largely absent
from the novels title, language, and representational mode, is clearly evident
in its characterization and thematic concerns, supporting Thiango’s own
assertion that the novel is about the “Kenyan people’s struggle to claim their
own space.”
In
dealing with an historical context marked by such total incommensurability
between colonial and native interpretive frameworks, it is not surprising that
Thiango constructs a rigid oppositional binary between colonizers and colonized
in the novel. The absence of common ground between the two cultural groupings
is emphasized dramatically by the very terms employed in the openings pages of
the novel to distinguish them: settlers and indigene are refined to hot as
“while man and black man”, but rather as the two entirely separate and discrete
entities of “Whiteman” and “Blackman”.
In ‘A
grain of wheat’, the dynamics of colonial ideology are embodied most succinctly
in the figure of John Thompson, whom
many Kenyans perceive as “the symbol of Whiteman’s government and supremacy”.
His subsequent transformation from liberal humanist thinker to colonial tyrant
is not the result of ‘comparative collapse of ideas’, as peter Nazareth has
suggested; his fall into infamy reveals, rather, severe problems with the
ideals themselves. It must be remembered that the two men who inspire
Thompson’s colonial vision are Africans “who in dress, in speech and in
intellectual power were no different from the British”.
In
novel more set of contradictions in Thompson’s literal ideology found. These
contradictions pertain to Thompson’s reactions to situations which he should view,
according to his own “great moral idea” of global potential for human equality
under British imperialism, as signifying the accomplishment of his colonists
‘mission’.
First: If Mau Mau supporters are criminals, then it follow that Gikuyu people who do in fact cooperate with British colonial law should be treated with the respect due to equals. Thompson’s habituated mistreatment of Karanja, the Gikuyu collaborator, the, reveals further the extent of his own hypocrisy, for Thompson’s refuses to acknowledge any dependency on Karanja, not to mention any praternity based on a shared vision or purpose. Indeed, to Thompson Karanja is an object of contempt. Despite the qualities witch the colonial regime attributes to him-“faithfulness, integrity and courage” Karanja can never be more than “a trusted servant”.
First: If Mau Mau supporters are criminals, then it follow that Gikuyu people who do in fact cooperate with British colonial law should be treated with the respect due to equals. Thompson’s habituated mistreatment of Karanja, the Gikuyu collaborator, the, reveals further the extent of his own hypocrisy, for Thompson’s refuses to acknowledge any dependency on Karanja, not to mention any praternity based on a shared vision or purpose. Indeed, to Thompson Karanja is an object of contempt. Despite the qualities witch the colonial regime attributes to him-“faithfulness, integrity and courage” Karanja can never be more than “a trusted servant”.
Second:Thompson’s attitude to Kenyan
independence must be analyzed, for, according to his own youthful ideals, Uhuru
could logically be seen as the ultimate accomplishment of the British endeavor “to
reorient” its colonial subjects and to actualize their essential equality.
Thompson’s characteristic not only helps to explain Thiango’s construction in A
grain of wheat of a rigid binary separating Gikuyu self and British other, they
also reveal and justify the need for violent anti-colonial resistance strategies
on the Kenyan people.
Mugo is the representative of the
hybrid imagination in ‘A grain of wheat’. Certainly, he shows evidence of
resisting the polarized viewpoint advocated by Kihika and his followers. His
refusal of Kihika’s oppositional politics is made apparent in one chapter in
the novel; when the aspiring revolutionary leader speaks at a meeting of the
movement held at Rung’ei market, Mugo is repulsed by the violence of his words,
for Kihika speaks,
“of blood as easily as if he was talking of drawing water
in a river”.
Throughout the novel Mugo resist all overt participation in
the movement, continually seeking to escape the pressur of military
conscription and political participation. When Mugo gives his first speech to
the people after arriving home from the British concentration camps, he is the
only speaker who does not employing an empty and formulatic nationalistic
rhetoric crediting his survival to revolutionary inspiration.
Mugo,
in high contrast, gives a more truthful account of the feelings of the
imprisoned man during political incarceration one which privileges the
non-revolutionary forces of family and community over the pull of nationhood.
The other former prisoners admire Mugo
for speaking the truth rather than a homogeneous construction of “truth” based
on an uncompromisingly appositional and largely fictious nationalistic favor;
his speech becomes the stuff of legends, and engenders a desire among the
villagers to have him lead them as their chief.
In ‘A
grain of wheat’, the relationship between Gikonyo
and Mumbi best dramatizes the tension between individualistic and communal
emphases of identity. Gikonyo change, largely attribute to the presence in
Kenyan of colonial military violence and the ideology of western capitalist
individualism, symbolizes the loss of communal world view and the advent
individualistic dissociation in the colonized society.
Gikonyo’s
internal response to Mumbi’s challenge to his traditional authority, his
knowledge “that in future he would reckon with her feelings, her thoughts, her
desires-a new Mumbi”, suggest that a change in the status of colonized people
must be accompanied by a change in the status of women in Gikuyu society as
well. The gender based binarism which enables Gikonyo, after his return from
prison, to co opt Mumbi’s voice and debate the nature of family and community
life must be dismantled to open the way for the emergence of the “decolonized”
women and a new hybridized conceptualization
of the relationship between men and women. If Mumbi is the archetypal women in
‘A Grain of wheat’, then Thiango does nothing less than question the
suitability of the traditional archetype itself as a model for gendered
behavior in the context of the new, post-colonial Kenyan. Moreover, Thiango’s
open ended conclusion suggests, to a certain extent, that he himself will not
presume to prescribe the exact nature of
the impending dialogue, examination, and planning between reforming Gikonyo and
a “new, unspecified Mumbi”.
Reference
