Assignment paper no: 14 African Literature

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A Critical not of Anti-Colonial Struggle in Grain of Wheat

                                        Name: Mital Raval

                                        Roll No: 18

                                       M.A. SEM: 4

                             Batch Year: 2016 – 2018

                      Enrollment No: 2069108420170026

                    Email Id: ravalmital5292@gmail.com

                          Paper Name: The African Literature

                            Submitted to: Dr. Dilip Barad

                                      Smt. S. b. Gardi

                                 Department of English

                             M .k. Bhavnagar University

Assignment Topic: A Critical not on Anti-Colonial Struggle in Grain of Wheat.

Ngugi Wa Thiango:

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan writer, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mutiri. His famous work are,

·       Hermit (1996)

·       Weep not, child (1964)

·       The River between (1995)

·       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: Brief introduction

         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 anticolonial 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.

            A Grain of wheat’ more focuses on the socio-political 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:

                                                                

       

         

     It was during a raid on the oathing ceremonies at Naivasha that the police party is first reported to have heard the term 'Mau Mau', a name with which they subsequently tried to damn the entire national freedom movement in Kenya, although as Kaggia says, 'we ourselves had no particular name for it in the early days'. The world 'Mau Mau' has no meaning in either Gikuyu or Swahili and there are interesting speculations about its origin. Some suggested that the expression was arrived at through transposition of the world 'Uma-Umal—out, out--in Gikuyu, which referred to the desire of the Africans that the Europeans leave Kenya. 

        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 reconsolidating the collective identity of Kenyans in the post-independence era.

Anti-colonial resistance in ‘A Grain of wheat’:-

         “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed,
          for it influences individuals and modifiesthem                                  
           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 potentially disruptive influences from the margins, while forcefully inundating those margins with disempowering 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 syncretic 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. (Rasila)

          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 black man”, but rather as the two entirely separate and discrete entities of "white man" and "black man."

       The novel ends with Uruhu. Kenyan independence is the end era, and beginning of a new one. No one knows what is coming, good or bad. Political corruption corruption certainly exists, and the wealthy seem to remain wealthy while the poor remain poor.Still, Uruhu means change, and change means hope. The celebration is a coming together of the people a time for unity in the quest to move forward.

       The rase is a central point of chapter 14. Each runner has his own experience, and running seems to free the runner’s minds to wander over their pasts, their goals and hopes. And their disappointments. The rase seems to be almost a replay of the past, at this moment of moving into the future. Gikonyo and karanja go back to a pivotal time in their lives, the day when Gikonyo and mumbi first express their love for each other. Karanja s disappointment and bitterness begins at this moment, when he realizes that Gikonyo and mumbi are off together. Gikonyo s bitterness and disappointment also begin at this moment, though it is a moment of joy for him. Gaining mumbi as a lover means that Gikonyo is risking his heart. By racing against each other. Both Gikonyo and karanja hope to recover heir pride and mumbi. Neither can win this race.

         Mugo, mean while, has struggled with his guilt. He also has looked toward the past at this moment of moving into the future. He finds that he cannot live with the guilt that he feels. He must confess and at the end he also died because of his betrayal. (Jumani)

 Thank you...

Works Cited

Jumani, Pooja. 'A Grain of Wheat' as an Anti- colonial struggle. 06 April 2013. 9 March 2018. <http://jumanipooja07201112.blogspot.in/2013/04/a-grain-of-wheat-as-anti-colonial_6.html>.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 28 February 2018. 09 March 2018. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C5%A9g%C4%A9_wa_Thiong%27o>.

Pydah, Dr. Meena. "The Language of Discord in The Novels of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o." Internatinal journal of english language, literature and humanity 4.5 (2014): 13. English. 09 March 2018. <http://ijellh.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/The-Language-of-Discord-in-The-Novels-of-Ngugi-Wa-Thiongo.pdf>.

Rasila. Critical note on the Anti-colonial Struggle as depicted in Ngugi WA Thiango’s “A Grain of Wheat”. 20 March 2015. 09 March 2018. <http://jambucharasila.blogspot.in/2015/03/critical-note-on-anti-colonial-struggle.html>.