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different ways, but they also betray themselves, as does Mumbi. Through the guilt they suffer, they arrive at a point of understanding and self-knowledge, and so in the end the novel offers a possibility of regeneration. In this sense,
A Grain of Wheat
is also a moral narrative.
    Ngghas said of the 1967 version of
A Grain of Wheat
that his ‘peasant and worker characters’ had the ‘vacillating mentality of the petite bourgeoisie’. A lot had happened to the author between 1967 and 1987. He changed his name from James Nggto the more correct Gkùyform of Nggwa Thiong’o (Thiong’o was his father’s name). The change was not just a desire to be more culturally correct, it was also a rejection of that ‘missionary’ construction ‘James’. The legal change of name took place in November 1977, but by then Ngghad already publicly and repeatedly repudiated the influence of Christian missionary teaching. By the mid-70s he was writing in Gkùyas Nggwa Thiong’o, working on agitprop plays in collaboration with other writers and in ‘peasant’ workshops. The thrust of his work by now was to see how writing could intervene in social change, how it could be instrumental to progress. It was this that finally panicked the government into detaining him for a year in December 1977. It was a powerful demonstration of Ngg’s argument about which writing language was appropriate for the African writer. It was not that the play
Ngaahika Ndeenda
(I Will Marry When I Want) was makingunprecedented criticisms, but that it was written in Gkùyand was comprehensible to ordinary citizens, and was therefore ‘subversive’, that led to his detention. Only a few months before his detention, Ngghad published
Petals of Blood
, which was sharply critical of the governing culture of Kenya without appearing to cause the authorities any anxiety. It was even launched by the Vice-President of Kenya Mwai Kibaki, in a public demonstration of the government’s commitment to ‘free speech’. A critical play in Gkùy, though, was another matter.
    On his release, the government dismissed him from his academic job, and finally harassed him out of the country in 1982. The government that did this was led by the same Jomo Kenyatta who is everywhere lauded in
A Grain of Wheat
as the saviour of his people. The muted warning against betrayal of independence that Ngghad sounded in
A Grain of Wheat
had been proved devastatingly correct, and not only in his personal case. As Ngg’s work grew progressively more ‘radical’, it is only consistent that he should want the ‘world view’ of his peasants to reflect the historical triumph of the oppressed rather than a nagging conviction that progress comes at a heavy price. The 1987 revisions do not do very much to improve the novel, but nor are they deep enough to diminish the power and the subtlety of its narrative play and its compulsive drama. Ngg’s work has been influential and provocative from the beginning, and in that impressive body of work,
A Grain of Wheat
is his most humane and persuasive novel.
    Abdulrazak Gurnah
    2002

For Dorothy

Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.
    1 Corinthians 15:36
    Although set in contemporary Kenya, all the characters in this book are fictitious. Names like that of Jomo Kenyatta and Waiyaki are unavoidably mentioned as part of the history and institutions of our country. But the situation and the problems are real — sometimes too painfully real for the peasants who fought the British yet who now see all that they fought for being put on one side.
    Nggwa Thiong’o
    Leeds, November
1966

A Grain of Wheat

One
    Mugo felt nervous. He was lying on his back and looking at the roof. Sooty locks hung from the fern and grass thatch and all pointed at his heart. A clear drop of water was delicately suspended above