A Grain of Wheat (3 page)

Introduction by
A
BDULRAZAK
G
URNAH

A GRAIN OF WHEAT

Note: In discussing this story, it has sometimes been unavoidable that crucial elements of the plot have been given away. Readers encountering this story for the first time, therefore, might prefer to read this introduction afterwards
.

Ng
g
wa Thiong’o is now established as a major African writer and one of the continent’s foremost intellectuals, among the few most important of that gifted decolonizing era. He achieved his greatest fame during and after his detention by the Kenya government in 1977–8, and later as a result of his arguments against African writers using English as their writing language. Although he did not initiate this debate about language, Ng
g
has become its most renowned and most determined advocate. His own fiction since the 1978 detention has been in G
kùy
, followed by translation into English. His critical and political writing (and the two have overlapped from the beginning) has focused ever more sharply on issues of culture and language.
A Grain of Wheat
came at a crucial moment in the radicalization of Ng
g
’s thinking, most dramatically evident here in the way the writing moves from the single-character focus of the earlier novels to the social epic mode of the later ones.

Ng
g
wrote
A Grain of Wheat
at Leeds University in England, in the years 1964–6, when he was a postgraduate student there on a British Council scholarship. In the event he did not receive the research MA he was working on (on the work of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming), because instead of completing revisions to his thesis, he read widely and wrote
A Grain of Wheat
. He was then twenty-eight and already the author of two novels,
Weep Not, Child
(1964) and
The
River Between
(1965), both of which were published while he was at Leeds. It was also during this period that he first read Frantz Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth
, as well as Marx and Engels, and later cited these writers, and Engels in particular, as important to the writing of the novel. These influences became much more evident in his next novel
Petals of Blood
(1977) and beyond. Ng
g
revised
A Grain of Wheat
in 1987, to make the ‘world outlook’ of his peasants more in line with his ideas of the historical triumph of the oppressed. But if Fanon and Engels played their part in Ng
g
’s thinking during the writing of this novel, then so did Joseph Conrad. Ng
g
’s special subject for his undergraduate degree was the writing of Conrad, and one of the novels he studied was
Under Western Eyes
. There are parallels in method as well as subject between the two novels — we will return to these later.