The concept of 'Uhuru' in A Grain of Wheat

Name: Joshi Toral

Paper: 2 The African Literature

Topic:The concept of 'Uhuru' in A Grain of Wheat

SEM: 4,

M.A. part 2.

Year: 2012

Submitted to,

Dr.Dilip Barad,

M.K Bhavnagar University,

Bhavnagar

Introduction

A Grain of Wheat is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s third novel, and marks a significant turn in his literary production, as a Marxist and Favonian militant attitude replaces the liberal Christians of his first works.  The action of the novel focuses on the protagonists’ remembrances of the ‘Mau Mau’ Revolt, which Ngugi sees as the only historical moment which allows “the space to imagine the birth of a new Kenya”.

The way these events are recounted and reshaped is a collective one, as a shifting focalization and a complex time structure create a polyphonic, choral-narrative that shows in detail the physical, psychological and political impact of Revolt on individuals living in a small community.

The novel pivots on the transitional point of Kenya’s independence on 12 December 1963, beginning with the last four day of Kenya under colonial rule and reaching its narrative peak on the very day of “Uhuru”?

Ø Meaning of “Uhuru”:

Meaning of ‘Uhuru’ means a ‘Freedom’ .Ngugi’s choice not to translate this term is significant, as in the novel the definition of the actual meaning if Uhuru is an open political and social question: the new Kenyan bourgeoisie sees it indeed as the possibility to replace the colonizer without changing the existing social, political and economical structure, whereas for Gikuyu peasants Uhuru means a profound break with the colonial past, a rebirth which has to bring about the restitution of the lands usurped by the white settles and the eradication of the poverty. The meaning of Uhuru is thus a central question, quite far from being obvious; so much so that Ngugi clarifies what Uhuru should be only in the 1986 version of the novel.

The former “Mau Mau” guerilla General R.Staes in his Independence speech.

“We get Uhuru today. But what’s the meaning of ‘Uhuru’? It is contained in the name of our movement: Land and Freedom”.

The whole novel can indeed be summarized as a collective act of recalling and reflecting on the events leading Uhuru, in order to understand what actual meaning it could have for Thabai peasants. It is precisely in the past that ‘ A Grain of Wheat’ constructs a narration of the nation: the pedagogic moment materializes in a prerogative moment disseminated in lots of narratives, each of which is a speech act.

“The narration becomes therefore an active construction of the past, an act of writing, in the sense of modeling.”

The novel dissipates this celebratory mood by representing and re-examining the hurts from the past: the wreckages brought out by the Mau Mau rebellion-disloyalties and betrayals, broken from the suppressed memories to haunt the present.

“The idea of a sociological organism moving cylindrically through homogeneous, empty time is a price analogical of the idea of the nation”.

The novel is about how the villagers of a Gikuyu village, Thabai, are busy preparing for their,

“Uhuru Celebrations”

That would be held on Kenya’s Independence Day. To commemorate this significant day that signals Kenya’s “freedom”, the village of Thabai decide to prepare a public honoring of their village hero, Kihika, a Mau Mau rebel who sacrificed his life to fight for Kenya’s freedom during the Mau Mau rebellion.

Throughout A Grain godhead, the Thabai villagers are indeed seen to be hailed seen to be hailed by this call of a ‘Nation’. As part of the efforts to persuade the “hermit” Mugo to lead Thabai’s Uhuru celebration, warui one of the representative sent by the Thabai villagers to visit.

Mugo says:

“We of Thabai village must also dance our part”

The construction of the nation in A Grain of Wheat is explicitly represented as a narration, a linguistic act; indeed most of the events of the Revolt are not related directly, but refracted through the conscience of its heroes and heroines: it is their narration which is represented, and it is through their narration that those historical events are relived, following a narrative strategy typical of or a true.

“Every significant development either consists of or turns on acts of speech or their absence”.

The events are evoked and put one beside the other as mosaic teasers through the heroes’ dialogues, confessions and free indirect style monologues. Most of the action actually consists of.

“An intricate network of speech-acts performed and unperformed, acknowledged and unacknowledged”.

“A great deal of it centers on bringing ergon into proper relation with logos”

“Creating instability about what is know and what it means to know”

Ngugi’s literary representation of the Mau Mau rebellion in this novel A Grain of Wheat (1967). Ngugi’s Trans gression of the boundary between historic and literary writing has led to his failure as a writer, I argue that as “a literary-historical artist.

The moment of independence, the novel attempts to explore both the past the Mau Mau rebellion and the possible future it brings to Kenyans. The meaning of “independence” to question the meaning of “freedom”. That dramatization of the “disillusionment of the moment of independence”, Ngugi has represented the crisis.