A Grain of Wheat
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Four days before Uhuru, a village guards a secret betrayal.
Set in the village of Thabai during the days before Kenya's 1963 independence, it braids competing memories of the Mau Mau struggle around a hidden act of betrayal. Ngugi abandoned the single hero for a communal cast, absorbing Fanon and Conrad, and asked who truly earned freedom. It became a foundational Kenyan novel of independence, reframing the anti-colonial war as morally tangled rather than triumphant.
Its legacy. It anchored the East African independence novel.
- Author
- Ngugi wa Thiong'o
- First published
- 1967
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- East, Southern and North African Literature
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