Ngugi’s retrospective gaze: The shape of history in" A grain of wheat"

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s engagement with history in A Grain of Wheat has been commented upon by critics differently. G.D. Killam (201) and Andrew Gurr (92) view it within the post-colonial frame in which ‘received history is tampered with, rewritten, and realigned from the point of view of the victims of its destructive process’ (Ashcroft et al 34). In their view, Ngugi’s first three novels — Weep Not, Child, The River Between, and A Grain of Wheat — provide his version of Kenya’s history from the 1920s to the time of its independence. Ime Ikiddeh too considers Ngugi a novelist-historian, who focuses on key phases in the history of Kenya covered in the novels, but reads A Grain of Wheat mostly as a story of heroism and betrayal, of human relationships in a chosen situation (76–77).