A Grain of Wheat Read Online Free PDF Page A

labour, sweat, and through success and wealth, force society to recognize him. There was, for him, then, solace in the very act of breaking the soil: to bury seeds and watch the green leaves heave and thrust themselves out of the ground, to tend the plants to ripeness and then harvest, these were all part of the world he had created for himself and which formed the background against which his dreams soared to the sky. But then Kihika had come into his life.
    Mugo went home earlier than usual. He had not done much work, yet he was weary. He walked like a man who knows he is followed or watched, yet does not want to reveal this awareness by his gait or behaviour. In the evening he heard footsteps outside. Who could his visitor be? He opened the door. Suddenly the all-day mixture of feelings distilled into fear and animosity. Warui, the elder, led the group. Standing beside him was Wambui, one of the women from the river. She now smiled, exposing a missing line of teeth in her lower jaw. The third man was Gikonyo, who had married Kihika’s sister.
    ‘Come inside,’ he called in a voice that could hardly hide his agitation. He excused himself and went towards the latrine. Run awayfrom all these men … I no longer care … I no longer care. He entered the pit lavatory and lowered his trousers to his knees: his thoughts buzzed around flashing images of his visitors seated in the hut. Several times he tried to force something out into the smelling pit. Failing, he pulled up his trousers, but still he felt better for the effort. He went back to the visitors and only now remembered that he had not greeted them.
    ‘We are only voices sent to you from the Party,’ Gikonyo said after Mugo had shaken hands all round.
    ‘The Party?’
    ‘Voices from the Movement!’ Wambui and Warui murmured together.

Two
    Nearly everybody was a member of the Movement, but nobody could say with any accuracy when it was born: to most people, especially those in the younger generation, it had always been there, a rallying centre for action. It changed names, leaders came and went, but the Movement remained, opening new visions, gathering greater and greater strength, till on the eve of Uhuru, its influence stretched from one horizon touching the sea to the other resting on the great Lake.
    Its origins can, so the people say, be traced to the day the whiteman came to the country, clutching the book of God in both hands, a magic witness that the whiteman was a messenger from the Lord. His tongue was coated with sugar; his humility was touching. For a time, people ignored the voice of the Gikuyu seer who once said: there shall come a people with clothes like the butterflies. They gave him, the stranger with a scalded skin, a place to erect a temporary shelter. Hut complete, the stranger put up another building yards away. This he called the House of God where people could go for worship and sacrifice.
    The whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the Agikuyu. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had peeled off. The hot water must have gone into his head.
    Nevertheless, his words about a woman on the throne echoed something in the heart, deep down in their history. It was many, many years ago. Then women ruled the land of the Agikuyu. Men had no property, they were only there to serve the whims and needs of thewomen. Those were hard years. So they waited for women to go to war, they plotted a revolt, taking an oath of secrecy to keep them bound each to each in the common pursuit of freedom. They would sleep with all the women at once, for didn’t they know the heroines would return hungry for love and relaxation? Fate did the rest; women were pregnant; the takeover met with little resistance.
    But that was not the end of a woman as a