More first impressions

This morning, I finished my first pass of this novel from the Kenya of around 1960, reference 1, as advertised at reference 2, following in the first impressions steps of reference 3. I have not attempted to put the fragments which follow in a sensible order.

The second part of the author's name is his father's name, so a patronymic after the Russian fashion, rather than a family name after our own. Some people would say that means that the name should be filed under 'N' rather that 'T', but some people does not include Waterstones.

Continuing with the Russians, I found all the foreign names rather hard to get hold of, rather as they are in 19th century novels from Russia. I now suspect that part of the difficulty is that they are from a foreign language as well as a foreign country and one cannot easily say them, in one's head or otherwise, in the way that one can with one's own names. With the result that they fail to lodge in memory. Perhaps next time around, I shall resort to a diagram in Powerpoint, something I do occasionally with novels, for example a Maigret story which I am failing to hold together. A diagram which as well as helping with the names, helps with relationships and with place in story.

I also associated to the novel at reference 4, a novel which I once knew well - initially in Penguin Classics - and which also tells of more or less ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events.

I was impressed by the absence of anger in the novel, anger about what had been done in what was the recent past at the time that the novel was first written. Sadness yes, anger no. Anger which I thought might have been present, given his aggressive stance vis-à-vis his native Kikuyu, my starting point at reference 2. This despite his long service in universities in the US.

By the understanding which he extends to the plight of the civil servants - and their wives - sent out from the UK, many of whom started out with high ideals of doing good. And some of whom ended up on the bottle. And some of whom wrote monographs about the plants and flowers of the countries to which they had been posted, some of which are still to be found in the libraries of places like Wisley - the show garden run by the Royal Horticultural Society.

I was very struck by the point he made about violence. OK, so the British put an end to the endemic, mainly tribal, violence which came before. No doubt they also bore down on what sounds like a high level of community violence, a lot of it drink or women related. But at least the Africans did not go in for world wars which killed many millions of people - although some of them were conscripted to fight in them. I had not known that conscription was involved, a point I ought to check up on.

Also by the way that the Mau Mau emergency tainted everything involved. The dreadful behaviour of many of those involved in running the concentration camps spread out to taint ordinary life in the areas concerned. A long legacy of lost, ruined and damaged lives. What this novel has done for me is to offer a peek into this last. A very human - and humane - novel.

A lot of tea was drunk, presumably drunk without milk, as there was little talk of cows. Hot tea was what you offered if someone visited your hut. A hut which was plastered with mud and roofed with grass. I associate to reading a comment about people who comment on the shacks a lot of people lived in in countries like Kenya, to the effect that concrete blocks for the walls and corrugated iron for the roof were much better than the infestations of insects and worse of the olden days. And another about igloos, which might be picturesque, but which were cold in the winter and damp in the spring and autumn. Water dripping off the walls and roof the whole time.

And some of the eating was quite basic, with one wife-free man taking just one meal a day, after work on his smallholding. A meal consisting of a dish of  reheated maize and barley grains, previously boiled up in large batches: a sort of coarse porridge. Fast food of a sort?

I was reminded of the quite unreal expectations of ordinary people caught up in revolutionary change. In this case, how the simple act of removing the British from the top of the heap was going to solve all the problems. Including the Indians who, on this telling, had quite a strong grip on shops and shopping. Everyone would have enough money and enough land, and everyone would have access to education and health.

I have also read the introduction, from which I learn of parallels with Conrad - whom I had thought I knew pretty well, although I have not read him for a while now.

I hope there will be a next time - and the present plan is to try and track the novel in the large map offered by the Times Atlas, snapped above. I note that I had quite forgotten about the snow capped mountains to the south west, quite near Nairobi.

PS 1: I am reminded that blog search - available from the box top left - is not accent blind. 'Ngũgĩ' works, while neither 'ngugi' nor 'Ngugi' do. But at least they all will, as far as the present post is concerned.

PS 2: more news this morning from Microsoft, this time about a senior Labour politician arranging his or her housing affairs to avoid paying tax. There was also talk of the same sort about a senior SNP politician. All perfectly legal, all perfectly reasonable, up to a point. And probably piffling compared with corporate shenanigans elsewhere: just think of the late Lynch and his sale of Autonomy to HP. But it does not play well in the media at a time when our government needs to ask the rest of us to pay a bit more, to help balance our books - presently in rather dire straits.

PS 3: I have now checked up on conscription. It seems that while we avoided the term 'conscription', we did make use of what amounted to press gangs, of the sort used by our navy during the Napoleonic wars. See reference 7 and 8 - with the first of these taking a rather different tone than the second. Without having gone very far into either of them, it occurs to me that there may be some mitigation in that at least some of those caught up in all this would have come from cultures which valued warriors. One gets the odd glimpse of this in the present book.

References

Reference 1: A grain of wheat - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - 1967. Penguin (from Waterstones). Introduction by Abdulrasak Gurnah. Cover snapped above.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/kikuyu-affairs.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/07/first-impressions.html.

Reference 4: And Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov - c1930.

Reference 5a: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=kenya.

Reference 5b: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=kenya. Includes notice of one Brain Thompson, who did time in Kenya during the emergency. Who caught my eye today because of one of the central characters of the present book being called John Thompson. Brain Thompson, for an author, is hard to find on the Internet, but I did turn up reference 6.

Reference 5c: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=kenya. Includes notice of the arrival of our 1968 Times Atlas, still present to my right as I type this, and still used reasonably often, guessing, more than once a month.

Reference 5d: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=kenya. Includes notice of termination of my Facebook connection with Kenya, a connection I was sorry to lose.

Reference 6: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-490559/I-Idi-Amins-boss.html. 

Reference 7: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/03/britains-violent-conscription-of-african-soldiers-is-finally-coming-to-light. But see reference 8 below from more than thirty years previously: it had seen light of a sort before.

Reference 8: Recruitment and service in the King's African Riles in the Second World War - Jennifer Warner - 1985. A dissertation from the University of Bristol. 220 odd pages of typescript.  https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/34495837/370678.pdf.