Voicing freedom

the meaning of Uhuru in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat

Abstract

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat is set in Kenya in 1963, the year the country became independent from the British. It depicts both colonisers and colonised, and explores the workings of power both before and after independence, unsettling the notion that gaining independence can be equated with gaining freedom. Drawing from the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s concerns about the dangers of conflating status with freedom, this article reflects on the workings of colonial and neo-colonial power in the novel. There are parallels between the coloniser/colonised dynamics of A Grain of Wheat and those of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as in both texts the language of freedom is used ambiguously to the benefit of the coloniser. Ngũgĩ’s novel demonstrates that a nation may be declared free in a way which in fact works to conceal the lack of freedom of its people, and that voicing freedom in a negative as opposed to a positive sense exposes the violation of fundamental freedoms.