Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “A Grain of Wheat” (1967) – Few people really know what to do with Kenya’s decolonization struggle. No one looks good. The British “won,” but did so through the application of mass internment and terror- years after a British judge sat in judgment at Nuremberg and sent the leaders of a rival empire to the gallows for similar crimes. They covered it up well, largely by publicizing the bloodier Mau Mau killings, but these things reemerge. The Kenyan government, which was essentially handed power by the British a few years later in exchange for major concessions, doesn’t like its people to think too much about Mau Mau. The international Left doesn’t really know to process an uprising by an autochtonous, secretive, semi-religious group with few links to any of the established strands of thought or organizing- “The Kenyan Revolution” isn’t even a phrase, as I’ve seen. The Mau Mau themselves and the Kikuyu people they emerged from were, of course, brutally suppressed and terrorized and then lived under dictatorship of Kenyan leaders unfriendly to the memory of the uprising, and didn’t have the best avenues to tell their stories.

One who found a way to tell some of the story is the great Kikuyu writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and he paid for his impertinence- he was jailed by the Kenyan government and exiled after that for twenty years. In “A Grain of Wheat,” Ngũgĩ tells the story of several members of a rural Kikuyu community on the eve of the formal handover of power. The Union Jack is going to come down, the red, green, and black of Kenya is going to come up, and presumably everyone should be happy.

Of course, people are actually unhappy. One of the great strengths of this book is getting across the sheer trauma of going through a brutal insurgency war like the Mau Mau Uprising. There’s the trauma of having fought, having seen friends die, being interned and tortured, and there’s the terrorizing of the community as a whole. Counterinsurgency works by turning communities against themselves, and the British were viciously effective at this, across much of the world but especially in Kenya. You get flashbacks to the war, but more affecting to me was the description of the aftermath. Ngũgĩ masterfully takes you into the experience of characters like Mugo, hailed as a martyr for having gone through the camps, who wants to be left alone in his hut, and Karanja, who experiences the terror of having collaborated with the British — this overwhelming source of power and terror — only to have them leave without so much as a goodbye.

Most of all, Ngũgĩ depicts the ways in which insurgent struggle renders any sort of life we would normally choose to live impossible. Mugo is defined by two choices that would be completely ordinary under normal circumstances. A man came into his house with a gun after having shot somebody and made him an accomplice in hiding him, so he alerted the authorities; a soldier was abusing an old woman, so he spoke up. One of those actions made him a traitor, the other made him a martyr, and between the two they tear his life apart. Everyone in “A Grain of Wheat” is riven by similar experiences.

And what’s worse, there’s the sinking feeling throughout the book that independence will not be all its cracked up to be. The British cut their deals with moderates and sharp dealers to keep the rich agricultural land they stole from being redistributed to the people as a whole. The old guerrillas, with their odd noms de guerre and comparative lack of interiority, still mouth the old slogans but are clearly trying to clean house, get their revenge on traitors, before a new regime acceptable to the superpowers comes in and forecloses both on their possibilities (and likely freedom) and on the promise of decolonization. Kenya doesn’t offer easy answers, and neither does Ngũgĩ. *****

Doris Lessing, “The Four-Gated City” (1969) – after five books and almost twenty years, Doris Lessing wrapped up the “Children of Violence” series with a notice from a post-apocalyptic bureaucrat. The series followed Martha Quest (based on the author) from her girlhood in settler Rhodesia to her middle years in London in the 1960s, and in a long “appendix,” to the years after a variety of wars and environmental catastrophes kill much of humanity.

The book follows Martha’s life in London, which she comes to from Rhodesia in her late 20s, shortly after the end of WWII, through the paranoid Cold War 1950s and eventually the thaw and revival of consumer prosperity that leads to “swinging London” of the later 1960s. The first third or so is Martha exploring immediate postwar London, which in many respects prefigures the post-apocalypse the book ends with- bomb-damaged, lingering under austerity, seemingly with no way to get better. Eventually, Martha becomes resident-secretary-cum-coparent for a writer and gets involved with his family, the Coldridges, a big, rich, high-profile public progressive clan riven internally by resentment and other emotional issues. A central part of the incompletely-drawn apocalypse Lessing posits occurring in the mid-1970s is rapid human mutation in response to environmental strain. In the end of the book, this entails telepathy and other strange powers. But it’s prefigured by the terrarium of difficult over-educated Brits Martha has access to in the Coldridge house, many of whom are maladapted by any meaningful definition — there’s a Jane Eyre-esque madwoman in the attic who becomes a friend of hers, one of the kids is a kleptomaniac, etc — but which prove helpful to the unsettled lives they (and more and more people) are made to live. Martha herself experiences a breakdown — in many respects a break with reality — and this is what allows her to see the coming of the end and survive it while helping others- at least for a while. It doesn’t make for a happy life, being a mutant in Lessing’s world, but little enough does.

Lessing wrote her magnum opus, “The Golden Notebook,” in the midst of writing the “Children of Violence” series. In many respects, “The Golden Notebook” is a shorter, somewhat more elegant version of the series, which does in one book what the series does in five. You get much of the same stuff: girlhood in settler Africa, falling in and out of love with various people and causes, move to London, and a breakdown surrounding the central issue of maintaining a sense of self when both society and personal life tend to fracture the self, and a recovery of sorts. I’m not sure how much the apocalypse adds. She makes it fit reasonably well, and it prefigures her move into scifi, which I look forward to digging into (and which I’m pretty sure was highly influential on later generations of scifi writers, especially feminist scifi). It was also pretty prescient, especially about mass computer-based surveillance and the way groups would try to buy their way out of catastrophes. But it’s also literally an appendix, and much of it isn’t from Martha’s perspective. It’s a little jarring, where “The Golden Notebook” manages its transitions perfectly.

I have a little theory that part of the reason behind Lessing ending the series with an apocalypse is that she might have seen it as a false start, a prolonged draft for “The Golden Notebook.” Stuck with the series after she already said what it was supposed to say, she spikes it, and its entire world. That’s probably not really true- if nothing else, at over 600 pages, “The Four-Gated City” is a serious work in its own right. There’s little like Lessing given the chance to depict a group of people over a long term, the evolutions of their relations, the various ways they repeat patterns while imagining themselves having broken free and recreated themselves. Lessing is a maestra of disappointment, which makes it all the more poignant when something good does happen, and someone can break away. So even if “The Golden Notebook” is tighter than “Children of Violence,” the longer form suits her well. *****

Doris Lessing, “Landlocked” (1965) – the fourth of Lessing’s “Children of Violence” series, Landlocked takes the story of Martha Quest (based on Lessing herself) to the end of her time in the colonized Rhodesia in which she was raised. The little group of reds, marooned in a provincial capital, among whom Martha tried to find meaning and companionship loses what little traction it had with the masses once WWII ends and Cold War anticommunist paranoia — racialized, naturally, in this white settler colony — takes hold. Quest continues trying to do her bit from the movement, even as her German Stalinist husband takes up open philandering (and in very progressive, “civilized” fashion, he encourages her to find her own boyfriend while they await his citizenship papers, which in turn will allow a divorce) and the little red scene in their town continues to split between stalinists, trotskyites, zionists, etc. In some of those painful scenes Lessing does so well, all of them try to reach out to the great prize, the black population, all painfully patronizing to varying degrees and completely unsuccessful. The whites are growing increasingly paranoid, the blacks are going to go their own way without much input from middle class white leftists, and no one’s fantasies or half-measures will cut it anymore. People also start to die at an alarming rate- some of sickness, some by violence, like the Greek RAF men posted to Rhodesia for the war, going back to Greece knowing that they will fight and die alongside their fellow communists in the civil war.

Lessing knew whereof she spoke when it came to sectarian backbiting and half-hearted efforts at living out values, and it shows, in this book and the previous installment, “A Ripple From the Storm.” She also depicts, like no other, living multiple lives- that was what her magnum opus, “The Golden Notebook,” is about, and in “Landlocked” we see her furiously pedaling her bike between her many lives: activist, thankless peacekeeper between activists, working secretary, wife, lover, daughter in a fraught relationship with a dying father and hypochondriac mother. The whole time, Martha is dreaming of making her way to Britain and escape- and she does get on the boat to Britain, in any event. This gives the whole installment a certain “running out the clock” feel, especially when you know that this is the penultimate book in the series, but Lessing can be relied upon to make even a feeling like that come alive. ****’