How did the process of decolonization in Kenya create specific challenges facing the new nation at uhuru, and how does the Ngugi novel illustrate this?

Paper_2-AGrainofWheat.pdf

HIST 450: Topics in African History (Spring 2023) Colonialism and Nationalism in the Making of Modern Africa Prof. Ned Bertz
“Mau Mau was the great horror story of Britain’s empire in the 1950s.” -Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 1
“Gikonyo lay on his back and stared into the darkness, every minute conscious of the heavy breathing
from the two women. Six years he had waited for this day; six years through seven detention camps had he longed for it, feeling, all the time, that life’s meaning was contained in his final return to Mumbi.
Nothing else mattered: the camps, mountains, valleys, everything could have been wiped from the face of the earth and Gikonyo would have watched this, without flinching, if he had known that he would, in the end, go back to the woman he had left behind. Little did he then think, never thought it could ever
be a return to silence. Could the valley of silence between him and the woman be now crossed?” – Ngũgĩ, A Grain of Wheat, 116

Essay