Tweet

A compelling African memoir whose unblinking candor about human behavior suggests the iconoclastic, unsentimental approach of such authors as Czesław Miłosz and I.B. Singer, writers whose recreation of a vanished world is tough-minded rather than sentimental.

Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Pantheon Books, 256 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

Reading memoir can resemble a Tolstoyan train ride, one of those satisfying trips during which a passenger, a stranger to the others in his compartment, tells a tale filled with fascinating characters, intimate relationships and detailed pictures of the sociology and culture of his personal world. This month, I’ve been enjoying that kind of extraordinary ride with Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a stranger to me until now.

His tone is conversational, his story compelling, and the Kenya-Uganda train that runs from the port of Mombasa across what was then called the White Highlands of Kenya, a constant presence, a symbol and reality both fearsome and alluring. Built by Indian labor, the railway was an important pathway for colonialism. We glimpse the tracks first in April of 1954 when Ngũgĩ’s older brother Good Wallace, who has joined the Mau Mau, flees the police. They remain a significant part of the landscape until 1954 when, after a rigorous academic exam, Ngũgĩ finally rides the train to Alliance High School, the best high school in Kenya – and ends his memoir.

Ngũgĩ –- as he is known internationally — is the East African playwright, journalist, novelist, and academic now based at the University of California, Irvine. Born in 1938 near Limuru, in what was then Kenya Colony, he was baptized James Ngũgĩ. In 1962, as a student at Makerere University College, he made his formal debut as a playwright at the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda. “Weep Not, Child,” the first novel in English by an East African, was published two years later, followed by his acclaimed fiction “The River Between” and “A Grain of Wheat.”

In 1967, Ngũgĩ became lecturer in English Literature at the University of Nairobi and began championing African and third world literatures. Together with colleagues, he wrote “On the Abolition of the English Department,” a piece of postcolonial literary theory. “If there is need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African? Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?” the authors asked. Ngũgĩ pursued this question and his interest in oral tradition and performance in books such as “Decolonising the Mind” (1986) and “Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams” (1998).

He was almost as critical of the government and society of the Republic of Kenya as he was of British colonial rule and, in 1977, he finally ran afoul of the government with his novel “Petals of Blood” and a play Ngaahika Ndeenda (“I Will Marry When I Want”), that was performed by workers at a community theater in Limuru. Ngũgĩ was arrested and during his year in prison wrote “Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary.” During that time, he decided to write in Gĩkũyũ his mother tongue.

Amnesty International helped secure his release but Ngũgĩ was barred from teaching by the dictator Daniel arap Moi, his work was banned from Kenyan bookshops, and he was forced to live and teach in exile, first in Britain and then at a succession of universities in the U.S.

Like all good memoirs, “Dreams in a Time of War” is imbued with the reflections of the adult author yet hews closely to its time-frame of Ngũgĩ’s childhood in Kenya Colony, which begins with his birth in 1938 and ends with his coming-of-age circumcision in 1954. His dreams center around obtaining an education. The wars are World War II, in which Africans are conscripted to fight for the colonial powers on each side and the Mau Mau War of Independence against the British.

But there are many more personal wars in this memoir: conflicts between fathers and sons; mothers and daughters; psycho dynamics between siblings and friends. Although this book will be compared to Wole Soyinka’s 1982 childhood memoir “Ake,” Ngũgĩ’s unblinking candor about human behavior reminded me more of Czesław Miłosz or I.B. Singer, also iconoclastic, unsentimental writers who recreate a vanished world in their remembrances.

Ngũgĩ begins his memoir in April of 1954 with a vivid personal memory embedded in African political and cultural history. He is a young teenager walking home from Kĩnyogori Intermediate School with his friend Kenneth when they come across groups of people excitedly discussing the arrest and escape of an unnamed African man. Some say he was caught carrying bullets, a treasonable offense for an African; others that he was shot at but flew into the sky.

Kenneth attempts to sift out fact from fiction but Ngũgi tries to piece together a coherent narrative. He has heard stories about Mau Mau guerrillas before but never from eyewitnesses. When he gets home to his family compound for dinner – he is one of 24 children born to his father and his four wives – his mother tells the true story: “Wallace Mwangi, my elder brother, Good Wallace as he was popularly known, had earlier that afternoon narrowly escaped death. We pray for his safety in the mountains. It is this war, she said.”

War is the backdrop for Ngũgi’s colonial childhood, starting with a war that readers born in Europe like myself will most likely be startled to see from a new perspective: “When the mother country coughed, the colonial baby contracted the flu,” so when in 1914, Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo, triggering World War I “the two colonial states, Tanganyika and Kenya, fought on the side of their mothers, hence against each other …They drafted many Africans as soldiers [and] the African soldiers died, in combat, from disease and other ills, out of all proportion to the European soldiers.” When the war ended in 1919, some of the white soldiers were rewarded with African land, “some of the land belonging to surviving African soldiers, accelerating dispossession, forced labor, and tenancy-at-will settlers, such tenants otherwise known as squatters.”

Although this particular wave of dispossession occurred before the author’s birth, it was part of a continuing tide. “Things changed,” he writes. “I don’t know how gradually or suddenly, but they changed … I was aware of trees being cut down, leaving only stumps … It was strange to see the forest retreating as the pyrethrum [chrysanthemum flowers cultivated as a source of insecticide] fields advanced … somehow, in time, I learned that our land was not quite our land; that our compound was part of property owned by an African landlord, Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu, or Bwana Stanley as we called him; that we were now ahoi, tenants-at-will. How did we come to be ahoi on our own land?”

The author’s father, Thiong’o wa Naducũ, had been drawn to the city and worked as a domestic for a white employer in Nairobi as a young man. This employer may have pulled some strings to keep him out of the war and had certainly taught him the English words ‘bloody fool,’ ‘Nigger,’ and ‘Bugger’ which he Gikũyũnized as mburaribuu, Kaniga gaka, Mbaga ino, and “used freely to address any of his children at whom he was angry.” He managed, however, to save up enough money to buy land and livestock in Limuru where his rural and traditional brother lived. “He bought his land under the traditional system of oral agreement in the presence of witnesses,” but the owner then sold it a second time to Lord Stanley Kahahu, a graduate of the Church of Scotland Mission at Kikuyu and his brother.

This sale was registered with the colonial authorities and kept the author’s father in court until finally “orality and tradition lost to literacy and modernity” and Thiong’o lost his land. He never forgave Reverend Kahahu and this incident is an early example of the way British colonialism, African legal and religious practice, missionary activity and religious affiliation thread through and intertwine in Ngũgĩ’s childhood.

Despite his loss of land, Thiong’o had four wives and a compound of five huts. The four women Ngũgĩ calls “Mother” were, as he remembers it, fiercely loyal to one another and constituted a kind of family government in his eyes: Njeri was “the defense minister of the household” who “brooked no nonsense from anyone;” Gacoki, “shy and kind” was “the minister of peace;” his hard-working, laconic mother Wanjikũ was “the minister of works;” and the calm and beautiful Wangari “the minister of culture.”

When the author once asked his mother why she consented to becoming the third wife of a polygamous man, she replied It was because of his first two wives…They were always together, such harmony, and I often wondered how it would feel to be in their company, And your father? He was not to be denied.”

Ngũgĩ’s biological mother was a determined woman, responsible, at great cost to herself, for making possible and financing his education as well as once acting on her intuition and saving him from asphyxiation as a child. But his mother Wanjikũ was the accomplished storyteller and most evenings the children and their friends gathered around the fire in her hut for entertainment. In that vanished time of no electricity or mass media, Ngũgĩ took part in a kind of ritual happening in which the narrator/soloist/performer and her audience took turns in listening, in which dance and music often alternated with speech, where debate might follow story, where content was a blend of fact, folktale, myth, gossip and news.

Some of the stories told might be, to our ears, pointless. Some might be deeply pertinent, like the ones about “Harry Thuku, whose political fire of the 1920s had become cold ash” after seven years of exile from Kenya. “Some sounded stranger than fiction: like the case of a white man called Hitler, refusing to shake the hands of the fastest runner in the world in 1936 because the man, Jesse Owens, was black.” Repeated during the day, the stories told by the fireside seemed less powerful. “Daylight, our mothers always told us, drove stories away.”

The nature of narrative itself is a major theme of this memoir. So is the question of language. Like colonized people on every continent, Ngũgĩ and the lucky few who pass their exams and enjoy family support are offered an education that then cuts them off from their own language, tradition, and culture at a time of their lives when they are unaware of that process. “Dreams in a Time of War” shows us how that happens and the psychological cost, from how issues of clothing and footwear affect self-esteem and family feeling to the practicalities of reading when there are few books, no electric light or money for candles, to the intricate politics of schooling in colonial East Africa where missionaries, government officials and African nationalists all vie for power.

In Ngũgĩ’s rendition of his family dynamics, I found his descriptions of traditional African explanations for medical and psychological problems particularly interesting and admired his no-fault way of straddling traditional and modern, Christian and secular, African and European bodies of knowledge. In terms of stories, Ngũgĩ saves his best ones for last. His coming-of-age ceremony, his interrogation by soldiers searching for Mau Mau and his dramatic train journey to boarding school read like performance pieces.

Throughout, as he moves from encapsulating history to drawing portraits of family members like his regal grandfather, embittered grandmother, his brother Good Wallace or community members like Reverend Kahahũ’s decidedly unchristian wife and the master storyteller Ngandi, Ngũgĩ maintains a comfortable, sometimes wry, conversational tone and only rarely betrays bitterness or self-indulgence – although he has ample cause for both.

But he doesn’t make things easy for even the super-attentive reader. I could have used a good map, a clear chronology of historical events, a glossary of terms, and a family tree. Following the many characters and fitting them into the complex world Ngũgĩ creates is hard work for the reader unfamiliar with Gĩkũyũ. But complaints, complaints. The effort is worth it. I feel richer for having read this memoir.

===========================================

Helen Epstein was born in Prague and is the author of the memoirs “Children of the Holocaust” and “Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History.”