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Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir, by Ngugi wa Thiongo
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Review
“A testament to the resilience of youth and the strength of hope. . . . Vividly evokes the colonial era as experienced by Africans, and the resulting clash of cultures that produced one of the most significant African writers of our time. . . . Ngũgĩ’s greatest literary achievement in this book is to re-create, with almost uncanny success, how the world looked through mid-century African eyes.”—The Boston Globe“Eye-opening. . . . The work Ngũgĩ offers us here is like nothing that’s gone before. . . . There is a startling similarity between [Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father] and . . . Ngũgĩ’s eye-opening memoir. . . . It is admirably free of cant or sentimentality, and yet it is enough to make you weep.”—The Washington Post“Startling, vivid. . . . Inspiring. . . . Whether recalling joyful or challenging times, Ngũgĩ displays a plainspoken yet beautiful prose style. . . . Ngũgĩ’s inspiring story is a testament to his extraordinary resilience and stubborn refusal to surrender his dreams.”—Christian Science Monitor “Absorbing. . . . Infused with a child’s curiosity and wonder, this book is deeply touching in its revelation of a whole community’s stake in nurturing a writer.”—The Guardian (London)“Gives its readers an unforgettable sense of another time, a country and a continent in the middle of change. A small child learns to hold onto his dreams, even in a time of war.”—Los Angeles Times “Luminously evokes Kenya on the cusp of independence. . . . [This] memoir is suffused with affecting evocations of time and place, as well as a touching reminder that dreams can come true.”—Richmond Times Dispatch “Ngũgĩ has been a key figure in Kenya’s modern history, both as a writer and as a model for political engagement, and his three-volume memoir will serve as an important record of the country and the life.”—Irish Times “Crisp, clearly told. . . . A fascinating look at twentieth-century African history, but also a moving intellectual odyssey in which Ngũgĩ learns to revere both modernity and tradition but to reserve a healthy skepticism of both.”—Booklist “Ngũgĩ has returned to his roots to produce something delicate, fresh and scrupulously honest.”—The Spectator “Richly drawn. . . . A coming-of-age tale, gripping, endearing, shocking and funny by turns. . . . The surprise about Dreams in a Time of War is that, for all the provocation of history, and for all its clear-eyed evocation of an agonised time, it is not an angry book. . . . Ngũgĩ’s storyteller’s instinct for character and place, for recurring motifs and telling symbols, triumphs over the bleakness of background.”—The Scotsman
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About the Author
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Wizard of the Crow, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, and Decolonising the Mind.
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Product details
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Anchor (March 8, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1846553776
ISBN-13: 978-1846553776
ASIN: 0307476219
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
30 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#496,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of Kenya's most famous writers. Over the years, I've read a few of his novels -- The River Between (1965), Petals of Blood (1977), and the masterful Wizard of the Crow (2006). Both of the earlier two novels are set against the backdrop of the Mau Mau rebellion, an uprising against the British colonial government by Kenyans - mostly Kikuyus - in the 1950s.Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir, tells the story of Thiong'o's early life, through the mid-1950s when he was admitted to high school. As with several of Thiong'o's novels, this story also takes place against the backdrop of Mau Mau. It's a fascinating account, and it balances the personal with the political. On the personal side, Thiong'o tells of growing up in a polygamous household and of his mother's efforts to get him to school. His mother and father split when he was a child, and he becomes the scribe to his maternal grandfather. He gives an account -- the first I've read -- of going through the circumcision ceremony, the rite of passage that makes him a man.At the same time, he describes the political excitement and tension of the time. In the course of Mau Mau, his uncle goes to the mountains to fight, and Thiong'o himself is detained by colonial police on the way home from a religious meeting. The political and the personal intersect repeatedly.With little access to newspapers - and those filtered by colonial authorities - he and his friends rely on semi-informed and highly creative informants: "Ngandi, like some of his audience, has to read between the lines of the settler-owned newspapers and government radio. But he enriches what he gleans here and there with rich creative interpretation." Still, as Thiong'o underlines, "Perhaps it is myth as much as fact that keeps dreams alive in times of war."This is a beautiful homage to a mother's commitment to education, as well as a view to growing up in a time of great political upheaval. I listened to the unabridged audiobook, narrated by Hakeen Kae-Kazim. I highly recommend the book, the audiobook, and Thiong'o's other work, especially Wizard of the Crow.
Ngugi's latest publication Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir is a treasure-house of childhood memories. It is an informative and didactic memoir written with the intent of taking the reader down memory lane. The story of Ngugi's travails through life lends credence to the wise saying that epic characters are often associated with humble beginnings. The narrator begins his narrative precisely where stories of epic heroes always begin: with the place, time, and circumstances of his birth: "I was born in 1938, under the shadow of war, the Second World War, to Thiong'o wa Nducu, my father , and Wanjiku wa Ngugi, my mother. I don't know where I ranked, in terms of years, among the twenty-four children of my father and his four wives, but I was the fifth child of my mother's house"(9). Having been born in a polygamous family with too many mouths to feed, young Ngugi often suffered pangs of hunger : "I had not had lunch that day, and my tummy had forgotten the porridge I had gobbled that morning before the six-mile run to Kinyogori Intermediate School"(3). Not only did the youngster have to dispense with food on occasion; he had to walk an incredibly long distance each day in quest of the knowledge he so badly needed to improve his lot in life. Knowing who Ngugi is today, it is shocking to learn that he never owned a pair of shoes until he was admitted into high school: "I had walked barefoot all my life" (245).Ngugi's adolescent years were formative characterized by rites of passage: "My grandmother turned to me: `And my husband here? She called me husband because I was named after my grandfather... The idea of circumcision was very far from my mind. But for some reason she would not let the matter go, and a few days later she brought up the subject, reiterating that Ndungu who was my age, could not become a man and leave me behind a boy"(163). The initiation school sometimes referred to as an unsafe ordeal by westerners is highly regarded in Kenya and beyond. Circumcision is a practice whereby the loose skin at the end of a boy's penis is cut off. The initiation school is viewed as a nursery where moral rectitude is inculcated in the minds of initiates who are taught life skills such as courage, resilience, stoicism, creative thinking, and respect. Most importantly, rite of passage is perceived as a coming of age, an inevitable bridge between boyhood and manhood. As Ngugi puts it, rite of passage was not only "initiations from one phase of life to another but also forms of social education" (83).Indeed, Ngugi portrays himself as a cultural hybrid, having undergone initiation in the indigenous and western senses of the word: "One evening, my mother asked me: `Would you like to go to school?' It was in 1947" (49). This moment marks the genesis of Ngugi's initiation into the White man's school, a school that had tonic effect on the growing youngster: "...at lunchtime when other kids took out the food they had brought... to eat during the midday break...I would often pretend that I was going someplace, but really it was to any shade of a tree or cover of a bush, far from the other kids, just to read a book, any book..."(3)Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir is homage paid to Kenya's nationalists, many of whom paid the supreme price in the struggle to free their country from British colonial yoke. Ngugi sheds ample light on the seminal role played by the Mau Mau in the liberation struggle: "The guerillas are under strict orders from Marshall Dedan Kimathi not to kill at random. The guerrillas could not survive without support from the people... there were hundreds of others who did not survive, butchered by the colonial forces... "(182. The historical significance of Ngugi's memoir resides not only in allusions to historical figures like Dedan Kimathi, Jomo Kenyatta, Eisenhower, Hitler, and Winston Churchill among others but also to the question of settler colonialism in Kenya and the irksome land misappropriation that surfaced in its wake: "I had learned that down beyond the forest was the Limuru Township and across the railway line, white-owned plantations where my older siblings went to pick tea leaves for pay...I had learned that our land was not quite our land; that we were now ahoi, tenants at will. How did we come to be ahoi on our own land?"(10). Western imperialism in Kenya went farther than mere land grabbing. The colonialists owned means of production as this example indicates: "...white people owned the tea plantation on the other side of the railway, and I had even heard that there were white owners of the Limuru Bata Shoe factory..." (39) Thus, this book is a lampoon on how Europe underdeveloped Kenya. It is a rap on colonialism and its attendant ills. Ngugi believes that the disintegration of the African continent began at the infamous Berlin Conference of 1885 "that divided Africa into spheres of influence among European powers..." (15)Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir is captivating in several respects but the quality that grips the reader's attention is the writer's continual recourse to the literary device of intertextuality. He resorts to cross-references in a bid to prove salient points. For example, on page 111, Ngugi refers to Theodore Natsoulas' article " The Rise and Fall of the Kikuyu Karing'a Education Association in Kenya, 1929-1952" published in the Journal of African and Asian Studies 23.3-4(1988):220-21 to underscore the colluding role played by Western religions in the cultural alienation of Africans. In the same vein, he alludes to Winston Churchill's My African Journey (1968) on page 14 to lambaste the cantankerous role the British played in the dismemberment of Kenya. Ngugi takes the West to task for the spoliation of Africa, particularly the theft of Africa's lands. On page 227 he refers to Stevenson's Treasure Island, a book that counts among his favorites in his adolescence. Charles Dicken's Great Expectations (p.219) belongs in this category as well.Clash of cultures is a leitmotif in Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir. Ngugi discusses the uneasy cohabitation of modernism with tradition in Kenya as follows: "Baba Mukuru's house was antithetical to Kahahu's. He was as confident in the ways of his ancestors as Kahahu was in the ways of his Christian ancestors. For him, tradition was sacrosanct." (82-3) A little further, the narrator sheds more light: "Baba Mukuru poured a libation for the ancestral spirits that they might be with the living and the newly born" (83). Cultural hybridity is manifest throughout the book in the form of indigenization of language. Ngugi straddles the linguistic divide by drawing from both his indigenous language and English as this example illustrates: "It was the main hut not because of its size but because it was set apart and equidistant from the other four. It was called a thingira."(9) Code-switching enables him to express cultural specificities. Sometimes, Ngugi employs vernacular language words in order to underline otherness: "These must the white spirits, the mizungu, and this, the Nairobi had heard about as having sprung from the bowels of the earth" (14). In his attempt to transpose the speech mannerisms of Kenyans into written English he resorts to the alternate use of languages, including everything from the introduction of a single unassimilated word up to a complete sentence as this other example shows: "... which he Gikuyunized as mburaribuu, kaniga gaka, mbaga ino, and which he used freely to address any of his children at whom he was angry" (18). Quite apart from Africanisms, Ngugi makes abundant use of proverbial expressions to translate the worldview of the Kikuyu into a European language: "... I comfort myself, because I don't have to tell my stories to listeners eager to eat from the palm of my hand" (232). Another insightful maxim used by Ngugi for the purpose of translating Gikuyu sagacity into English is: "The Gikuyu have a saying that out of the same womb come both a killer and a healer" (215). Throughout the narrative, he uses Gikuyu apothegmatic expressions--proverbs, idioms, ideophones and interjections for the purpose of self-expression. His memoir reads like an oral tale. The reason is that he strives to translate orality into the written oral word. The book is replete with songs culled from the author's childhood memories. The one on page 34 is particularly interesting because it captures the servile obedience characteristic of colonial subjects:We are marching onWe are marching onAt whose order?The king's ordersLet's march on.Ngugi goes to great lengths to translate the discursive orality of his maternal tongue into written English. He simulates the Gikuku storyteller by creating the spontaneity of oral performance. In sum, the publication of this nonfictional book after the voluminous Wizard of the Crow (2006, 768 pages) is welcome relief for readers who are intimidated by sheer length. True to himself, Ngugi has proven once again to be a true master of the word.
Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir by Ngugi wa'Thiong'o describes his childhood and coming of age in Kenya in the 1940's and 1950's. It is a really touching story of a young boy's thirst for knowledge and clearly provides the perspective of a native of Kenya.Ngugi describes what life was like for him growing up in Kenya in a polygamous family. His father had four wives and many children. Ngugi's mother was the third wife and Ngugi lived in her hut with his full siblings. The wives formed close relationships with each other as did the children. Early in life, Ngugi made a solemn promise to his mother to attend school and to his best possible if she would make the sacrifices necessary for him to go to school.This book really presents what life was like for Ngugi through the innocence of a child's eyes. We learn about who his friends were and what he did for fun. We also discover his heartbreak and travails when his father divorced his mother and she returned to live with her father. We begin to see the unfairness of the colonial rule when Ngugi's brother returns to Kenya after fighting in Burma in World War II and these former soldiers are not given equal treatment or justly credited or rewarded for their assistance.Dreams in a Time of War describes the beginnings of what is commonly termed the Mau Mau Rebellion through a child's eyes and the confusion of having members of his family on different sides during the rebellion.This was an enlightening read for me and I appreciated being able to see this through the innocence of a child.
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