Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’s childhood memoir, ‘Dreams in a Time of War’ is quite simply
enchanting. Every thinking human being should have a copy of this
wondrous memoir. Ngugi returns with full force to the playground of
ideas and shames those who suspect he is a spent force. He puts
together many ingredients of a lived experience and serves the world a
delightful stew of recollections. It is impossible to put this book
down. The man can tell a story.
‘Dreams in a Time
of War’ is a graceful, moving ode to the relentless pursuit of
enlightenment by a child born into the war that passes for life in
sub-Saharan Africa. The writers Barack Hussein Obama, Chinua Achebe,
Toyin Falola and Wole Soyinka have explored the same theme with
uncommon eloquence and pathos. Ngugi simply adds a stunning, powerful
salvo to that repertoire of musings.
This is a memoir
narrated simply, prose shorn of gimmickry and most importantly,
bitterness. Ngugi has mellowed and this attitude provides graceful
wings to a soaring delivery. He also performs the very sly trick of
making the reader bear the burden of becoming really angry about all of
the unnecessary roughness that Africans of his generation had to bear
just to live through the day. Brilliant. Even the title says a lot
about Ngugi’s generosity of spirit. Upon reading the memoir, a mere
mortal would be forgiven for calling it ‘Nightmares in a Time of War’.
Born in 1938 in
pre-colonial Kenya, there were so many anxieties hovering around the
writer as a child: The descent of his father into despair and
decrepitude, marital abuse, separation and the rejection of Ngugi and
his siblings on his mother’s side; the brothers’ struggles for survival
during World War II and the Mau Mau uprising; and the challenge of
holding on to family bonds as he and his mother coped with trauma and
tragedy. These stresses shaped Ngugi’s childhood and his worldview. Yet
by all accounts he proved to be a star student.
This is a highly
disciplined documentary of Ngugi’s early childhood. We see a precocious
child weaving tales of his childhood experiences and the tortured
history of his clan with tales from the Bible. The sense of wonder his
ancestors must have felt upon stumbling into a modern city like Nairobi
makes the reader gasp with the same emotion. “Before their eyes were
stone buildings of various heights, paths crowded with carriages of
different shapes and people of various colours from black to white.
Some of the people sat in carriages pulled and pushed by black men.
These must be the white spirits, the mizungu, and this, the Nairobi
they had heard about as having sprung from the bowels of the earth. But
nothing had prepared them for the railway lines and the terrifying
monster that vomited fire and occasionally made a blood curdling cry.”
Ngugi fashions a
gorgeous tapestry of stories that pulls together all the racial and
ethnic relationships and tensions in pre-colonial Kenya, the result is
a carefully scripte oral history fused with the written. Clear-eyed
observations of the human condition politely but insistently hammer
home crystal clear conclusions. This is not only about Kenya; it
connects the dots of our shared humanity everywhere in the globe. There
are few books that I have read in my lifetime that radiated from a
single locus and connected all these dots everywhere without losing
their focus.
The author’s
relationship with his mother Wanjiku wa Ngugi is exceedingly moving. It
compares to Obama’s narrative about his mother Stanley Ann Dunham
Soetero (Dreams From My Father). They shared the same traits: that
gentle push for excellence and a fierce nurturing spirit. Throughout
the book, Ngugi’s mother is the guiding spiritual force holding the
book together. This is motherhood at its best peeping fiercely through
the mean legs of patriarchy. In return, Ngugi doted on his mother and
lived to please her. We also see strong similarities in temperament
between Ngugi’s father and Obama’s Kenyan father.
The book’s editing
is a delight, kudos to the publishers, Pantheon Books of New York.
There are minor quibbles: the chapters are strangely not numbered and
it was tough keeping up with the cast of characters in Ngugi’s clan. A
genealogical chart would have been helpful. Regardless, this is an
important book, full of authentic history. It reminds us that we should
not take for granted the valiant struggles of our warriors of old. They
fought the good fight, for us and the land. They were not perfect
people, but they had heart. May this book inspire us to pursue anew the
dream that our ancestors fought and died for.
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