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Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong'o: book review


Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (2010) commences in 1954 in Limuru, Kenya, with the “disappearance” of the narrator’s older brother, Wallace Mwangi, better known as Good Wallace. Police caught him with a pocketful of bullets. He eluded the police, narrowly escaped death, and fled to the mountains.

To understand the actions of Good Wallace, Thiong’o takes the reader back to his own Kenyan childhood, and the year of his birth, 1938. He was the fifth child of his father’s third wife (of four wives), among 24 of his father’s children. He was born into “an already functioning community of wives, grown-up brothers, sisters, children about my age, and a single patriarch, and into settled conventions about how we acknowledged our relation to one another.”

His father was born “sometime between 1890 and 1896” when Britain ruled Kenya, before independence. His mother, Wanjiku, was a thinker and a listener, but above all she was a great storyteller. In 1947 his mother asked him if he wanted to go to school – and this is the main theme in the novel. It is about his school days – from primary school to the “dreaded” Kenya African Preliminary Exams to reach secondary school.

Throughout the novel is the historical context of colonisation, poverty, discrimination, racism, but also of great dreams to “read and write.” There were daily challenges, but the turning point was the downfall of his father. There came a time when his father’s goats and cows caught “a strange illness” and died. “The man who had everything now lost all,” which led to his expulsion from the community, and his excessive drinking.  And it upset the delicate balance of power that his father’s wives had established. His mother, younger brother Njinju, and himself were evicted and sent to live with his maternal grandfather. “From a polygamous community we became a single-parent family” - but Good Wallace used to visit often. Thiong’o admired his much older brother, the first in his family to go to school.

Amid white rule, Jomo Kenyatta was his hero (who became the leader of Kenya after independence in 1963). In 1952, Kenyatta and other activists were arrested and a state of emergency was declared. This is the time of war that gives the novel its title. Thiong’o seeks refuge in learning and the company of his best friend, Kenneth Mbugua.  

And now we return to the beginning of his memoir. At the end of primary school in 1954, while waiting for his exam results, he searches for Good Wallace, who fled an inevitable prison sentence that year. But Thiong’o could find no trace of his brother. Thiong’o is accepted into the best secondary school in the country, but then came “the brute reality. My mother cannot afford the tuition.” Aid comes unexpectedly, and from an unlikely source.

This is a memoir about growing up with an unspoken dream, and in a quiet way, of achieving it through persistence and determination in adversity, the years before independence and the Mau Mau insurgency. But what became of Good Wallace? This is revealed at the end. But the novel is also an account of family, extended family, relationships, friendships, and the encouragement of his steadfast mother. Readers know the author’s destination – for Thiong’o attains his dreams to become an author. This is story of the early years, the dream’s genesis, and the beginning of the author’s journey.


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