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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