Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Author:Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 0307378837
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2010-03-09T10:00:00+00:00

Wallace Mwangi, or Good Wallace as he was becoming known, was my mother’s first major success. He was born in 1930 and later went to Manguo school for a few years beginning in 1945. He had interesting study habits, especially before a test: He would work all night, with an open paraffin lantern, feet in a basin of cold water to keep him awake, but I suspect that the lack of sleep was not very conducive to good performance. He would try to sell his theory and practice to anybody who would listen. He did not persuade me. With my past history of bad eyes, I disliked the very thought of studying all night by an oil lamp with my feet in cold water, but he never gave up selling the idea. My mother, who paid his tuition, did not interfere with his school efforts except once when he announced that he intended to become a boy scout. In Gĩkũyũ, the word “scout” sounded like thikauti, or thika hiti, to my mother, and somebody must have confirmed her worst fears that my brother would become a “burier of dead hyenas.” She pleaded with him, she threatened, and she did not want to hear an explanation. She just could not imagine her son becoming a professional mourner and burier of dead hyenas. I doubt if any other animal would have been more tolerable to her, but the hyena was the worst character in stories: greedy, dirty, and it fed on the remains of humans. I don’t know if it was because he caved in to her concerns or because he left school afterward, but he never became a boy scout.

This may have left, in my brother, a desire that he fulfilled vicariously through the lady with whom he fell in love and eventually married. Charity Wanjikũ was born in 1935 in Kĩmuga village, Kĩambaa, next to my sister Gathoni’s place and Charles Koinange’s. She went to Kĩambaa Church Missionary Society school, where she joined the girl guides squad. Even when not in uniform, Charity often wore a blue beret, leaving all the young men of Limuru agog with envy and admiration. Wallace got himself a girl guide, they would whisper or even say loudly. They nicknamed her Rendi ya Banana, “Lady from Banana Hills,” because the banana place, being on the highway between Nairobi and Limuru, was better known and sounded more esoteric than Kĩmuga or Kĩambaa, which sounded like villages next door. That was years later, of course, in 1954, and my mother had no objections to having a girl guide for a daughter-in-law because the name did not sound like “boy scout.”

Now, relieved and even grateful that her son had heeded her concerns, my mother funded his other dreams, time and again selling he-goats she may have been fattening, or black wattle trees she had grown on one of her parcels of land.

After leaving school he joined Kabae’s legal and secretarial services as an apprentice typist. His English would

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