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Lovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
“DREAMS of a Time of War” by Ngugi waThiongo proves beyond doubt that a memoir can be as much about inspiring the present in as much as it can also evoke the recollection of the past.

While Ngugi’s previous works are characteristically combative and revolutionary in their scope, “Dreams of a Time of War” encapsulates the author’s upbringing under British colonial rule.

Typical of his depiction of his main characters in “Petals of Blood” who flock to rural Ilmorog in search of a quieter life away from the hustle and bustle of the brutal capitalist system, Ngugi’s own father undergoes the same escape when he evades being drafted into the African contingent recruited to fight in the First World War.

The fifth child of his father’s four wives, Ngugi waThiongo was born in 1938 in Limuru in Central Kenya. In “Dreams of a Time of War”, Ngugi waThiongo recounts his life growing up in a polygamous set-up with multiple siblings and single patriarch where the four wives neatly gelled together with their varying balancing characters.

Ngugi pays special tribute to his own mother for toiling to send him to school after moving out of the polygamous set up because of his father’s abusive antics and also his loss of land.

It was his mother who single-handedly raised enough money to send him to school on the promise that Ngugi was to do his best regardless of the hunger and poverty that dominated their lives.

The young Ngugi cherished being at school probably as a pastime to escape the dreary poverty that pervaded his mother’s homestead. Education became an avenue for possible social mobility. It was that educational path that led him to come into contact with such English classics as Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” and was in turn christened James Ngugi- a name that he used in his early journalism and fiction writing until 1969.

In this book, Ngugi waThiongo reflects about his experience as a journalist and how editorial policy or the point of view of a newspaper influences the slant and scope of reportage. A single story assumed multiple and often conflicting interpretations, which was a disservice to the readership.

“At first the contradiction did not matter. Being able to read an English publication was more important than the information gleaned. The medium trumped the message,” recalls Ngugi.

Regrettably, some of the interpretations by some publications moved from being mere propaganda to actual incitement and negative labelling of freedom fighters as wild terrorists, a clear reminder of the African proverb: Until the lions have their say, tales of victory will be told by the hunter.

Ngugi’s experiences as a young cub reporter were essential in shaping his world-view about the need for Africans to find their own voice that expresses their own experiences without being coloured and distorted by other people’s interpretations, which centred more on their nightmares and gory imaginations.

It must be noted that Ngugi’s writing in English is not an attempt to abscond on his lifelong commitment in writing in his mother-tongue but simply to reach out to another audience — probably the academic world — which needs to contextualise how his upbringing influenced his writings and his world-view.

He still advocates for Africans to express themselves in their mother-tongue when he says: “In writing one should hear all the whisperings, all the shouting, all the crying, all the loving and all the hating of the many voices in the past, and those voices will never speak to a writer in foreign language.”

As suggested by the title, the book focuses on reading and education during the time when Kenya was undergoing the violent pangs of liberation from British colonial rule.

It is important to highlight the fact that Ngugi’s story telling techniques could have been shaped by his childhood. It was a ritual that every evenings all the children of the family would gather for story telling often recounted by the elderly members of the family.

Ngugi recounts how the increasing violence in Kenya divided families into those who collaborated with the system and those who became rebels. His own brother joined the rebel movement in the mountains while his other half brothers joined the Home Guard that sought to destroy the rebels. The author was also not immune to all the upheavals taking in his own country as he was also captured and feared dead but was later freed.

“Dreams in a Time of War” can be read as an account of history and how that history shaped Ngugi’s world-view.