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Dreams in a Time of War
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Themes
Dreams in a Time of War
The title of Ngũgĩ’s book, Dreams in a Time of War, conveys a consistent theme of hope in the midst of extreme violence. Ngũgĩ’s dream is to receive an education, a yearning that he dares not express to others when he is young. Instead, he greatly admires one of his older half-brothers, Kabae, for his formal education and his work in secretarial and legal services. “For us, the Thiong’o family, he was by far the best educated. This may have sparked my desire for learning which I kept to myself. Why should I voice desires impossible to fulfill?” Ngũgĩ asks(44). An education does not seem like an attainable reality, however. It is something he associates with wealthier families, like Lord Kahahu’s. So, when his mother asks him one day if he would like to attend school, Ngũgĩ is speechless: “It was the offer of the impossible that deprived me of words. My mother had to ask the question again” (59). Ngũgĩ quickly answers yes and makes a pact with her that he always will try his best, despite the hardships.
Initially, Ngũgĩ focuses on the immediate impediments to his education, like paying for his tuition and uniform, which his mother covers with her marketplace earnings. He also describes a test to his commitment to the pact when his mother offers to take him on a train trip. Going with her would mean missing school for a few days. Ngũgĩ declines the offer, at great personal anguish: “Tears flowed down my cheeks. I could not bring myself to break the pact regarding school that I had made with Mother. I could not abandon my dreams. The train would have to pass me by!” (78).
The encroachment of larger conflicts becomes increasingly evident in the second part of the book as Ngũgĩ discusses the brutality of colonial rule, particularly during the state of emergency in the 1950s:
And then things began to hit closer to home. Mau Mau songs and all references to Waiyaki, Kenyatta, or Mbiyũ were criminalized. This abruptly ended my life as a troubadour. More basic, the Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri and all KISA and Karĩng’a schools were banned, a blow to my dreams of an education (156).
Eventually, Ngũgĩ returns to Manguo, although it is repurposed as a government school and has a new, colonial-inspired curriculum. While Ngũgĩ misses the performative and communal aspects of his old school, he still excels in his studies.
During this time, Ngũgĩ learns about political events from his friend Ngandi, who speaks about the injustices of colonial rule. Greatly influenced by the intellectual and political insights of his friend, Ngũgĩ later models a character in his novel Weep Not, Child (1964) on Ngandi. For Ngũgĩ, the experiences of war—as told by Ngandi—blend the real and surreal, fact and fiction, which for him “keeps dreams alive even in times of war” (195).
Ngũgĩ’s references to “dreams in a time of war” continue in the concluding chapters of the book. He is accepted into Kenya’s most prestigious high school. He is excited about the journey to his new school, for he will travel by train: “Twelve miles away, but it is as if I’m about to ride a train to paradise. This one is even more special. It will carry my dreams in a time of war” (253). To Ngũgĩ’s despair, however, a colonial official prevents him from boarding the train because he does not have a special pass to travel, a new policy of the colonial state. He writes:
I stand there on the platform with my luggage and watch the train move away with my dreams but without me, with my future, but without me, till it disappears… I don’t know how my mother will receive this, for mine was also her dream (254).
Ngũgĩ takes a cargo train instead, anxious that he is too late to attend school: “The journey feels like one of a thousand miles. I am numb with fear that something will happen to stop me from catching up to my dreams” (255). To his relief, he reaches school in time and concludes the book by once again referring to his pact with his mother: “I hear my mother’s voice: Is it the best you can do? I say to her with all my heart, Yes, Mother, because I also know what she really is asking for is my renewal of our pact to have dreams even in a time of war” (256). Ngũgĩ’s dream is not only about attending school. It is about imagining a better world in the midst of great uncertainty and violence.
Domination and Resistance
While a memoir of Ngũgĩ’s childhood, Dreams in a Time of War also is a story about the brutality of British colonial rule in Kenya. As such, themes of domination and resistance feature prominently in the book. The opening pages directly describe this violence with the story of Good Wallace’s escape from the police to join the Mau Mau fighters. Ngũgĩ refers to this story again at the end of the book but adds a twist to it. He notes the presence of an informant initially described as a “friendly source” (211) who tells the police about Good Wallace’s activities in the resistance movement. This collaboration between Africans and British colonial authorities adds a nuanced dynamic to Ngũgĩ’s story of domination and resistance. He shows the internal divisions within communities and families, like his own where neighbors, friends, and family members have competing loyalties to the state. It is possible for some of Ngũgĩ’s half-brothers, like Tumbo and Kabae, to work as agents supporting colonial rule, while Good Wallace directly opposes it.
The oppressiveness of colonial rule is not noticeable to Ngũgĩ early in his childhood. Other injustices occupy his thoughts. For instance, he describes his troubled relationship with Kenneth, a boy who habitually beats him up. Ngũgĩ fights back one day, and he and Kenneth become friends. As Ngũgĩ writes, “That was my first lesson in the virtue of resistance, that right and justice can empower the weak” (173). Ngũgĩ further develops this theme of resistance when he protests the exploitative practices of Lord Kahahu’s wife, Lillian, who refuses to pay her workers because some of them ate from her plum trees. Outraged, Ngũgĩ tells Lillian that her Christianity is “without meaning” (175). This incident teaches Ngũgĩ another valuable lesson about resistance: Speaking for your freedom is worth the cost. He also sees this with one of his visiting teachers, Karanja, who refuses to defer to the humiliating treatment of a government school official. Karanja restores pride in the teachers and student body; later on, he loses his teaching job because he participates in a student strike in Uganda.
These early lessons in resistance provide Ngũgĩ with the fortitude to withstand extreme oppression. As a teenager, he is caught in a military dragnet and subject to intense interrogation by a white colonial official who beats him for not properly deferring to him: “For some reason he took my refusal to cry or scream as defiance, and he rained more blows on me. I didn’t know whether I should stand up or remain on the ground, but even this indecision seemed to increase his fury” (239). While fearful, Ngũgĩ has enough presence of mind to answer his tormentor’s questions truthfully so that he is allowed to leave. During this ordeal he notices his interrogator consults with a hooded person, likely a member from his community collaborating with the colonial government by working as an informer. Walking away from the scene, Ngũgĩ hears gunshots and screaming.
While Ngũgĩ withstands many oppressive conditions, he falls apart when a government official refuses to let him board a train to attend high school. As he writes:
I shed tears. I don’t want to, I am a man, I am not supposed to cry, but I cannot help it. The white military officer who had floored me with blows could not make me cry; but this white officer, a railway official, who has denied me a ride in the train has done it (254).
In this moment of complete despair, Ngũgĩ receives unexpected help. An assistant station master tells him to board the next cargo train—a train that will help him reach school. The assistant station master, dressed in government garb, is African, and in this case the collaboration is one that will help Ngũgĩ achieve his dreams despite the racist policies and brutality of the colonial state.
Tradition, Modernity, and Capitalism
Another recurring theme in Dreams in a Time of War, is the juxtaposition of traditional values with those of modernity. Ngũgĩ presents his early childhood years in fairly idyllic terms, as he describes the social universe of his father’s homestead. In many respects, his father, Thiong’o, represents the ideals of a traditional patriarchal figurehead as he has wealth in cattle and a large polygamous family. Yet, Ngũgĩ also notes that this manifestation of success is predicated on his father’s participation in a capitalist system of wage labor.
As a young man, Thiong’o sets out for Nairobi to find work, a decision that marks him as “modern,” for he adopts “urban airs in dress and outlook” and develops “a cavalier attitude towards traditional rites and practices” (21-22). Thiong’o finds employment as a servant for a European family and saves enough money to purchase land in rural Limuru. This serves as the foundation to build his homestead—a traditional enclosure with four dwellings for his four wives and a separate abode (or thingira) for himself.
Thiong’o purchases the land by oral agreement, and although observed by witnesses, the court nullifies the arrangement when the owner sells the same parcel of land to Lord Kahahu, who obtains a title deed for it. The court privileges the written document, a symbol of modernity, over the oral agreement, essentially demoting Thiong’o to the status of an ahoi—a tenant without cultivating or grazing rights.
While Thiong’o considers himself a self-made “modern” man (85), Ngũgĩ largely reserves this designation for Lord Kahahu, who is an archetype of these values. He is Christian, is educated by missionaries, wears Westernized clothes, and is the first to adopt new technologies in his community. He also is monogamous and married to Lillian Kahahu, who manages the estate they convert into a pyrethrum plantation. This too is a symbol of modernity, as Ngũgĩ associates it with the exploitative practices of capitalism in which he and his siblings work for menial wages.
In direct contrast to Lord Kahahu, Ngũgĩ’s uncle, Baba Mũkũrũ epitomizes the tenets of traditionalism, as he closely follows the rites and practices of his ancestors, modeling his home on these values. Ngũgĩ sets up Baba Mũkũrũ and Lord Kahahu as foils to each other and writes, “Baba Mũkũrũ’s house was antithetical to Kahahu’s. He was as confident in the ways of his ancestors as Kahahu was in the ways of his Christian ancestors” (82-83). Yet, while seemingly separate, the two worlds of tradition and modernity are intertwined. This is evident in the clandestine relationship between Kahahu’s son and Baba Mũkũrũ’s daughter. While the patriarchs do their utmost to keep out of each other’s lives, their children do not heed them, resulting in a pregnancy that neither family accepts. To avoid responsibility, Kahahu sends his son to school in South Africa, further associating the family with modernity in the eyes of the community.
The competing ethos of modernity and tradition also is apparent in Ngũgĩ’s description of his two schools, Kamandũra and Manguo, which formatively shape his trajectory as a writer. Kamandũra is a Kĩrore school, a term that refers to missionary and government educational institutions. As Ngũgĩ explains, these schools acquire a negative reputation, as they inculcate the values of colonial and capitalist subjugation, preparing students for subservient roles: “The white settler community wanted ‘skilled’ African labor, not learned African minds” (114). Mangu, meanwhile is a Karĩng’a school, a term that refers to African independent schools. These schools promote self-reliance with “the African being the judge of the shape and direction of change” (113). For Ngũgĩ, the difference between the two schools “lay in intangibles” (115). As he writes, “When I think back on Kamandũra, what pops up are images of church, silent prayer, and individual achievement” (115), associations that typify values of colonial modernity. “In Manguo,” he continues, “Images of performance, public spectacle, and a sense of community” (115), thus reflecting values of traditional learning.
Nonetheless, for Ngũgĩ, the values of modernity and traditionalism are not incompatible, as he incorporates both in his life, significantly shaping his character and outlook in life:
From Lord Reverend Kahahu I myself learned to revere modernity; from Baba Mũkũrũ, the values of tradition, and from my father, a healthy skepticism of both. But the performance aspects of both Christianity and tradition always appealed to me (86).
Indeed, these values carry over into Ngũgĩ’s career as a writer, as he devotes a substantial portion of his writing to the performative interplay of modernity and tradition.
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