Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o
I don’t know how long it took, but eventually we managed to earn enough money to pay for the iron wheel. The owner raised the required fee. I was so anxious to get the wheel that I gave the money I had as down payment, but by the time I raised the rest the wheel was no longer available and it was he who now owed me money. He promised to get us another wheel. Disappointed, we resumed our engineering efforts and eventually came up with a better and smoother-functioning wheel. We then collected wood, nails, and wires from wherever we could and managed to make a semblance of a wheelbarrow. Equipped with our new vastly improved contraption, we would trek distances to collect firewood or fetch water in a tin container. Quite often the wheel would not move straight, especially on rough, uneven surfaces, and it needed the power of us two, one in front pulling with a rope and one behind pushing by the handles.
We took our home contraption everywhere, even to the pyrethrum fields, where it attracted the attention of other kids, particularly Njimi and Gĩtaũ, the young sons of the landlord, who often came to the fields, not to work, but for the company of age-mates, breaking the monotony of home confinement. They marveled at our contraption and they begged to push it. We were reluctant to let others touch it, so they brought us a real wheelbarrow to substitute for ours. What a difference between the real thing and our invention! But ours had the attraction of a homemade toy!
We used the demand for our toy to extract other privileges. The pyrethrum fields had not eaten up all the forest. It was still thick with bush. We would go there to climb trees, sometimes building bridges between them by connecting the branches of one tree with those of another, or using the branches to swing from tree to tree. What we most longed for was to hunt and capture a hare, or even an antelope. An antelope was once spotted in the pyrethrum fields and the entire workforce stopped what it was doing to chase the animal, shouting, Catch the antelope, but the animal was too fast for the screaming pursuers. We had often heard of boys who had managed to land one or the other, but it was clear from this experience that without a dog to help us, we would never manage to catch a hare, let alone an antelope. In exchange for the right to push our wheelbarrow, we persuaded Njimi and Gĩtaũ to bring their dogs to help us catch an animal and carry its carcass home on the wheelbarrow. We were lucky and spotted a hare and, led by the dogs, we immediately started chasing it. Soon the dogs and the hare left us behind, but the barking led us to a thick thorny bush. The dogs were barking at the bush, inside which a very frightened hare was ensconced, and no amount of stones thrown inside or shaking of the bush would persuade the hare to leave its lair. We never captured a hare, and after some time the novelty of the homemade wheelbarrow wore off for Njimi and Gĩtaũ, and the privilege of pushing it was worthless to us. My brother and I longed to have dogs that would be at our command anytime we wanted to hunt, or dogs that would follow us as we piloted our airplanes.
But the wheelbarrow had not yet lost its charm for those who saw it for the first time. An Indian boy became smitten by its toy power. The Indian community kept to itself, connected to Africans and whites only through its shops. In the front was the Indian merchant. Otherwise family life was in the backyard, each surrounded by high stone walls. Similarly high walls surrounded even the schoolyard. The only African people who had glimpses of the life of an Indian family were cleaners and sweepers, who said that Indians were of many nationalities, religions, and languages—Sikhs, Jains, Hindus, Gujaratis. They talked of conflicts between and within families, contradicting the image of seeming harmony. There was even less contact between Indian and African kids. Sometimes when a few of them ventured outside beyond the shops, African boys would throw stones at them for the joy of seeing them retreat to their barricaded backyards. From inside the barricades, they would also throw back stones. The most feared were the turbaned Sikhs because it was said they carried swords and when they ran back inside their yards we assumed it was to get their dangerous weapons. But children’s curiosity about one another sometimes overcame the barriers of stone walls and adult warnings. That was how our wobbly homemade wheelbarrow attracted the eyes of the Indian boy who begged to be allowed to push it. He smoothed the way by giving us two tiny multicolored marbles. Later it took the occasional gift of a candy to bridge the human divide. And finally some kind of friendship was sealed by the gift of two puppies whose mother had given birth to too large a litter.
At long last we had dogs we could call our own. We brought them home in triumph, but my mother hated dog shit so much that she put them in a basket and took them back to the Indian shopping center and set them loose. We told our Indian friend that the puppies had escaped and he gave us another one. We tried to bring up the puppy secretly by building a dog pen in the bush around the dump site. We fed it in secrecy, but our mother must have been on to us. One day we woke up to find the puppy gone. We never saw our generous Indian friend again, and we could not go knock at his door to ask for him. Besides, what could we tell him? That the puppy had run away again?
I would soon be cured of any love for dogs. I was going to the pyrethrum fields one day, crossing the path to the landlord’s house, when his dogs, the same dogs that had been our companions in hunting, came barking at me. I ran for dear life, but the dogs felled me and one of them dug its teeth into my leg just above the right ankle, a bite that left a scar and a lifelong fear of dogs.
I recalled and identified with the terror of the hare we had earlier tried to catch. I would leave hunting alone and stick to my homemade toys.
One evening, my mother asked me: Would you like to go to school? It was in 1947. I can’t recall the day or the month. I remember being wordless at first. But the question and the scene were forever engraved in my mind.
Even before Kabae was demobilized, most of the sons younger than he, including my elder brother, Wallace Mwangi, had entered school, most of them dropping out after a year or two, because of the price of tuition. The girls, so bright, fared even worse, attending school for less than a year, a few of them teaching themselves at home and learning enough to be able to read the Bible. School was way beyond me, something for those older than I or those who came from a wealthy family. I never thought about it as a possibility for me.
So I had nursed the desire for schooling in silence. Though its seed had been planted by the status of my half brother Kabae in my father’s house, its growth was influenced less by his example or that of my own brother Wallace Mwangi than by the children of Lord Reverend Kahahu: Njambi, the girl, and Njimi, a son, both about my age. When I worked in their father’s fields harvesting pyrethrum flowers, I had often interacted with them, but I never imagined that I could ever be of their world. In lifestyle we inhabited opposite spheres.
The Kahahu estate of motor vehicles, churchgoing, economic power, and modernity was a contrast to ours, a reservation of hard work, poverty, and tradition, despite Kabae’s glorious exploits and my father’s wealth in cows and goats and his lip service to our ancestry. The difference between our clothes and those the Kahahu children wore was glaring: The girls had dresses; most of my sisters wore white cotton cloth wraps, sometimes dyed blue, over a skirt, the long side edges held together by safety pins and a belt of knitted wool. The young Kahahu boys’ shirts and khaki shorts, held in place by suspenders, were a contrast to my single piece of rectangular cotton cloth, one side under my left armpit and with the two corners tied into a knot over the right shoulder. No shorts, no underwear. When my younger brother and I ran down the ridge, playing our games, the wind would transform our garments into wings trailing our naked bodies. I associated school with khaki wear, shorts, suspenders, and shoulder flaps. As my mother now dangled school in front of me, the uniform also came into view.
It was the offer of the impossible that deprived me of words. My mother had to ask the question again.
“Yes, yes,” I said quickly in case she changed her mind.
“You know we are poor.”
“Yes.”
“And so you may not always get
“Yes, Mother.”
“Promise me that you’ll not bring shame to me by one day refusing to go to school because of hunger or other hardships?”
“Yes, yes!”
“And that you will always try your best?”
I would have promised anything at that moment. But when I looked at her and said yes, I knew deep inside me that she and I had made a pact: I would always try my best whatever the hardship, whatever the barrier.
“You will start in Kamandũra school.”
I don’t know why my mother chose Kamandũra, where the children of the landlord went, rather than Manguo school, which my brother Wallace Mwangi had attended. It may have been because of differences in tuition, or because my uncle Gĩcini, much older than I, went to Kamandũra and he would look after me. I suspect that my mother had come to trust Lord Reverend Kahahu on account of his role in helping heal my eyes and that she was acting on his advice. I did not mind this choice because then I would be sure to have a school uniform like the children of the landlord.
My father had no say one way or another in this enterprise. It was my mother’s dream and her entire doing. She raised the money for the tuition and the uniform by selling her produce in the market. And then one day she took me to the Indian shopping center. I had been there before, but I had not seen the shops as having anything to do with me directly except that some of the shops stocked rocks of unprocessed sugar—gur or jaggery or cukari wa nguru as we called it—which we bought for a few cents, our candy. But now I saw the shops advertised as Shah Emporium or Draperies in a different light: They contained what would fulfill my desire. Eventually we made our way to a store that specialized in school wear. On the wall hung a picture of a thin Indian man wearing glasses. He seemed to be dressed in a cotton cloth serving as both his trousers and his shirt. How so, I thought, wondering whether I could have fashioned my garment so as to cover my body the same way. My mother bought me a shirt and a pair of shorts, the plainest, without suspenders or shoulder flaps, but lack of these adornments did not diminish my joy. I forgot to ask my mother who the frail-looking Indian was and why his picture hung on the wall. I was lost in contemplation of my new possessions. My only disappointment was that I would have to wait for school to start before I could wear them. And then at last!
The day I wear my khaki uniform and walk two miles to Kamandũra is when I enter and float in the soft mist of a dreamland. I am in the mist as Njambi, the landlord’s youngest daughter, who has guided me to school on the first day, shows me my starting class, sub B, taught by her older sister, Joana. The teachers are characters in a dream. Big-eyed Isaac Kuria is registering new pupils. He asks me my name. I say Ngũgĩ wa Wanjikũ, because at home I identified with my mother. I am puzzled when this is greeted with giggles in the class. Then he asks me: What’s your father’s name, and I say, Thiong’o. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the identity I shall carry throughout this school, but I am not conflicted by the two ways of identifying myself.
Later, I learn that sub B and A are a kind of preprimary stage, slightly lower than grade one, or standard one, as it was called. I have entered sub B in the last third, so the others have been at it for the first two quarters. Njambi is already in grade one, two classes ahead, so she cannot help me navigate my way in this class. We sit on benches without desks or tables. The three classes are held at the same time in a church of corrugated iron walls and roof but in different spaces without any partitions. I can hear and see everything that is going on in the other spaces, but, as I soon learn, woe to anyone caught paying attention to what is going on outside one’s space. But it is hard not to look since most of the teaching takes the form of call-and-response, the teacher writing and reading aloud some numbers or an alphabet on the blackboard, the kids repeating after him or her, in a singsong. Everyone, the teachers, the students, looks splendid in their strangeness.
I returned home in the evening, still in the dream, only to wake up to reality. I had to take off the school uniform and change into my usual garb. This became routine. Initially this was okay, but I soon found embarrassment increasingly creeping into my awareness of the world, especially when I encountered the other kids who had simply changed into regular shorts and shirts. But taking care of my school clothes was one of the promises I had made to my mother. She washed the one set of shirt and shorts every weekend so I could don them on Mondays. When I dirtied the clothes on weekdays, she would wash and dry them by the fire at night.
School remains an environment totally different from the one of my ordinary living. I feel an outsider in our world, to which everyone else seems to belong. There are many things I don’t understand. But one custom among the kids and teachers puzzles me. Before splitting into the different spaces, all the children assemble in the same place, bend their heads down, close their eyes, and the teacher says something like, Our Father who art in Heaven, and the entire assembly takes up the rest. I don’t close my eyes. I want to see everything. But even after the Amen, some kids continue murmuring something to themselves, eyes still closed. For a long time this habit continues to puzzle me, and at one time I elbow one of the kids next to me to see if he would open his eyes, but he keeps them shut. Soon I figure out that the children are muttering a silent prayer. In my home we never prayed silently and individually. When my father used to live in the compound, he would wake up in the morning, stand in the yard facing Mount Kenya, pour a little libation, and say some words that ended with a loud call for peace and blessings for the entire household. Later I learn to shut my eyes but I don’t have anything to mutter about. It was more fun with my eyes open, for there is a lot more to hold my attention.
I have bought a black slate and a white chalk for my writing material. We copy on our slates what the teacher has written on the blackboard. Later she comes around to grade on the slate, putting an X or a check against each word or number, totals them up, and then circles the cumulative number. At first I do not realize that after she has graded I still have to wait for her to enter the number in a register for the record. I rub off my work as soon as the teacher has graded it, but when I go home and my mother asks me what and how I had done and I say I rubbed off everything she says: Then don’t, wait for the teacher to tell you what to do. The teacher also corrects me, otherwise I would continue getting zero, and when later she starts writing on my slate 10/10, and my mother asks me what I had done and I say, ten out of ten, she would ask probing questions ending with: Is that the best you could have done? This is a question she will keep on asking in response to my schoolwork, class exercises, and tests: Is that the best you could have done? Even when I tell her proudly that I scored ten out of ten, she asks the question in different ways, until I say yes, I had tried my best. Strange, she seems more interested in the process of getting there than the actual results.
I drift through the initial classes, not quite understanding why I have been moved from sub B to sub A to grade one, all within the same quarter, a skipping of classes that continues from term to term so that within a year I am in grade two, and still my mother continues to ask: Is that the best you could have done?
I don’t know about the best that I could have done; all I know is that one day I am able to read on my own the Gĩkũyũ primer we used in class titled Mũthomere wa Gĩkũyũ. Some sentences are simple, like the one captioning a drawing of a man, an ax on the ground, his face grimacing with pain as he holds his left knee in both hands, drops of blood trickling down. The picture is more interesting than the words: Kamau etemete. Etemete Kuguru. Etemete na ithanwa! Kamau has cut himself. He has cut his leg. He has cut himself with an ax! I tackle long passages that do not have illustrations. There is a passage that I read over and over again, and suddenly, one day, I start hearing music in the words:
God has given the Agĩkũyũ a beautiful country
Abundant in water, food and luscious bush
The Agĩkũyũ should praise the Lord all the time
For he has eve
Even when not reading it, I can hear the music. The choice and arrangements of the words, the cadence, I can’t pick any one thing that makes it so beautiful and long-lived in my memory. I realize that even written words can carry the music I loved in stories, particularly the choric melody. And yet this is not a story; it is a descriptive statement. It does not carry an illustration. It is a picture in itself and yet more than a picture and a description. It is music. Written words can also sing.
And then one day I come across a copy of the Old Testament, it may have belonged to Kabae, and the moment I find that I am able to read it it becomes my book of magic with the capacity to tell me stories even when I’m alone, night or day. I don’t have to wait for the sessions at Wangarĩ’s in order to hear a story. I read the Old Testament everywhere at any time of day or night, after I have finished my chores. The biblical characters become my companions. Some stories are terrifying, like that of Cain killing his brother Abel. One night at Wangarĩ’s their story becomes the subject of heated discussion. The story, as it emerges in this setting, is a little different from the one I have read about but it is no less terrifying. In this version Cain is condemned to wander the universe forever. He carries the mark of evil on his forehead and travels at night, a tall figure whose head scrapes the sky. Some of the storytellers claim that late one night they had encountered him and they ran home in terror.
Most vivid in a positive way is the story of David. There is David playing the harp to a King Saul of contradictory moods. Their alternations of love and hate are almost hard to bear. Years later I would completely identify with the lines of the spiritual: Little David play on your harp. But David the harpist, the poet, the singer is also a warrior who can handle slingshots against Goliath. He, the victor over giants, is like trickster Hare, in the stories told at Wangarĩ’s, who could always outsmart stronger brutes. When later I learned how to make a sling attached to a Y-shaped twig, I would be thinking of David’s, though I never met my Goliath in war. David, the warrier-poet, remains an ideal in my mind.