” Dreaming in times of war is the French title of the childhood memories of novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Octogenarian, the writer restores in this first volume of his Memoirs the oppressive atmosphere of colonial Kenya where he grew up and which was the breeding ground of his literary and militant commitment. The birth of his vocation as a writer is the theme of this second part of the chronicle that Tirthankar Chanda devotes to this giant of African letters (rebroadcast).
” When years later I read the verse by TS Eliot where it says that April is the cruellest of months, I remembered what had happened to me one day in April 1954 in the cool of Limuru, in the heart of this region on which in 1902, another Eliot, Sir Charles Eliot, then colonial governor of Kenya, had taken control by renaming it White Highlands, the White Highlands. The past then came back to me as vividly as if it were present again. »
So begins Dreaming in times of warthe first volume of the Kenyan writer’s romantic memoirs Ngugi wa Thiong’o. They are also very political memoirs, as the quoted extract illustrates. Here, Eliot is not just the name of a poet. It is also that of a British governor whose mandate at the beginning of the last century remains associated in the Kenyan history books with colonial spoliation. This bringing together of the political and the poetic is what makes the singularity of all the literary work of Kenyan, considered with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka as one of the founding and fundamental fathers of African Anglophony.
Ngugi is not only a novelist, but also a playwright, essayist, activist. His powerful and protean body of work has earned him imprisonment, exile, physical and verbal abuse, as well as worldwide recognition, with his name regularly cited as a potential Nobel Prize. The man, now 84 years old, claiming to be part of the dissident thought of Marx to Frantz Fanon, is the very example of the committed writer. This commitment is rooted in Ngugi’s childhood, the subject of the first volume of his memoirs which has just been published.
An unwritten pact
The story begins at the time of the author’s grandparents who saw their country fall into the hands of the Germans, then the British, following the partition of Africa by the European powers at the famous Berlin Conference. , in 1885. As for the author’s father, to escape conscription during the First World War, he had to flee the hustle and bustle of the nascent Nairobi where he worked as a servant in a European family, to go and settle in more rural areas, in the center of the country.
Born in 1938, ” in rural tranquility in central Kenya, Ngugi grew up in the oppressive shadow of British colonization. The exploitation, the spoliation, the repression of the separatists who affected the close and family entourage of the writer, constitute the very texture of these childhood memories.
Remembering the little boy he was, Ngugi stages his slow awareness of the injustices and brutalities of colonization. It is ” as if I emerged from the mist “, writes the author. The protagonist realizes the misery of his family, colonial domination and the helplessness of adults. One of his first memories is linked to the pyrethrum fields where his family sent him to take part in picking. At the age of 8, he must earn his living. The school will be his salvation.
” I never imagined that I could one day studyproclaims Ngugi. It was my mother Wanjiku, who could neither read nor write, who asked me one evening if I would like to go to school. The question remained engraved in my memory as the school seemed to me, at the time, out of my reach. In fact, everything I am today, I owe to my mother. Women have always played a major role in my life. So does the prominent place they occupy in the history of Kenya. They participated fully in the anti-colonial resistance. It is women who have literally carried Kenyan society at arm’s length, preventing it from disintegrating. »
Ngugi likes to say that he never really understood where his illiterate mother’s determination came from to ensure a proper education for her children. Still, it is to his stubbornness and his resourcefulness to raise the necessary money for registration and the purchase of the required uniform that the young Ngugi owes his admission to the school. In one of the most poignant scenes in the book, the writer evokes his mother reminding him that they were poor and that at school he may not eat every lunch. The teenager he was had to promise him, writes Ngugi, that he was not going to “ashamed one day by refusing to go to school, because he was hungry or it was difficult “. It was an unwritten pact between mother and son that was never to be broken.
A haven of peace
If the universe Magic of the school appears in the book as a counterpoint to the turbulence that Kenya is going through, confronted in the post-World War II period with a bloody cycle of independence demands and repressions, the school was not quite a haven of peace. Ngugi tells how the Kenyan school had become the field of ideological battles between the assimilationist current represented by the missionaries and the indigenous movement.
The war raged between these two visions of Africa. While in the independent schools founded by enlightened Kenyans, the teachers spoke of Africa as the continent of the black man, the missionaries close to the colonial power taught a revisionist version of African history, celebrating the arrival of Europeans who would have brought peace, progress and civilisation. They erased the conquests, the spoliations and the destruction in rule of the indigenous cultures. The climax was reached with the closure of the famous Kenya Teachers’ College who trained indigenous teachers. ” The hardest blow to collective morale wasrecalls Ngugi, when the colonial state decided to transform the grounds and buildings of the establishment into a prison camp where those resisting colonialism were hanged. »
Despite the acculturation that the school represented for the student Ngugi, the pact that he had concluded with his mother on a winter evening was never broken. It was all the less so because, parallel to the trauma of the loss of his culture, the school allowed the adolescent to discover his future vocation as a writer, by introducing him to the great classics of English literature. great expectations by Charles Dickens and Treasure Island by Stevenson as well as other emblematic books will be his gateway to the world of the imaginary. The little boy had vaguely sensed its existence in his early childhood, during the night vigils in the hut of his mother’s co-wife.
” My father had four wives, explains Ngugi. We called them “our mothers”. We met every evening in the hut of the eldest of the four. She was an outstanding storyteller. I was fascinated by the imaginary world in which she led us. The night was conducive to these storytelling sessions. Our mothers told us that the light of day drove away the stories. They went home as soon as the day dawned and did not return until the work of the day was finished. It wasn’t until I went to school and learned to read and write that I realized you could tell stories when you actually wanted to. I believe, however, that it was the evening vigils around my storytelling mother-in-law that made me the writer I became. »
Dreaming in times of war ends with the departure of the protagonist for the prestigious Alliance High School where the rest of his education will take place. Sitting in the coach taking him to his destination, the adolescent does not yet perceive, through the mist that envelops the morning landscape, the promise of the sumptuous life of writing that awaits him. But he does not forget to pay tribute to his mother, renewing in thought their secret pact of ” dream, even in times of war “.
(REPEAT)
Dreaming in times of war. childhood memories, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Translated from English by Jean-Pierre Orban and Annaëlle Richard. “Pulsations” collection, Vents d’ailleurs editions, 258 pages, 22 euros.