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Authors: Ngugi wa'Thiong'o

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Finally I turn to my father. He is sitting on a stool inside Njeri’s hut. My father has nothing to say beyond, You have done well and you have my blessings. I know that he has been receiving many congratulations from other elders on the achievement of his son, but embarrassment prevents him from saying more. I know that he has nothing material to give me and he does not even make a gesture. He is really down and out. But I am not here for money or gifts from him. I want to give myself a gift. I do not want to start a new life with resentment in my heart. My visit is my way of telling him that even though he has not asked for forgiveness, I still forgive him. Like my mother, I believe that anger and hatred corrode the heart. I want my actions to speak for me, positive deeds to be my only form of vengeance. Not much is spoken. But as I am about to leave, he stands up and
walks a few steps with me. Then he does something I have never seen him do: He takes me up the dump site, telling me to be careful of the stinging plants, the kind we called
thabai
. We stand there looking down the slope I had known so well, the slope where I often witnessed my sisters and brothers and mothers going on their way to work at the white-owned tea plantations and scattering all over. From this hill one could hear the sirens from the Limuru Bata Shoe Company built in 1938. And for all those years, the siren,
king’ora
, had become a timekeeper, marking the passage of the day for all of us: The morning siren announced the break of day, the midday one, lunch break, and the last one, nightfall. We talk about the before and after of the sirens. This was the same hill from which my mother claimed she had witnessed Indian ghosts holding lights in their hands and walking about in the dark. Yes, so many memories, of being stung by stinging nettles, of hiding our dogs in the bush around the dump site and then my mother taking them back to the Indian shops! Even my father is absorbed in thoughts of his own as if surveying the lands that once belonged to him and the distance he has covered since his flight from Mũrang’a. Or his journey in time from his birth before Kenya was Kenya, before there was Nairobi or Limuru or any town beyond the coast; his journey through the First and Second World Wars and now Mau Mau with his sons fighting on both sides of the conflict. I wish I could say to him: Your thoughts about this, Father, but I don’t say it. He breaks the silence but not about the past. You have done well, he says at last. The road ahead is long. There will be holes and bumps.
You shall fall sometimes. The thing is to stand up and continue walking. His tone is matter-of-fact. But I have a feeling that he is telling this to himself as well. And in my heart I say thank you. I am free. I am not a prisoner of anger or resentment anymore.

Everything is ready. I have been to see my friend Kenneth. He has been accepted in Kambũi Teacher Training School. So also have Mũrage Chege, Mũturi Ndiba, and Kamĩri Ndotono, all my classmates. Kambũi is Harry Thuku’s home area, once the site of the Gospel Missionary Society before it merged with Church of Scotland Mission to form the Presbyterian Church in 1946. Kenneth is disappointed that he has not been admitted into a high school, but he does not forget to bring up our arguments about writing and prison. I will still write that book, he says, just to prove you wrong about the license to write.

My mother is not coming to the train, she tells me. Go well, always do your best, and you will be all right. I discover that Liz Nyambura, a senior at Alliance Girls High School, the girl who was a math prodigy way back in my early Kamandũra days, and Kenneth Wanjai wa Jeremiah, already in form two at Alliance High School, are returning to Kikuyu the same day. I join them at the railway platform. My sisters, my brother’s wife, and my younger brother accompany me to the station.

The platform seems very busy, but probably not as busy
as in those days long ago when the Limuru railway platform was a social center. I recall the days when my sisters and brother used to run down the slope from our father’s house to meet the twelve o’clock passenger train to Kampala or Kisumu. Oh, how I used to envy them, wishing for the day when I would become an adult so that I could race other young men and women to the railway station! And now I am there, not to see the train come and go but to ride it.

All the people present assume that I am excited because of my next school; only my younger brother knows what I am really feeling. For the first time in my life I am going to board a passenger train. I recall that time when I was not able to board a train to Elburgon. I recall how my brother, who took the train then, would later hint at the wonders of the train ride as a way of letting me know that he had one up on me. He knew that I was envious of his achievement. But he does not know that I have also been envious of John and Joan, the fictional schoolkids who lived in Oxford but went to school in Reading by train. Now my time has come. Now I am doing the same thing. A train to school. A boarding school. Alliance High School, Kikuyu. 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.

At long last the train arrives. We walk toward the coaches that are not marked for Europeans only or Asians only. Third class is not even dignified by “Africans only.” Wanjai and Liz and others enter and as they do they show a piece of paper to a European railway official. It is now my turn. The official stops me. Pass? What pass? He demands to see a pass
that allows me to move from Limuru to Kikuyu, only twelve miles away. It is a new law under the state of emergency. No member of the Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru community can board the train without a government-issued pass. But nothing of the sort was mentioned on any of the information sheets in the package from the school. Interventions by Wanjai and Liz Nyambura are to no avail. The only assurance Wanjai can give is that he will tell the school about the mishap. But his words don’t touch me; they can’t heal the wound in my heart. By now there is a commotion around me, different people offering different opinions.

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 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. Those who would have commiserated with me are themselves in need of commiseration. I don’t know how my mother will receive this, for mine was also her dream.

And then out of nowhere an African assistant station master arrives on the scene. Somebody must have gone to appeal to him. His name, I will learn, is Chris Kahara. Years later, after independence, he will become mayor of the City of Nairobi. But just now he is simply an assistant station master in his official white uniform, a white safari jacket over white trousers. He tells me not to cry; he will do his best to ensure that I get to Kikuyu. Only I will probably miss the bus to
school. But I could run through the Ondiri marshes to my dreams. Before he has finished talking, along comes a goods train. It is not the smooth-looking passenger train I had hoped for, but I follow him to the last car. He has made arrangements. I get into the car. I am surrounded by workmen’s tools and clothes. I can smell their sweat but it does not matter. The car has no windows so I don’t see the landscape. 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.

At last I arrive at Kikuyu station. Like Limuru, it was opened in 1899. Somebody opens the back doors for me, behaves as if he is simply checking the tools, mumbles something like “It is here,” and I jump out, with my box. The man smiles, closes the door, and walks away.

I stand there at the station platform and watch the goods train go by, this time with relief and gratitude. I look around and see some shops. I take my box and drag it toward them. I cannot believe that this is the real Kikuyu Township. It consists of two rows of Indian shops very much like those at Limuru, but far fewer. But I am not interested in the Indian traders behind the counters or the African shoppers. I may have overcome one obstacle, but I have another to worry about.

The information sheet that I had received stated that a school bus would meet students at the station. I am late. The bus must have come and gone without me. I have no idea about the distance to and location of the school. I approach a stranger who looks askance at me and then points to a road, mumbling something about going past the Ondiri marshes,
and walks away. I will have to wade through the Ondiri marshes the way I used to do in Manguo, except that then I carried nothing heavier than a bird’s
egg
or a bundle of wet clothes. Now I have a box with my belongings. And then I recall the story of Ondiri that I had read in
Mwendwa nĩ Irĩ
and Ngandi’s stories about people disappearing in the bog never to be seen again. Was this the same Ondiri? No, I am not going to walk through the Ondiri bog, no matter what. I will stick to the road.

I am about to start walking toward the road pointed out to me by the stranger when the school bus comes for others on the Mombasa train, which also arrives at that moment. I walk toward it. The teacher, who I learn later is the acting principal, Mr. James Stephen Smith, checks my name on his list and tells me to enter, as the other students do the same.

It is only after I enter the bus and sit down that I let out a sigh of relief and dare to look ahead. A new world. Another journey. A few minutes later, at a junction off the Kikuyu road, I see a billboard with banner letters so personal that I think it must have been for me alone.
WELCOME TO ALLIANCE HIGH SCHOOL
. 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.

Irvine, California
February 12, 2009

Limuru Station

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Njeri wa Ngũgĩ, who suggested this; Gloria Loomis, who told me it cannot wait; Kĩmunya, my general assistant in Kenya; Kenneth Mbũgua, who provided pictures and information about our school days; Charity W. Mwangi, who gave information on Kĩambaa and Banana Hills; Neera Kapila for information on railroad stations and the picture of the Indian family; and, as always, my assistant Barbara Caldwell, for library and Internet research and editorial work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has taught at Amherst College, Yale University, and New York University. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His books include
Petals of Blood
, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977, and
Wizard of the Crow
, which won the California Book Award Gold Medal for Fiction in 2007. He lives in Irvine, California.

Copyright © 2010 by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, [date]
Dreams in a time of war : a childhood memoir / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37895-8
1. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, [date]—Childhood and youth. 2. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, [date]—Family. 3. Authors, Kenyan—20th century—Biography. 4. Kikuyu (African people)—Biography. 5. Kenya—History—1895–1963—Biography. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, Kenyan. 7. World War, 1939–1945—Kenya. 8. Kenya—History—Mau Mau Emergency, 1952–1960—Personal narratives, Kenyan. 9. Kenya—Colonial influence. 10. Kenya—Social conditions—20th century. I. Title.
PR9381.9.N45Z469 2010   828′.91409—dc22   [B]   2009034107

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