Song of Africa

Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening. By Ngugi wa Thiong’o. New Press; 238 pages; $25.95. Harvill Secker; £14.99.

IN THE latest volume of his memoirs, Ngugi wa Thiong’o advocates a certain revisionism about his native Kenya. In a brief preface titled “Note on Nomenclature” he asserts that the British-termed “Mau Mau” rebellion will instead be referred to as the “Land and Freedom Army”, the two main goals for those who rose up against the British colonial presence in Kenya. According to Mr Ngugi, the term “Mau Mau” comes from a corruption of the movement’s motto: “Oath of unity for (demanding) Land and Freedom”. It was the colonial state that opted instead, he says, to refer to the soldiers with the “meaningless mumbo-jumbo” of “Mau Mau” in order to obscure both their goals and their purpose.

The uprising began in the early 1950s, when Mr Ngugi was still a teenager. It grew from the armed struggle for liberation by the Kikuyu and other tribes, but was characterised by the colonial power as “mass mania manifesting itself in violence and witchcraft”, what Elspeth Huxley, the white settlers’ literary spokesman, called the “yell from the swamp”. The rebellion would have a momentous impact on the novelist’s future work.

Mr Ngugi’s unstated goal throughout this book is reclamation, not just of the Land and Freedom Army, but of much of the colonial endeavour in east Africa. Over and over again he condemns the denigration of Kenyans as “primitive” and “zoological” and goes on to present a clearer rationale for the Kikuyu people’s desire for freedom. Mr Ngugi’s own wish to wrest the narrative away from the colonial thread comes at a cost, though; at times the story of his development as a thinker and writer is muddled and seems secondary to the broad political and social upheavals happening across the region.

Mr Ngugi attended the missionary-run Alliance High School near Nairobi and, later, Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. It was here that he began writing plays and novels against colonial oppression in east Africa. The motto of Makerere University was “to seek the truth”, Mr Ngugi points out, but his accounts of the censorship and bigotry of that time are shocking.

He describes attending the Conference of African Writers of English Expression, which was held at Makerere in 1962, near the end of his time as a student. Mr Ngugi was selected to participate alongside such writers as Kofi Awoonor, Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka—Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature—and Langston Hughes, an American poet.

The conference opened with a discussion on the nature and meaning of “African literature”, and its thematic debates have gone on to shape writing across the continent for the past 50 years. One heated point throughout was language itself, with Mr Ngugi arguing that African novels should be written in African languages, an idea he would promote two decades later in a collection of essays entitled “Decolonising the Mind.” He published several novels in English and then brought out one of the first novels ever written in his native language of Gikuyu, which he later translated into English.

During the Makerere conference, Mr Ngugi offered Hughes a tour of the city and was given editorial advice by Achebe on the manuscript that would become his first novel, “Weep Not, Child”. The Heinemann African Writers series, for which Achebe was an editorial adviser, published the novel in due course. Later it would be revealed that, unbeknown to many of the participants, the CIA had been the original funder of the Makerere conference in an effort to influence the eventual decolonisation of east Africa.

Mr Ngugi refers to Makerere as “hell in paradise”. Idi Amin, who seized power in Uganda in 1971, would send a generation of writers and thinkers into exile abroad. Yet the violence and depravity of Amin’s regime—including the decapitation of his captives and the subsequent feeding of their bodies to crocodiles—should have come as little surprise. Amin once served the British in Kenya as a member of the King’s African Rifles. He worked as a headhunter, in the literal sense, fighting a rebellion once called the “Mau Mau”.