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The decolonial autobiography?: Reading Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Dreams In a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter
Wambua Muindi
University of Nairobi
“But why does one recall some events and characters vividly and others not at all? How is the mind able to select what it buries deep in the memory and what it allows to float on the surface?” [Dreams in a Time of War, 41]
Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a renowned Kenyan novelist whose oeuvre is, arguably, synonymous with the history of Kenya. He was born in 1938, 18 years into the vicious British settler colonialism of Kenya, from 1920-1963. This reality has afflicted much of his authorship which has sought to complicate the history of colonialism as an individual who grew up under colonialism and was ushered into manhood at the height of the anticolonial struggle. Colonial violence, both to the body and memory, thematically punctuates his ideology and politics of interpretation of what colonialism means and how it features in his writing.
For Ngugi wa Thiong’o, colonialism and language have been the major motivating factors in his writing. These have been reflected in the serialization of the effects of colonial violence and its afterlives in his oeuvre. His corpus of work has been animated by the two and refracted in different ways in his fiction, non-fiction and memoirs. Weep Not, Child (1964) and A Grain of Wheat (1967) rely on the Agikuyu myth of creation to perform Agikuyu nationalism whilst embracing modernity ideas of development and progress The River Between (1965) contests Kenyan’s historiography through historic invention, while Petals of Blood (1977) which supposes a counter narrative of history of the colonial subject through a postcolonial ideation of history. Devil on the Cross (1980) written from prison animates Fanonian pitfalls of national consciousness, Matigari (1986) which dramatizes violence in Kenya’s history, while The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) memorializes the spirit of resistance in the liberation of Kenya as do, Wizard of the Crow (2006) and The Perfect Nine (2018) among others. The trilogy of Dreams in a Time of War (2010), In the House of the Interpreter (2012) and Birth of a Dream Weaver (2016) came quite late in Thiong’o’s career, when his standing as a pioneer (East) African postcolonial writer and critic was already secure. It constructs a self that ontologically struggles with a cultural history that is premised on the idea of domination and subjugation as caused by colonial violence.
This paper takes the entry point of decolonization as manifesting itself in literary expressive thought, imaginative and epistemic works. Thus, attempting to read tableaus of decolonial thought in cultural productions and inscriptions of individuals straddling both theory and literature is instructive in apprehending decolonization. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a postcolonial writer and critic, presents himself in this project as an individual who critically tinkered with his nominal identity but also quit writing in English to write in Gikuyu. The paper takes its cue from Gatsheni’s idea of ‘coloniality as being’ to read Ngugi’s memoirs as they embody the collective colonial experience through his subjectivity.
The arguments in the paper will be problematised by concepts proposed by Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ngugi wa Thiong’o on decolonization. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in Decolonizing the Mind, argues about the situational awareness of the position of those in the Global South and defines the struggle as “between the two mutually opposed forces in Africa today: an imperialist tradition on one hand, and a resistance tradition on the other” (2). Ngugi uses this dialectic to position his decolonial critique in the postcolony and through the example of language shows how cultural products concern themselves with keeping track of injustices informed by historical consciousness. The school becomes a metaphor for the conquest of the mind as it assumes the double role of a space and symbol of coloniality. It is this philosophical underpinning that guides this study’s reading of the memoir as a revisionist memorialization of the life of a colonial subject as an allegory to the colonial reality. Hence, the idea of institutionalized domination can best be understood by looking at the question of colonial violence in Kenya taking the premise of British settler colonialism which characterized the age of Ngugi growing up in Limuru and being educated in Kikuyu through his memoirs. Similarly, Sabelo Ndhlovu-Gatsheni, in describing decolonization, concurs that in both its insurgent and resurgent form decolonization predates the colonial matrix of power yet through the decolonial turn it is imperative to ‘turn a new leaf’. Ndhlovu-Gatsheni sees colonialism and coloniality as incentivizing what he characterizes as liberation from the predicament and long crisis of dependence. In fashioning the self, Ngugi in both memoirs is cognizant of this dialectic and alludes to it through the struggle for education and land as key tenets that occasion the liberation of the postcolonial subject and hence decolonization in Ndhlovu-Gatsheni’s sensibility.
Thiong’o’s life writing comes from a history of the settler colonialism in Kenya under which he was born and educated. As a result, the cloud of colonialism looms large on his upbringing and education. This way, Dreams In A Times Of War reads as a narrative of war animating the anticolonial struggle whereas, In The House Of An Interpreter, we see Ngugi as a child who witnesses violence at different scales and spaces as he gets an education in a colonial school. This settler history animates another of Ngugi’s novels. Matigari, whose theme of violence is situated in the anticolonial struggle. To recollect in Dreams in a Time of War of his upbringing in Limuru, to desire to achieve an education at his mother’s insistence is Ngugi’s way of thinking about a colonial childhood that is at best troubled, and at worst disturbed and to announce the structures, processes and institutions of power in unequal measure. As Syned Mthatiwa concurs, both memoirs “give a glimpse into a troubled boyhood in colonial Kenya” (78). It is this troubled colonial childhood that transits to In the House of an Interpreter characterizing a colonial education in a high school that would define the immediate postcolonial direction of the just independent Kenya.
To the extent that Ngugi refashions his identity against his scholarly politics and philosophy on subjects like colonialism and language, his memoirs are of a decolonial sensibility. Titularly, both autobiographies define themselves around the idea of space. Dreams in a Time of War supposes a visionary experience around an atrocious environment recreating a defiled childhood by the pangs of colonialism and patriarchy alike. Senayon Olaoluwa supposes Ngugi's father’s “loss of fatherhood agency as instigated by his loss of land” (35) caused ‘emasculation’ as the dispossession of land strains the familial relationship with a young Ngugi left to grow up with his maternal grandfathers. Similarly, In the House of the Interpreter reflects on Alliance High School as a space dominated by an overbearing Carey Francis, who fathers the adolescents to prepare them for subservience to the state. In Alliance, education is primed not for intellectual nourishment but rather a pipeline for civil service. This is punctuated by the fact that as an institution, Alliance was modeled after the metropole’s education franchise. Education was not rooted in knowing or understanding Kenya but a promised Britain and Europe and in this way to inculcate subservience to the empire. Ironically, however, it is while at Alliance that Ngugi seems to prime himself for a life in higher education as he seeks to join Makerere. It is not a smooth sail and his profession of the same at a checkpoint earns him an arrest and an arraignment.
The spatial standpoint in the memoirs also imbues within them the cultural memory that Ngugi narrativises to interweave his life story with that of Kenya as a British settler colony. Colonialism and colonial violence punctuate both life histories and broadly allude to the colonial subjects of Kenya. Whereas both autobiographies undress colonialism, In the House of Interpreter, complicates this with a focus on the state of emergency. The opening scene in the memoir is that of an adolescent going home after an eventful first term only to be confronted by the sheer horror of concentration camps. To himself, he wonders, “how could a whole village, its people, history, everything, vanish, just like that?” (3). His bewilderment is reflective of the scale of violence and disregard for societies that colonialism posed on Kenyans. At school, Ngugi is also aware of the permeation of violence within social order mechanisms as well as institutions which are extensions of the colonial state. He gives the example of the assembly ground suggesting that “but I would soon learn it was one of the most important spots in the entire school, the site of a daily performance of power” (10). In so doing, Ngugi portrays the dynamic of trying to negotiate the unequal power given that power as informed by the purveying colonial violence machine is not consistent. Its symbols of violence in this case are embodied in the assembly which alludes to colonial order and hierarchies which sustained the colonial enterprise.
In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi, not by choice, changes schools several times. This happens because the government closes some schools for not working within the curriculum. He schools at Manguo Primary School and Kinyogori Primary School, which were not government-manned and thus viewed with suspicion hence the closures. This not only impeded intellectual growth but also social mobility serving as a form of subjugation since the schools were fashioned as colonial institutions. Closures were not enough as a young Ngugi notes, “but the biggest blow to the collective psyche occurred when the settler colonial state turned the college grounds and buildings into a prison camp where proponents of resistance to colonialism were hanged” (103). Here he references the pioneer school in Githunguri that was pioneered by the community as a community-based and run institution and later turned into a prison camp. Moreover, Ngugi illustrates the colonial modalities of configuring space. These offered an alternative education from the one in the colonial schools and Ngugi here intimates on the epistemic decolonization now a dominant feature in African institutions and a reality he would live through while at the University of Nairobi. While at Alliance, Ngugi suggests, “Even African history was largely the story of Europeans in Africa. Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, and Burton were the larger-than-life bearers of light to a Dark Continent” (42). This alludes to the idea of a decolonial education speaking to what Ndhlovu terms a ‘decolonial epistemology’. Ngugi is against the reduction of history to fit an imperial viewpoint.
Ngugi recounts his studentship at Alliance High School in In the House of the Interpreter. He describes it as, “the first secondary school for Africans in the country and the only reminder of the missions’ feel-good moment of togetherness. African graduates of the elementary schools now had an alternative to vocational institutes” (5). In the school there did not exist a multicultural environment despite it being an institution supposedly ‘enlightened’ and to the extent to which it was possible Ngugi notes how “the presence of Africans on the staff as equals with the white teachers undermined, in our eyes at least, colonial apartheid and the depiction of the Africans as inferior” (7). This reveals the unmodulated logic of colonialism. On the one hand, it did not regard anything black yet admitted black students and had black staff members. This description helps Ngugi to refashion settler colonialism as an unstable system, a pathology of sorts, characterizing it in a manner suggesting that in and of itself, is a problematic system inundated by white supremacy logic. Alliance as a space predisposes the students to valorise whiteness. For instance, Ngugi in a moment of self-deprecation recollects that, “I don’t think I noted the irony in my singing this hymn of prayer while my own brother, Good Wallace, was out in the mountains fighting with the Mau Mau guerrillas so that the queen did not reign long over Kenya” (11). A student during the last days of colonialism and at the height of the war against colonialism, Ngugi cannot help but notice the ironies of Alliance. Further, he is opposed to the education in white mannerisms humorously noting, “the pleasures of eating ugali lay in touch and taste: dipping fingers into the smoking dish and letting it cool in your mouth, rolling it around with your tongue” (13). These ironies worked to diffuse the ways of knowing which were effected by the colonial structures as it sought to maintain control.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, since his days at the University of Nairobi where he together with Henry Anyumba and Taban Lo Liyong wrote the famous memo ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’ has advocated for an Africanized curriculum where Africa is at the centre of the education system. Hence, in his memoir about Alliance he remarks “Our literature classes were no different: English texts were the norm, and Europe the cultural reference” (39). Whereas this could be arguably a play at Ngugi keeping with his academic polemics, he's fundamentally charging at the question of pedagogy at African institutions and the nature of a decolonial curriculum.
In the House of the Interpreter, Ngugi notes that “Life at school continued to be a series of discoveries. There was, for instance, the hierarchy and mystery of the prefect system, which was almost a mirror image of the colonial administration” (20). Ngugi juxtaposes this with the Home Guard Scheme which just as the prefect system worked against the students, worked against the people. This was largely in terms of land and the scheme was meant to dispossess people of their land denying them any form of sustenance. He observes that, “It was a mass fraud, often giving land from the already poor to the relatively rich, and from the families of guerrilla fighters to those loyal to the colonial state” (23). The lack of land meant a sense of loss to the community and also worked to ensure that the colonial state exercised surveillance on the people. He further laments that, “Henceforth I was going to live out my life in a home that reminded me of the loss of home and a school that offered shelter but not the certainty of home. Both, ironically, were colonial constructs, but I feared that even they might clash at any moment and crush my dreams” (25). In writing this way, Ngugi uses the memoir as a genre to be critical of the subtle modes of social engineering that the colonial enterprise fashioned.
Ngugi enlivens space in both memoirs, and features the diasporic inhabitants of Kenya whose history is directly linked with the settler history of the country. Ngugi wa Thiong’o revisits the Indian question to show the genealogies of power and domination in confronting the subject matter in his life story. The South Asian diaspora in Kenya appears in the way Ngugi configures both the Limuru Shopping Center and Kikuyu town in Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter, respectively. A playful Ngugi claims that “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” (34). This reference maps the high cell community by riding on its insularity yet also locating it in the public memory for its power in commerce. In the House of the Interpreter, he adds “those who lived in the neighborhood went home, and the others would trek to the Indian shops at Kikuyu ...the Indians were the commercial frontiersmen, supplying the army of railroad workers and officials with food, clothes, and transport” (10). He gives this description at Alliance for when they were allowed to be out of school on weekends. Both memoirs do this to acknowledge or at least point to the contribution of the South Asian diaspora in Kenya besides the persistent trope of them only having come as Indian coolies to help build the railway.
By acknowledging this Indian question, Ngugi points to the fact of racial segregation. The urban centers were fragmented along racial lines with Africans at the bottom; first was Europeans and second Indians and Africans at the bottom. This of course worked to disadvantage the already impoverished Africans. This colonial segregation, Ngugi notes, “also created the native African worker out of the peasant who, having lost his land, had only the power of his limbs that he hired out to the white settler, when his labor was not taken by force, and to the Indian dukawallah, or shopkeeper, for a pittance” (47). The class differences emanated from the fact that the African was deprived of any means of labour and were forced to contend with meagre wages creating a class difference. But, just as he valorises the Chief Koinange, Jomo Kenyatta and Harry Thuku, which perhaps gives an inkling of Ngugi angling towards ethnonationalism (Agikuyu nationalism, a subject he fictionalized in Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat) both autobiographies acknowledge the role of Indians like Manulal Desai and Makan Singh in helping to energize the anticolonial struggle in Kenya, and of course the role of Mahatma Gandhi who was key in cementing ideals of resistance towards colonialism.
Seen from the viewpoint of religion, the memoirs keep with what Godwin Siundu and Wegesa Busolo regard as a dominant feature in Ngugi's writing as “the way he presents Christians and Christianity” (292). Carey Francis in In the House of Interpreter is a Christian and professes faith yet he is part of the colonial empire. However, he seems able to withstand divided loyalties like being aware that Ngugi's brother is part of Mau Mau and allows him to be a student at a colonial school. Ngugi, who keeps attending church at Kinoo, wonders of the school chapel: “The chapel was meant to be a symbol of God’s presence in the school, the motive power behind its work and service, but it would also be a continuing reminder of the unity between Alliance and the colonial state” (84). This is the confounding scale of colonialism that Ngugi endures. At Alliance, Ngugi wa Thiong'o picks issues with a teacher’s claim that God spoke in English. He says “I raised my hand and said that Jesus did not speak English: the Bible was a translation” (14). This instance performs his early consciousness of the power of language. His consciousness of falsehoods passing in the name of religion despite himself being a committed Christian only served to alienate him.
Ngugi in In the House of the Interpreter relies on the metaphor of translation to illustrate the process of healing the colonial wound. Carey Francis translated the order of the crown, the empire and the school, with all colonial spaces and institutions just like religion meant to acclimate the students to a colonial reality where the chapel becomes emblematic of the pervasive colonial hand. Ngugi’s experience in the school exposes the nature of the colonial state and the logic(s) it uses to sustain itself. Writing the memoir becomes an act of translating what the actions and practices of these colonial institutions were, thereby allowing insights into a reality that is introspection and reflects the dark inequalities in economic and political levels.
Ngugi fashions his life writing in the decolonial turn to functionalize memory as it relates trauma, violence and subjugation as an act in what he termed elsewhere as ‘re-membering’ (2014). Narrative then works to change the power relationship to the extent that memory, space, land and religion perform the healing of the colonial wound psychologically, politically, existentially and spiritually. It is this process which has both memoirs emerge as a creative project addressing itself to a colonial past that truncates individuals with their ways of being and knowing. Both memoirs appropriate decolonial cultural memory to perform anti-colonial efforts and consciousness and perform healing in what he has called ‘decolonising the mind’ (2011). Ngugi appropriates the form of life’s writing to fashion his life as that primed by personal ambition and determination to work around social engineering meant to caricature an inferior complex. Through sites like the school the two memoirs animate the decolonial project that Ngugi's life and life's work have been a testament to through its profound decolonial dialectics.
If Dreams in a Time of War captures a childhood defined by a colonial ordering and a desire to move beyond this space, In the House of the Interpreter shows how an individual armed with sheer determination strives to understand their geography, learn and unlearn a colonial education. This way, Ngugi imports his conceptual frame of decolonising the mind to pen life narratives engaged in healing the colonial wound by re-ordering the meaning of traumatized pasts. Thus, in reading the memoirs we journey towards social renewal and reconstruction by healing the colonial wound.