This is a better side of Ngugi

• He is an interesting storyteller as an ‘innocent’ author than the ‘ideological’ and ‘committed’ one

In three years, we shall celebrate half a century of Kenya’s independence. As it would be expected, many senior citizens are writing their auto/biographies.

Already Ngugi wa Thiong’o has let us into his experiences of a childhood under colonialism and growing up during the emergency period.

Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir is quite a compelling reading. And there is a very good reason: it has no lectures on revolution, socialism, Marxism, neo-colonialism, African languages as purveyors of our culture, etc.

I guess that the “innocent” James Ngugi in Dreams in a Time of War is a much better storyteller than the “ideological” or the “committed”, Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

To read of his father’s success, of the “theft” of the family land by a new system that casually swipes away an established culture around economic transactions and settling of disputes, conveys a more acute understanding of how colonialism upset and damaged the African ways of life than many an historian would be able to express.

The not-so-developed tracing of his ancestry to the Maasai is the most profound statement of how ethnically mixed and cosmopolitan Kenyans can be. I find this statement serving our collective national aspirations better than his fiction sometimes tends to do.

If Ngugi proclaims to be a nationalist in his fiction if, indeed, he seeks to write about post-colonial Kenya in which all tribes are equal, if he desires, as forcefully expressed in his non-fiction essays, to see a Kenya truly freed from colonial occupation and neo-colonial dependence, then how is it that the same vision as read in his literature tends to be narrow?

First, his early fiction, and rightfully so, is located within the Gikuyu community. But even then the tensions within that (imagined) community foreclose any possibilities of true reconciliation between those on the opposite sides of the anti-colonial struggle.

Thus, little room is left for those who betrayed the cause; those who associated with the colonialists are condemned forever.

Beyond the community, Ngugi’s fiction does not beckon much towards other communities.

Finding just names of individuals from other Kenyan communities, the Maasai, Kamba, Somali or Kisii or their stories – which would symbolically communicate conviviality and shared national dreams – is a hard (t)ask. Isn’t it individuals in stories – identified by name, which name takes on significant value – who project an author’s intentions?

Also, the Mau Mau story, the backbone of all his writing, has to be more complicated by the fact that many Kenyans contributed to the struggle for Kenya’s freedom in one way or another. Again, these are the individuals that one struggles to identify in Ngugi’s fiction.

The point I seek to make is that once Ngugi decided to use history as the pillar of his work, it is by history that he will be judged. And this is where the problem of fair representation begins.

The absence of “good whites” in Ngugi’s fiction is as surprising as is the absence of Kenyans from other tribes – surely Ngugi must have met many other kind and sympathetic whites and Kenyans from elsewhere during his schooling.

Is it mere coincidence that these “absences” are present in literature that has been read for so long as allegories of colonial and post-colonial Kenya?

Yet in Dreams in a Time of War, the reader encounters a more egalitarian and sympathetic account of the times and lives of individual Kenyans and institutions such as the church during colonialism.

One feels that if Ngugi had written his fiction in the manner in which he tells his life story, then we could be celebrating a more nuanced critique of post-colonial Kenya.

What reading Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir is likely to reveal is that Ngugi’s non-fiction writing is often more satisfying than his fiction.