In the House of the Interpreter

September 10, 2012
Acclaimed Kenyan novelist, poet, playwright, and critic wa Thiong’o recalls the seminal moments of his high school years from 1955 to 1959 during the bloody Mau Mau rebellion against a rigid British colonial regime. The memoir starts on a pleasant, restive tone with young Kenyan schoolboys attending Alliance High School in their school uniforms, but the revolt spills over into the surrounding villages and towns until the British troops begin a scorched earth policy, burning huts and crops to starve out the guerrillas. With his revolutionary brother in the mountains and his brother’s wife in prison, young wa Thiong’o is watched and monitored by authorities, and finally detained in the dark chambers of physical and psychological hell. Alternately youthfully innocent and politically savvy, this is a first-rate telling of that African revolutionary elite who determined the future of their continent.

September 15, 2012
Kenyan writer and professor wa Thiong'o (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine) offers a second harrowing volume of memoir, a sequel to his Dreams in a Time of War (2010). The author begins in 1955, when he had just completed his first term of boarding school and returned home to find...no home. His village was destroyed, and his family was relocated. Right from the outset, then, the themes of dislocation, fear and random violence and terror emerge. His older brother sided with the anti-colonials and was eventually captured, then released; the author was imprisoned, not long after his graduation--a random detention that culminated in the 1959 trial that concludes this book. Wa Thiong'o highlights his family and friends, but also the dominant presence of the school principal, Edward Carey Francis, who appears as a strong, principled but enormously complex character whom the author both feared and revered. School became a revelation, as the author plunged into the library, reading indiscriminately at first (he loved Sherlock Holmes, was troubled by the literature of empire). Excelling in the classroom, he submitted a story for publication in the school journal (it was accepted), and he participated in the school's annual Shakespeare production. The author also writes about his dawning spiritual and religious life (he became an extraordinarily devout Christian, then began to question) and about his ineptness at sports. He preferred table tennis and chess to soccer and field hockey. Throughout, he fittingly refers to school as his "sanctuary," for the place shielded him from the Mau Mau Uprising and other regional and continental crises. An inspiring story of a young man determined to excel and escape.

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June 15, 2012

A 2009 Man Booker International Literary Prize nominee and an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience in his native Kenya in the late 1970s after his arrest for writing a controversial play, wa Thiong'o here follows up a first volume of memoirs called Dreams in a Time of War--which, by the way, was a Samuel Johnson Prize nominee. This new work covers wa Thiong'o's high school years in 1955-59, which places it smack in the middle of the Mau Mau uprising that eventually led to the end of British colonial rule. Nobel-worthy reading, I'll bet; wa Thiong'o is often mentioned for the prize.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2012
Following Dreams in a Time of War (2010), acclaimed Kenyan writer Thiong'o, in this second volume of his memoirs, remembers his four years in boarding school in the late 1950s in Kenya's first high school for Africans, modeled on Tuskegee in the U.S. His brother is a guerrilla in the mountains with the anticolonial Mau-Mau (terrorist or freedom fighter?), and the teens' dual viewpoint will hold readers, both the wry commentary on the literature curriculum (he loves Shakespeare but doesn't get Wordsworth's daffodils) and especially his growing political awareness of the savagery of empire building ( King Solomon's Mines was full of adventure but clearly at the expense of Africa ). His inspiring role models include Garvey, Du Bois, and Nkrumah, and he joins the call for whites to scram from Africa. The A-student wins a scholarship to prestigious Makerere College, but, even though he is no activist, he narrowly escapes prison. The personal detail dramatizes the farce of the colonial land grab and of Christianity as liberation of the natives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)