It is apparent from all of Ngũgĩ’s writing that his education has been one of his biggest influences in his life. It is even the frame with which he chooses to space out his memoirs. Beginning with Dreams in a Time of War, he then goes on to document himself through the path of his education in In the House of the Interpreter and following that, Birth of a Dream Weaver. It is notable that he chooses to separate the memoirs by the different stages of his education.

While he attends boarding school, he remains acutely aware of his foundations in the peasant class of Kenya. This becomes especially apparent when he returns home after his first school term to find that his whole community has been displaced and forced into a concentration village alongside other households from different communities. He chooses to open the memoir en media res, jumping right to this disrupting and alienating encounter with home. The Alliance becomes his sanctuary, then, now that his home has been dismantled with only a fruit tree remaining to remind him of what used to be there.

Interestingly, he identifies the Alliance as his sanctuary, but it is also a site of colonial rule in which presents Ngũgĩ with strong images of contradiction. He soon began to realize that the school established two contradictory pillars of education: “the notion of self-reliance and the aim of producing civic-minded blacks who would work within the parameters of the existing racial state” (10). The aim of the Alliance School was to create self-reliance only within the structure of colonialism.

Ngũgĩ’s time at Alliance is marked by contradictions: the contradictory nature of the schools goals, the feeling of sanctuary while his home was being destroyed, and also the songs and prayers in support of the British state he sings at school while his brother Good Wallace is fighting for Kenyan independence. These are only a few examples of the duality in Ngũgĩ’s experience between the Alliance and his village origins. After having read all of his school-age memoirs, the stark difference between Ngũgĩ’s educational experience and his experience at home brings valuable insight to how he is able to use his extensive education to address issues he was observing when he returned home to see his mother and family, and later his wife and child.

Works Cited

Ngũgĩ, Thiong’o wa. In the House of the Interpreter. Pantheon Books, 2012.