Environmental Dispossession and Dislocated Fatherhood in Ngũgĩ’s Childhood Memoirs

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a reading of Ngũgĩ’s childhood memoirs Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter (2012). It tracks a trajectory of the initial model stability and fatherhood of Thiong’o wa Naducu, Ngũgĩ’s father, and argues that Thiong’o’s success in the first phase of his patriarchy is conditioned by his firm control of a vast portion of land acquired and held as his own. It reads the second phase of Thiong’o’s patriarchy and its loss of fatherhood agency as instigated by his loss of land. The paper intimates that Thiong’o’s dislocation leads to a destabilised father-son relationship in the process of which his mother, Wanjiku, assumes composite parenthood agency. It further argues that an understanding of the transition must be located within the context of the unspeakable violence that defines Ngũgĩ’s childhood. Therefore, his agency of resistance to the marginal space occasioned by colonial violence dramatises a desire for balance between the aspirations for western modernity through colonial education and staying true to the primacy of the indigenous epistemic canvass. The experience underscores the far-reaching consequences of land alienation in Kenyan anti-colonial autobiography.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Professor Carli Coetzee for her painstaking review and suggestions leading to the final version of this article. I am also grateful to Professor Taiwo Osinubi for his initial interventions.

Notes

1 In the context of this essay, Thiong’o refers to Ngũgĩ ‘s father.

2 It must be acknowledged that Birth of a Dream Weaver (2016), also by Ngũgĩ, completes the trilogy of his childhood and offers the concluding insight on his witness to the violence of colonialism.