num_pages: 256
description: Birth of a Dream Weaver charts the very beginnings of a writers creative output. In this wonderful memoir Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo recounts the four years he spent in Makerere University in Kampala Ugandathreshold years where he found his voice as a playwright journalist and novelist just as Uganda Kenya Congo and other countries were in the final throes of their independence struggles.James Ngugi as he was known then is haunted by the emergency period of the previous decade in Kenya when his friends and relatives were killed during the Mau Mau Rebellion. He is also haunted by the experience of his childhood in a polygamous family and the brave break his mother made from his fathers home. Accompanied by these ghosts Ngugi begins to weave stories from the fibers of memory history and a shockingly vibrant and turbulent present.What unfolds in this moving and thought-provoking memoir is both the birth of one of the most important living writerslauded for his epic imagination (Los Angeles Times)and the death of one of the most violent episodes in global history.
language: English
title: Birth of a Dream Weaver
publisher: The New Press