In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir
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. --Hazel Rochman