Dreams in a Time of War Read Online Free PDF

narrators, Wabia was possessed of imaginative power that took me to worlds unknown, worlds that I was later able to glimpse only through reading fiction. Whenever I think of that phase of my childhood, it is in terms of the stories at Wangarĩ’shut at night and their rebirth in her daughter’s voice in daytime.
    Though I did not know it at the time, it would be two of Wangarĩ’s other children who would connect me to a history unfolding in the colonial state and in the world. First was the eldest male in my father’s household, Tumbo, an odd nickname because he had no visibly big belly. He had no visible job either, but it was whispered that he was a
gĩcerũ
. There were people answering to the name Gĩcerũ, but this could refer to the fact that they were light-skinned. For them it was simply a name and not a job. How could one have a profession called “white”? It was only later, when I learned that the word, as used, was derived from the Swahili word
kacheru
, which means “informer,” that I knew that he worked in low-level undercover police intelligence.
    Her third son, Joseph Kabae, was also a mystery, emerging in my mind as an image in a mist. Since I had not met him in person, the outline was formed through hints and odd bits only. As a boy, grazing our father’s herd, he had gotten into a fight with a bigger boy, a bully who always came upon him when he was milking my father’s cows. The bully would drink some of the milk by force and Kabae would get into trouble. One day in anger and self-defense, Kabae fatally stabbed the boy with a knife. He was arrested, but being under age he was taken to Wamũnyũ, a reform trade school, where he got some formal education. After this—I don’t know if it was voluntary or forced—he went to fight for King George VI, in the Second World War, as a member of the King’s African Rifles.
    The KAR, as it was known, was formed in 1902, an outgrowth of two earlier units, the East African Rifles and the Central African Regiment, the brainchild of Captain Lugard. He was famous as the author of the British Indirect Rule, the strategy of using the natives of one region to fight the natives of another region, and in each community, to use the chiefs, traditional or created, to suppress their own people on behalf of the British Crown. The regiment had earlier played a big role in the pursuit of the elusive German von Lettow-Vorbeck in the First World War and against the Ashanti king, the Asantahene, in the Ashanti wars. The men of the regiment sang of themselves as king’s men marching to his orders.
    Twafunga safari
Twafunga safari
Amri ya nani?
Ya Bwana,
Tufunge safari
.
    We are marching on
We are marching on
At whose order?
The king’s orders
Let’s march on.
    Kabae was not the only one from our extended family who fought in the Second World War. Cousin Mwangi, the eldest son of Baba Mũkũrũ, had joined. Names of strange people—Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Churchill, andRoosevelt—and places—America, Germany, Italy, and Russia, Japan, Madagascar, and Burma—occasionally cropped up in the story sessions at Wangarĩ’s fireside. These names and places were vague in outline, and, like those surrounding Harry Thuku earlier, were really shadows in a mist. Was this Hitler, for instance, the same who had refused to shake hands with Jesse Owens? I could understand them only in terms of scary ogres versus heroes in the never-never land of orality. Hitler and Mussolini, who threatened to enslave Africans, were the bad, ugly ogres, the proof of their evil intent being next door. Even before I was born, Benito Mussolini had entered Ethiopia in 1936 and had forced the African emperor Haile Selassie into exile and added insult to injury by creating Italian East Africa out of Ethiopia and neighboring territories. Us today; you tomorrow, Haile Selassie had told the League of Nations, who had watched the invasion of Ethiopia, a member state, with silence. Folk talked