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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'oA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o introduces Dreams in a Time of War with a description of an important event in his life that highlights the socioeconomic inequality and violence enacted against Africans in colonial Kenya. He describes the escape of his older brother, Wallace Mwangi (also known as Good Wallace), from the police in 1954.
Ngũgĩ first learns of the escape from men and women in the marketplace of Limuru, a town located in central Kenya. This area is part of the “White Highlands,” a vast swath of land that the colonial governor set aside for Europeans in 1902, which led to the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of Africans.
The townspeople explain that the police arrested a young man for having bullets, a capital offense. The young man escaped from the police and ran through the town. The police opened fire on him, but he was not hit and found coverage in the tea plantations where he later escaped into the mountains. From there, people presume he joined the Mau Mau guerrilla fighters, a group working to overturn colonial rule.
Notably, Ngũgĩ does not realize the young man he heard about in the marketplace is his older brother until he returns home for dinner, whereupon his mother informs him that his brother “narrowly escaped death” (8).
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A Grain of Wheat
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A Meeting In The Dark
A Meeting In The Dark
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Decolonising the Mind
Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature
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Devil on the Cross
Devil on the Cross
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I Will Marry When I Want
I Will Marry When I Want
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Matigari
Matigari
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Petals of Blood
Petals of Blood
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The River Between
The River Between
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Weep Not, Child
Weep Not, Child
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Wizard of the Crow
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