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Zusatztext 41786528 Informationen zum Autor Ngugi wa Thiong’o has taught at Nairobi University! Northwestern University! Amherst College! Yale University! and New York University. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California! Irvine. His many books include Wizard of the Crow! Dreams in a Time of War! Devil on the Cross! Decolonising the Mind! and Petals of Blood ! for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977. 1955 A Tale of Home and School 1 It’s the end of my first term at boarding school, and I’m going home. It’s April. When I first left Limuru for Alliance High School in January, it was in the last car of a goods train into which I had been smuggled, my sole company then being workmen’s tools and clothes. Now I travel third class, with schoolmate Kenneth Wanjai. It’s very crowded, standing room only, and our school uniform of khaki shirts, shorts, and blue ties marks us as different from the general passengers, all black Africans, their clothes in different stages of wear and tear. Their haggard faces belie the animated voices and occasional laughter. On getting off at Limuru railway station, I linger on the platform and look around me to savor the moment of my return. The goods shed, the tea kiosk, the waiting room, and the outside toilets marked for Europeans only, Asians only, and Africans, minus the qualifying only, still stand, silent weather-beaten witnesses of time that has passed since the station first opened in 1898. Wanjai and I part company for our different destinations, he in his father’s car, and I alone, on foot. Then it hits me: I’m going home to my mother. Soon, very soon, I’ll be with my sisters and younger brother. I have news to share with them: I was among the top of my class. No doubt my mother will ask me if that was the best I could have done, or her variation, were you number one, and I will have to confess that another boy, Henry Chasia, was ahead of me. As long as you tried your best, she will surely tell me with pride. I am going to bask in her sunny smile, which always carries warmth and depth of care. I enjoy her reaction in advance. I lift my wooden box by the handle with my right hand. It’s not very heavy, but it dangles and keeps on hitting against my legs. After a time, I change hands; it’s worse on the left side, so I lift it onto my shoulder. I keep up the pattern: right hand, left hand, right shoulder, left shoulder, and back to the right hand. My progress is slow. I walk past the African marketplace, which looks deserted, a ghostly place, except for a pack of stray dogs, chasing and fighting over a female in heat. But the memory of my childhood interactions with the place floods back: my brother’s workshop; people massing outside the Green Hotel to hear news; my falling off Patrick M?rage’s bike. I stagger up the slope toward the Indian shopping center. Almost two years back, my brother, Good Wallace, ran down this very slope, barely escaping a hail of police bullets, but I refuse to let memories of pain interfere with my first homecoming as an Alliance student. Instead, I conjure up images from my Limuru youth that are more in tune with my triumphant mood. Onesmus Kphara War?ir? immediately comes to my mind. Kphara, an incredible cyclist and showman to boot, loved climbing this slope. People used to stand aside and cheer him in wonder and admiration as he cycled up the hill to take mail and parcels to the Indian shopping center. No other cyclist had ever managed to climb the hill all the way without once getting off his bike and pushing it. Kphara was our bike hero, possessor of superhuman endurance. I’m so engrossed in these thoughts that I forget to take note of the landscape around me. But instinct suddenly tells me that I have gotten home?.?.?.?or where home should be. I stop, put down the box, and l...
