Summary

The memoir opens in April 1955, and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o is returning home after the first semester of boarding school. He travels by train from Alliance High School to his hometown of Limura, Kenya. When he arrives, he finds his village burnt to the ground. A man points in the direction where everyone was relocated. He finds his family in the process of thatching a roof. There is no homecoming celebration, and Ngũgĩ is asked to help with the new home construction.

In Chapter 2 Ngũgĩ describes his feeling of safety at Alliance High School, free from his anxiety of British forces rooting out Mau Mau guerillas wherever they believed them to be. Chapter 3 gives the history of Alliance High School, founded in 1926 by several religious missionary groups and based on educational tenets of self-reliance yet keeping the social structure of...