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Among the things that fascinate me about this profound recollection is the rich language and acute, often vivid historical details, the author has penned down. It seems he has a fantastic memory as he writes about even the most prosaic things including how he lost his virginity after healing from circumcision. On the other hand, he has put down historical facts that many people are ignorant of like the imprisonment of Harry Thuku abroad, the influence of Marcus Garvey Nationalism in Kenya, the sending of Mbiyu wa Koinange and Achieng Oneko to England in 1951 to air out grievances of the colonial rule in Kenya, the sending of the Kenyan army to fight in the second World War, and the internal displacement of the Gikuyu, Meru and Embu people from the Rift Valley among other themes.

“There are, broadly, five (interconnected) areas that allow man to experience the enjoyment of life: productive work, human relationships, recreation, art, sex. Productive work is the most fundamental of these: through his work man gains his basic sense of control over existence—his sense of efficacy� which is the necessary foundation of the ability to enjoy any other value. The man whose life lacks direction or purpose, the man who has no creative goal, necessarily feels helpless and out of control; the man who feels helpless and out of control, feels inadequate to and unfit for existence; and the man who feels unfit for existence is incapable of enjoying it.�

"Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.
"All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identity it as a solid object: he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

We play draft and chess

By the pool deep green is the grass

We notice not time fly

At the horizon the dusk sun is shy

We play draft and chess

And although idle we enjoy ourselves nonetheless.....

Whereas the author chose the title for the book as Belonging in Africa (an almost divergent title of the Danish author Karen Blixen, Out of Africa, who she seems to adore, who depicts Africa in a bad taste) the above statement contradicts everything about the book and subsequently its main theme, teenage love and loss. It is in my observation, though the book has painted Kenya and Uganda in a good way in the 70s, it still has some negative aspects that many foreign authors take when they describe Africa. All the same it is a good read.

‘At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.

But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We."'

Joyce Cary seems to have a narrow biased view of Africa. What she talks of in her book has no relation to Africa. What she describes could only be in a continent in Mars. She lacks proper knowledge to describe what she thinks she knows. She perceives everything from the angle of the English master and the colonial bondsman. This, just like Conrad, has been the lie that has been spread over the years about Africa. Yet these writers have no idea of what they speak of, and this has had a huge taint on both Africa and her rich dynamic literature. Most historical books that are written by foreign authors, who are misinformed, have no idea about what they speak of, have no truth in them, and illustrate Africa in a bad light. Ironic enough these books have turned out to be best sellers in the West, and have made a vast population of people to believe in this obscene lie even up to today.

The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.

It was not until I read Globalectics by Ngũgĩ that it suddenly struck me that he is more of an essayists than a novelist. He is exceptionally talented, the best Kenya has! This book is undoubtedly brings out the best of Ngũgĩ genius as a theorist and as well as a profound thinker and critic. […]

Last month, I launched my latest book, The Girl with the Flawless Face at the Goethe Institute, and there was something interesting that I noticed. In attendance was a woman, who claimed to be a lecturer, but had nothing positive to say about my book. The fact that she had neither read the book, nor […]