MEMOIR: MOLLY McCLOSKEYreviews Dreams in a Time of WarBy Ngugi wa Thiong'o Harvill Secker, 256pp. £12.99

WHEN NGUGI wa Thiong'o was a schoolboy in Kenya, discovering the joys of Treasure Island, he told a friend that he would like to write stories like Stevenson's but would need "a license" to do so. If one wrote without proper permission, Ngugi said, "one would surely be arrested". By then Kenya was under a state of emergency, declared by the British in 1952. African-language papers were banned. A number of nationalist writers had been imprisoned.

Though the young Ngugi could not have foreseen his own future more clearly, he hardly imagined that it would be the government of an independent Kenya that would be responsible for his arrest.

In 1977, at the age of 39, Ngugi was detained without trial and held for a year in a maximum security prison. His own work was banned. The arrest was triggered by the publication of his third novel, Petals of Blood, and the staging of Ngaahika Ndeenda( I Will Marry When I Want), a play he co-authored in his native Gikuyu. Both works were critical of post-colonial Kenya and the pervasive inequalities in Kenyan society.

While in prison, Ngugi decided to abandon English as his language of writing in favour of Gikuyu, and it was there that he composed – on toilet paper – his first novel in Gikuyu, Caitani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross). He has retained the practice, and continues to translate his own works.

He was born in 1938, near Limuru in central Kenya. Dreams in a Time of Waris the first instalment in a planned three-volume memoir and covers the writer's life up to his admission to high school. Ngugi grew up in the shadow of two wars – the second World War and the Mau Mau uprising, a rebellion against British rule and land appropriation – and the title refers to a pact the young boy made with his mother, who was passionately committed to his education.

His mother was the third of his father’s four wives, and gave birth to five of his 24 children. When Ngugi's father lost all his livestock to disease, he began to drink heavily and to physically abuse his wives. After a particularly savage beating, his mother fled the homestead for that of her parents. Not long after, Ngugi's father would banish him and his brother with the cold directive: “I want you to stop playing with my children. Go, follow your mother”.

As well as recounting the more benign boyhood adventures – the first bike ride, the thrill of learning to read, listening to grown-up tales from the wider world ("scary ogres versus heroes in the never-never land of orality") – Dreams in a Time of Wartells the story of a boy's growing awareness of the political and historical convulsions of the time.

The Mau Mau rebellion lasted from 1952 to 1960, and members of Ngugi's extended family found themselves on opposing sides of the conflict. Displacement of the population was an official policy, as were mass screenings, conducted by British officers and loyalist Home Guard squads, who would cordon off public spaces to – ostensibly – weed out Mau Mau sympathisers.

As a boy, Ngugi got caught in one such sweep. A man in a white sheet with slits for eyeholes (likely a neighbour of those he was denouncing) divided the captives into "the bad, the worse, and the worst". The "worst" were taken to detention centres, a network of barbed-wire camps and villages where thousands were brutally tortured or killed by British agents and their African collaborators. (The camps were the subject of American historian Caroline Elkins's Pulitzer Prize-winning work Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya,published in the UK as Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.)

Ngugi’s memoir ends with an attempted rapproche- ment with his father, as the boy heads off to high school. His father gives him his blessings. “I know that he has nothing material to give me,” wa Thiong’o writes, “and does not even make a gesture. He is really down and out. But I am not here for money or gifts . . . I want to give myself a gift. I do not want to start a new life with resentment in my heart.”

His problems with the Kenyan authorities have resisted such easy resolution. While visiting London in the early 1980s, he was warned that Daniel arap Moi’s people would kill him if he returned. He went into exile – first in Britain, then the US (he is now Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine). In 2004, he and his wife travelled to Kenya for the first time in 22 years. Four men broke into their Nairobi apartment, beat Ngugi and sexually assaulted his wife. He has said in an interview that the couple believe the attack was politically motivated, whether the work of “remnants of the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current”.

But these are events far in the young boy's future, and Dreams in a Time of War, despite the sometimes harrowing periphery, retains an air of childhood innocence. Ngugi has been a key figure in Kenya's modern history, both as a writer and as a model for political engagement, and his three-volume memoir will serve as an important record of the country and the life.

Molly McCloskey is a novelist and short story writer and is the Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. From 2006-2008, she lived and worked in Kenya