If things had gone slightly differently for Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, he might have become a living, breathing vindication of the British Empire's good intentions. Despite having grown up in straitened circumstances on his mother's small agricultural homestead, he was selected on the basis of his test scores to attend a prestigious Rugby-style boarding school for Africans twelve miles outside Nairobi—this at a time when there were not many peasant sons of single mothers at Rugby back in Britain. His earliest attempts at fiction were promoted by the colonial government's Literature Bureau, which sponsored various publications and contests for native authors, and he first came to the attention of European audiences when he won the bureau's fiction prize. Later he wrote radio plays for the BBC. At every step of his early career, from the mid-1950s to the early '60s, Ngũgĩ was encouraged and underwritten by well-meaning Englishmen who sincerely believed that Africans not only could be but should be educated in the same way as Europeans. Theirs was the old civilizing mission, and for a time it seemed that Ngũgĩ was poised to become a shining example of their success.
