Book reviews: Dreams in a Time of War - A Childhood Memoir, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Education of a British Protected Child, Chinua Achebe

DREAMS IN A TIME OF WAR – A CHILDHOOD MEMOIR Ngugi wa Thiong'o Harvill Secker, £12.99THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD Chinua Achebe Allen Lane, £20

IT'S not often that memoirs by two giants of African literature come along at once. One is by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, East Africa's most prized author, who grew up in Kenya under British rule and since the Seventies has written only in his mother tongue, Gikuyu. The other is a collection of essays by Nigerian Chinua Achebe, "the writer in whose company the prison walls fell down" as Nelson Mandela called him, born eight years earlier than Ngugi, also under British rule.

Reading these books together – the former translated, the latter in English – is a rich, generous and sobering experience. Two great post-colonial voices speaking across a continent, one from east, the other west, sometimes in unison, sometimes at odds, sometimes in a kind of call and response. The books' titles could almost be interchangeable. Both were "British-protected children". Both dared to dream in a time of war.

Ngugi's is the more conventional memoir. Opening in 1938 under the shadow of one war, it ends in the midst of another, the Mau Mau uprising. In both wars Ngugi's family is involved. His stepbrother fights in the King's African Rifles in the Second World War. His older brother becomes a Mau Mau guerrilla, escaping death by hiding in the mountains and, in a touching episode, risking his life to visit Ngugi to wish him luck before an exam. This is a country buffeted by the schizophrenia and hypocrisy of colonialism, where brothers from one family end up fighting on opposing sides.

Yet war remains the backdrop for Ngugi's youthful dreams, not so much of peace or independence, not yet anyway, but of building a wheelbarrow, riding a train, and education. The memoir ends with Ngugi leaving his town, Limuru, smuggled on to a goods train headed for the elite Alliance High School.

He was born the fifth child of his father's third wife, one of 24 children from four mothers. His thirst for learning defines him early on. When one evening his mother asks if he would like to go to school, stressing that "you may not always get a midday meal" because they are poor, a silent pact is made. He will always do his best.

Not long after, his father, a farmer who loses everything, takes it out on Ngugi's mother and her children by disowning them. Ngugi describes this devastating event with typical fortitude, stating that "it is not a good thing to have your own father deny you as one of his children". Learning remains a struggle, whether affording clothes or chopping and changing between Church of Scotland and African schools. When Ngugi boards the train out of Limuru he recalls how hard he worked to get to this moment, "the nights I could not read because we had run out of firewood and paraffin". His boyhood resolve is remarkable.

Achebe's book is more idiosyncratic, combining essays from 1988 to 2009 on subjects as varied as his daughters, his novel Things Fall Apart, his excoriating attack on the racism in Conrad's Heart Of Darkness and his childhood in Ogidi village. One 1989 essay is devoted to the politics of language in African literature, a subject which caused a famous and long-running argument between Achebe and Ngugi.

When Ngugi renounced written English for his Gikuyu, he criticised Africans who write in the language of the coloniser, branding them accomplices of imperialism. Achebe still writes in English. "The difference between Ngugi and myself," he notes, "is while Ngugi now believes it is either/or, I have always thought it was both."

However, reading these books in tandem also reveals their similarities. This isn't just in their shared experience of devouring Treasure Island on either side of a carved-up continent. It's in their gaze. In The Education Of A British-Protected Child Achebe talks about his post-colonial perspective as occupying "the middle ground". In Dreams In A Time Of War Ngugi talks about "the surreal normality of ordinary living under extraordinary times". Both statements refer to a coolness, a way of examining things from a distance that makes for a language and tone that is analytical, ironic and very moving. Ultimately it is the perspective of the outsider that unites them.

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, March 7, 2010