Limuru, Kenya

The train station, which opened in 1898, has the “goods shed, the tea kiosk, the waiting room, and the outside toilets marked for Europeans only, Asians only, and Africans” (3). There is a small African marketplace, Green Hotel and a steep slope up to an Indian marketplace (many immigrants from India came to build the railroad system and stayed). Most of the houses in Ngũgĩ’s village, both old and new, were mud-walled huts or homes on stilts with grass-thatched roofs. The new village is over a ridge from the location of the old, and the homes are now concentrated together. This new village, under a military watch post and patrolled by troops, is called Kamirithu. The village is fenced in, leaving one entrance and exit. Ngũgĩ writes, “the new villages were the rural equivalent of the concentration camps [where thousands of inmates, mostly men, were...