Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dreams from My Father, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Community
Fathers, Sons, and Manhood
Race and Identity
Storytelling and Truth
Summary
Analysis
It takes Barack several days, but he convinces Auma to go with him on a safari. A driver named Francis takes them and several others out into the countryside. Barack thinks about Zeituni’s advice to decide who is family and notices that he’s getting no closer to bringing his different worlds together—if anything, his worlds are multiplying. He remembers Auma’s irritation that they booked their safari tickets through an Asian-owned company. He’d lectured her on “Third World solidarity,” but he sees that his simple theory has no place in Kenya, where the Indian residents are successful businesspeople, exploit the “racial caste system,” and are hated because of it. And among older Kenyans, there’s also the question of tribal loyalty and stereotyping. When Barack tries to push back on his aunts’ stereotypes, they say he’s naïve like the Old Man was.
Likely because Barack grew up outside of Kenya, he holds a somewhat flattened view of Africa that doesn’t make room for the loyalties many of his family members and others throughout Africa feel. For him, the issues are bigger than tribe or country of origin—the real issues are racism, poverty, and giving people opportunity. But his family members who have lived their lives in Kenya understand that life is more complicated and some of the political rhetoric—such as the notion of Third World solidarity—that abstractly makes sense in the States does not fit the reality in Kenya. Furthermore, while his aunts’ stereotyping might not be appropriate, it’s impossible to ignore that different tribes face different struggles.
Themes
Francis stops the van and picks up his young teenage niece, Elizabeth. Barack and Auma greet Elizabeth and share cookies with the other passengers. Finally, they reach the Great Rift Valley. It’s slow going for several hours, but they begin to pass gazelle, wildebeest, and zebras. They also pass Masai herdsmen. The Masai earned the respect of the British, something that annoys the other tribes who are ashamed of the Masai’s provincial ways. Barack wonders how long the Masai can hold out.
Even as Barack rails against his aunts’ insistence that loyalty to one’s tribe still matters, he still recognizes just how important it is to the Masai to preserve their way of life—and just how much prejudice they face for attempting to do so, even from other Black Kenyans.
Themes
On the other side of a rise, they reach the savannah. Francis drives the van slowly through a herd of wildebeest, and Barack notices both Auma and Elizabeth smiling. They set up camp near a stream and then drive to watch animals drink at a watering hole. Over supper, Francis tells them about his life. He has a wife and children on his homestead tending coffee and corn. He’d rather farm than work for the travel agency, but the Kenyan Coffee Union shorts Kenyan farmers. Francis says he feels compelled to speak up so that maybe something will change, but he allows that it’s not just the government’s fault. Kenyans don’t like to pay taxes and though the poor are right to be suspicious, wealthy men are selfish and want to keep their profits at the expense of everyone else.
The very fact that Francis has to supplement his preferred farming work with work for the travel agency—which primarily caters to white tourists—reinforces Auma and Barack’s earlier assertion that, despite being under Black rule, Kenya still caters to the white, Western world. And for that matter, Kenya’s tax issues mean that the country isn’t able to finance projects that might help someone like Francis do what he wants to do instead of essentially forcing him to perform work that doesn’t interest him.
Themes
Two Masai men, the night guards, arrive. Barack steps away from the fire to look at the stars and notices a hazy spot in the sky. Mr. Wilkerson, an Englishman, says that it’s the Milky Way. As the days pass, Barack learns that Mr. Wilkerson grew up on a tea plantation in Kenya. His family moved to England after independence, where he went to medical school. After marrying his wife, they moved to Malawi to work with the government. They never have enough supplies, but he’s not cynical. Mr. Wilkerson eventually explains that this place is his home, odd as it sounds. He knows that, ideally, Malawian doctors will take his place, and he allows that he might never to be able to call this place home—but he loves it.
Mr. Wilkerson provides Barack a very different look at the idea of home and family. Mr. Wilkerson recognizes that in order to atone for the horrors of colonialism, he can never really claim Kenya as his own—but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel a connection with the place where he grew up. He accepts that as part of fixing the issues caused by colonialism, he needs to eventually leave to help elsewhere. Telling this story helps Mr. Wilkerson take responsibility for Britain’s part in colonizing Africa and make a better future for Black Africans.
Themes
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Barack is struck by the beauty and the stillness of the land and the animals. He imagines the first humans in this landscape. In the evenings, he speaks with the Masai guardsmen who are warriors and killed lions to prove their manhood. Auma asks the Masai what they believe happens to a person when they die. The Masai smile; they don’t believe anything happens. Francis, who’s Christian, argues with an Italian man who left the church about whether Christianity brought colonialism, but Francis insists that those white missionaries did good and bad things. The conversation dies and Barack looks at everyone around the fire. All of these people are courageous, and Barack thinks that courage is probably what Africa needs most.
Francis appears to see the Christian church as something akin to a person. It has the power to do good or bad, and it has the power to bring people together or destroy communities. Over the course of colonialism, it did both—but in his opinion, that doesn’t mean they should write it off entirely. Rather, they should take what works from the church and use it going forward. To Barack, this looks like courage because it represents the kind of critical thought he appreciated in Chicago.
Themes
When Barack and Auma return from safari, they get word that Roy arrived early. The family plans a huge feast and when Barack and Auma arrive, Roy sits in the middle of everything. Kezia proudly introduces Roy as the head of the family and Roy introduces a plump woman, Amy, to Barack. After dinner, Roy shares that he’s going to start an import-export company, selling Kenyan crafts in America. He shows Auma several woodcarvings and tells Auma what he paid for them. She’s aghast that he paid so much. Roy says he also plans to marry Amy—she’s an African woman and won’t argue with him. He announces this to the room and pours a beer onto the floor. Auma is disgusted, but Jane rushes to clean it up.
Roy’s reasoning for marrying Amy suggests that he’s struggling still to adjust to life in the U.S.; wanting to marry Amy because she theoretically won’t assert herself shows that, in many ways, he’s still far more comfortable with traditional Kenyan ways of life. Kenyan or Luo culture might also look far preferable to Roy because of the way the family treats him, given that he’s the head of the family. They shower him with attention, affection, and whatever else he wants—something he might not have gotten in the U.S.
Themes
The family goes dancing. Auma grouses to Barack that the Obama men can get away with murder—and Amy is bad news. But she suggests that the family just feels less judged around Roy than they do around her. At the club, Auma asks Amy about her marriage to Roy. Noticing that both Roy and Amy look a bit too drunk, Barack asks Zeituni if she’s been to this club before. She insists she’s the best dancer and the Old Man was the best partner. Once, when the Old Man was young, he took Kezia out dancing instead of doing chores for Onyango. Onyango was livid when the Old Man got home, but the Old Man put on a record and called Kezia to come dance. After a minute, Onyango called his wife, Granny, to come dance.
Auma implies here that when the family is faced with what are presumably Western sensibilities (like the notion that men shouldn’t be able to get away with so much), they reject her. In this sense, because of her education and because part of her life is so firmly planted in the Western world, Auma is a bit of an outsider to the rest of the family. Hearing this fantastical story about the Old Man reminds Barack that not all the stories about his father seem plausible—but they all paint a picture of a man who contained multitudes.
Themes
The band starts playing and the family takes to the dance floor. As Barack watches Roy, he thinks back to when the Old Man taught him how to dance. Roy wears the same look of freedom and happiness that the Old Man did. Barack and Roy step outside and, as they chat, a fight breaks out. Roy stops Barack from getting involved, insisting that being in jail in Nairobi is awful. When the altercation breaks up, Roy says he was in jail the night David died. Roy had gotten in a fight with a man at a club and didn’t have papers. David begged for the keys so he could go get Roy’s papers. Barack assures Roy it was an accident and Roy leaps up to dance.
It becomes clear here that Roy feels responsible for David’s death. Especially as the oldest child and now the head of the family, Roy is under a lot of pressure to live up to expectations—and it’s possible that he feels just as much pressure as Auma does, just pressure of a different kind. The fact that Roy feels so much responsibility and pressure suggests that the Old Man may have struggled under the same kind of pressure and taught Roy that he’d one day do the same.
Themes
