"Ake: The Years of Childhood" is an autobiography or memoir by Wole Soyinka, describing his life growing up in colonial Nigeria in the 1930s and 1940s. It was published in 1981, several years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.
It is hard to write a memoir of childhood because our own memories are colored by our later interpretations of them, as well as by being informed of what we were like as a child by others. What I found especially skillful about this book was that Wole managed to write in a highly refined, literary style...while still maintaining the authorial voice of a child. At first, I was a little bit confused and irritated, because throughout the book, characters, places and situations are introduced without prologue or preamble and the reader has to guess at them. It took me some ways into the book to realize that characters named "Essay" and "Wild Christian" were the author's parents. But then I realized that this was part of the narrative's flavor: the book is written with the shifting focal length of a child who knows his home and town as the world, and is unable to put things into a larger context. And despite the difference in era and location of this memoir and my own, some of the stories of childhood, such as accidentally running away, or sneaking food, of being introduced to distant relations in formal circumstances, and of being scared by ghosts and wild animals, were familiar enough to me. Soyinka didn't try to make his childhood more exotic, but neither did he try to disguise the cultural differences he had growing up in a society that was at one time tribal, but rapidly modernizing.
One problem I had with the book at first, that I later realized was intentional, was that the social context is mentioned, but never explained. The difference between Christian and tribal beliefs, the impact of World War II, Soyinka's own position as a relatively privileged boy (his father was the headmaster of the village school), and the dawning of the African nationalist movement are all mentioned throughout the book, but never explained. But of course, this is a memoir of childhood: most children don't realize their own socioeconomic position.
The book is told in a rather straightforward and chatty style, with the only literary effect being the blurriness of a child's awareness. At times, I wish the book would have provided more context for the issues it talked about, but overall, I found it interesting and informative.