Africa-Press – Kenya. Today’s Google doodle celebrates award-winning novelist Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye.
Oludhe – the mother of Kenyan literature- helped a number of women across East Africa learn how to read and write.
Oludhe passed away in 2015 and would have celebrated her 94th birthday today. The icon was born in Southampton, England, but immigrated to Kenya soon after Kenya became independent.
She was a poet, novelist, and missionary bookseller after graduating from the University of London where she did her bachelor’s and master’s degree.
Marjorie’s living was communal. She created a public place out of her humble flat on the Ngara estate, in Nairobi.
Relatives, friends, acquaintances, aspiring writers and people from the street came in daily to exchange stories and listen to her words.
While there, she organised literary readings and workshops for Kenyan and East African writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Okot p’ Bitek, Taban lo Liyong, Ibrahim Hussein and Jonathan Kariara.
She believed Kenyan writers lived in Kenya and she lamented some of the nation’s best minds exchanged intellectual autonomy for where the money was: politics, NGOs and flights abroad to greener pastures.
From middle class to working class, from missionary to lay theologian, from school teacher to storyteller, from single woman to married woman with four children, all this needed expert juggling.
In l960, she married Daniel Oludhe Macgoye, a Luo Medical Officer and she would often face criticism due to her race. It was considered unthinkable at the time since she was British and Kenya had just gained independence from the country.
They moved to Alupe, South Nyanza near the border with Uganda where they offered solace to patients at a leprosarium.
She became so fluent in Nilotic Dholuo that she helped others in its translation.
Marjorie took a job as a schoolteacher in a government school in Gem, Kisumu.
Works: Murder in Majengo (1972), Song of Nyarloka and other Poems (1977); Coming to Birth (1986); Street Life (1987); Homing In (1994); Chira (1997); A Farm Called Kishinev (2005)
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