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For decades the
indomitable British-Kenyan intellectual Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye dominated
Kenya’s writing world, earning herself the title ‘mother of Kenyan Literature’.
On Friday, Google celebrated Macgoye’s life and birthday
with a doodle on its search engine—a mixed-medium artwork picturing Macgoye
surrounded by books, birds and a birds nest, and a silhouette of an African
woman and child.
Macgoye, who died on
December 1, 2015 in Nairobi at the age of 87, would have been 94 years old
today.
Macgoye remains one of Africa’s most prolific writers of
novels, short stories and children’s books.
Most of works revolve
around the struggles of Kenya during the post-colonial era such as Coming To Birth, which has been used as a
set book in Kenyan secondary schools.
The winner of Sinclair
Prize for Fiction, Macgoye was academically gifted from an early age. Her
mother was a teacher in Southampton, United Kingdom, who kept a close eye on
her studies.
Her most notable works
include Murder in Majengo (1972), ostensibly a detective mystery cum
political thriller which exposes the plight of poor young girls in urban
centres of newly independent Kenya. It was republished with its sequel Victoria in 1993.
The novel Coming to Birth, which won the Sinclair prize, is about the life
of Paulina, a peasant girl and her journey to becoming a mature, self-reliant
woman with the evolution of the Kenyan nation through the painful experiences
of the state of emergency, days of independence, and subsequent power struggle
and political violence.