The lack of a major “author-itative” female presence in Kenyan literature, until Macgoye published her major novels in the late 1980s, reflects a larger female social exclusion, the consequence of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial male assumptions and biases regarding “woman’s place” in a male-ordered universe. The dearth of women’s writing was itself partly an effect of colonial and postcolonial neglect of women’s welfare and development, including scant access to education. Further, women, weighed down with responsibilities of caring for the physical and financial needs of their families, lack the time and supportive networks required for literary production. Even today, male primacy usually reigns in private and public spaces, evidenced by the rarity of a female presence in the country’s social, business, and political institutions, and in its policy-making bodies.
In the 1980s there was a flowering of women’s fiction around the continent. Women were being educated in larger numbers all over Africa. Consequently, they were more aware of their rights and were articulate in demanding them. They were more determined to survive and better their position in society. These new expectations were reflected in the work of anglophone novelists such as Macgoye, Emecheta, and Lauretta Ngcobo and francophone writers such as Aminata Sow Fall and Mariama Bâ.4 Crucially, too, there emerged a new generation of critics—African and Western—eager to study and support women’s voices out of Africa. They did so at conferences and seminars, in college courses and classrooms, and by devoting critical studies5 to the work of African women writers.
Despite this progress, the critical-publishing establishment in Africa continued to display an androcentric attitude toward the work of women writers. Revealing of the critical neglect of female writers are three significant studies of “the African Novel” written between the early 1970s and late 1980s. Among them the trio of male critics managed to focus in depth on the work of seventeen African novelists, not one of whom is female.6
In Coming to Birth and The Present Moment, Macgoye sets herself the task of dramatizing how twentieth-century Kenyan history set in motion changes that contributed to the process of women’s emancipation in the country. In both novels Macgoye focuses attentively on working-class women struggling to make lives for themselves, to wrest a living and a modicum of autonomy within a rapidly changing society.
The historical scope of Coming to Birth is limited to twenty-two years in the life of a single woman, in the years before and after Kenyan independence. The Present Moment is more ambitious. In a rich and densely worked text, and for the first time, a Kenyan novelist offers a multifaceted, complex women’s perspective on Kenyan history and society over the last century. Macgoye does so by presenting, in their own words or through their memories, the stories of seven women in the Refuge for elderly homeless women. Their lives cover a wide span of Kenyan history: from the early years when British colonial rule was establishing itself, through two world wars, world economic depression, local labor unrest, violent anticolonial resistance, and into the triumphant but profoundly problematic postcolonial period.
In The Present Moment history, the engine of societal and political change, does not function as impersonal force, nor as theater featuring the exploits of “great men.” Neither is history in the novel a mere backdrop, the enumeration of significant dates and events signposting a privatized account of the domestic lives of the women protagonists. Rather, Kenyan history—colonial and postcolonial—is the very matrix within which the novel’s characters struggle, aspire, suffer, act, and endure. History in The Present Moment is that precise location where individual character, choice, contingency, desire, and hope coalesce with the opportunities, tragedies, and possibilities enabled by radical social, cultural, and political change. The personal and public are fused as one plays out within and against the other; women and nation struggle, often against great odds, to “come to birth” by finding an identity.
Moreover, history in The Present Moment does not live safely corralled in the past. Priscilla and Rahel uneasily reflect that “one is never quite safe from reminders” (77) as “sounds of the past kept on reverberating” in the present moment (10). In addition to the old women’s articulated remembrances, others lie just under the surface, and still others rise unexpectedly and painfully: “But memories . . . need not speak in loud voices. They may gibber at a tantalising distance like a bat in the rafters, or swoop upon you like a moth, soundless but soiling you with a residue of filmy substance” (34–35). Indeed, the weight of their past experiences “presses bitterly upon the present moment” (154).
History has been synonymous with far-reaching social change in African communities such as those of precolonial Kenya. These societies were profoundly shaken, fractured, and irretrievably changed by the intrusion of technologically superior European imperial powers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While traditional communities were not static, they offered their members a relatively stable and conservative environment. The thematic heart of The Present Moment concerns what colonialism and continuing change wrought, for good and ill, in the lives of African women and men.
Change registers in women characters’ lives both as loss and as opportunity. With the coming of the new colonial order, as Nduta, owner of the tearoom where Wairimu worked, tells her, “all the old rules [were] set aside” (24). The old village support networks and familial relationships frayed and sometimes snapped under the strain. The chaotic new world of the towns, mushrooming everywhere, provided little safety for women, throwing them back on their own resources. Simultaneously and most crucially, this changing world also presented women with possibilities—an expanding arena for work, mobility, autonomy, choice—that were both a blessing and, especially for earlier generations of women, a curse.
Of the seven protagonists of The Present Moment, only Wairimu voluntarily reached out to the new world beyond her village home. The others were forced out by circumstances. Wairimu “goes to the coffee,” picking coffee beans on white-owned farms. Her compatriots at the Refuge variously engaged in small business, including prostitution for some, or they went into domestic service for white bwanas and memsahibs. All led hardscrabble lives, always one misfortune away from disaster and penury.
From one perspective, considering the emotional and material losses they sustained, the women were the victims of change. One could describe the denizens of the Refuge as a sorority of suffering. Their children died or disappeared from their lives. Husbands and lovers died or betrayed and abandoned them. They were forced to eke out a spare living on the bare edges of poverty. They lost their livelihoods through economic depression and the violence visited on them by the minions of the state.
But change can also be understood as an inducement to growth. To survive, individual women relied on their mother wit, skills, and inner resources, and on their network of female friends and relations. However limited the scope allowed them in their precarious lives, these women got to exercise some choice. When Rahel’s husband died suddenly, she struck out on her own, rejecting the custom of being “inherited” by one of her late husband’s male relatives: “After the town kind of life we lived in quarters, I didn’t much like the idea of being inherited by some old man in Uyoma” (38). The widowed Sophia, once named Fatuma, risked her Swahili-Islamic family’s disapproval to marry the African Christian man with whom she fell in love. The Seychelloise Mama Chungu’s whole life was one open, throbbing wound—dead babies, a callous, abusive white lover, a series of dead-end jobs, hunger, and the humiliation of being driven by desperation to beg in public—yet even she made decisions. Partly prompted by anger at her lover’s treatment of her, she undermined his work in the security forces during the Mau Mau insurgency by becoming a message carrier on the African side.
Above all, these seven old women are survivors, individuals who “had special griefs . . . and special gifts to have survived so many griefs” (150). The Vicar notes that “to be eighty years old in Africa is to be tough. Particularly for a wo
man, because she has learned from childhood to look after others rather than to be looked after” (38).
The Refuge, a Christian-run, charitable old women’s home, functions as the site in which the women talk about and reflect on their pasts. It embodies the paradoxes that constitute their lives and experiences. Though spartan, it provides the women with a haven from utter destitution. Here their physical and spiritual needs are ministered to, and within its shelter they create a “lively and comradely” community (55). Despite their bickering, their petty jealousies and resentments, the women offer one another small courtesies and kindnesses which lead Matron to observe that the “community has a strength of its own” (8).
However, the very existence of the Refuge is a testament to social change in Kenyan society. In a period of transition, the women, as Matron notes, were “dwarfed by disasters without any savings or security to relieve them” (36). At the same time, in the absence of children, spouses, siblings, and community, they were bereft of all familial succor and the respect and care accorded the aged in the traditional extended family and community. They have no place to call home. Priscilla reminds Wairimu of this when the latter, in a fit of exasperation at Sophia, demands to know why she is not sent “back to Mombasa.” Priscilla tells Wairimu what the latter already knows: “Why didn’t they send you and me back to Nyeri? Because there is no one to look after us there” (27). Later in the novel, Rahel alludes to the lost anchorings of home and family ties. “But do you not have any people at all?” Wairimu inquires of Rahel, who responds, “We don’t always know. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? When we were young, we could not have helped knowing, because everybody was attached to a place” (43–44).
The radical change that the colonial and postcolonial periods wrought in Kenya’s indigenous communities in far less than a century—both the mobility and choices it opened up to the novel’s characters as well as the sufferings and losses it inflicted on them—is most comprehensively embodied in Wairimu, the oldest and boldest of the novel’s protagonists. She stands apart from the others: her restless and questing temperament, and the longings it engendered, meshed well with the historical moment. The new ways were not imposed on her; she grabbed at them hungrily and with both hands. Spunky, adventurous, curious, and mentally agile, she longed for more than the “cloying sameness” (3) afforded by life on the ridge of her rural home in Nyeri.
Wairimu’s life story lies at the center of the novel. The opening paragraph simultaneously introduces the reader to the young girl and signals the changes already in process in her rural environment, the icons and heralds of an encroaching alien world of trains and trade and material goods: “On Wairimu’s left arm was a metal bangle her brother brought back from Nairobi when he went there to see the train and conduct some mysterious business with rupees and skins” (1).
In old age, Wairimu fondly recalls the young man she met briefly on a village path. Encircled by “a halo of sunlight” (2), Waitito was a “fairy tale” figure to the adolescent girl. His stories of Nairobi and “his shirt and shorts, his wide-brimmed hat and sandals, his knowledge of the world and other ways” (2) marked him as both an emissary from and symbol of that enticing new world. He was the pied piper who fired the young woman’s imagination and her desire to explore that beckoning world. But in reality, she appears to have been seduced less by Waitito than by the intoxicating future his stories seemed to promise her. Significantly, this “fairy tale” figure did not carry the girl he seduced away to that new and wondrous world of “dreams” and “marvels”; she had to seek it out and cope with it herself.
Powerfully drawn to that new world, Wairimu set out before a marriage could be arranged for her on her odyssey of exploration, experience, and learning. It took her “to the coffee” near home, then to the big city. In most male-authored African literature, the rural girl who leaves for the city’s bright lights can only expect physical and moral ruin. But sexual freedom and experience constitute only part of the young Wairimu’s life. The new world she set out to taste and master offered satisfactions for various yearnings: for independence, for participation in the anticolonial struggle, for broadening of the mind, and for freedom to make choices and to learn about and explore her world.
When Wairimu recalls her earlier life in reveries and stories, the narrative assumes the wonderful energy and buoyancy of a young woman “awed,” “amazed,” “interested” in, and “delighted” by life’s possibilities and fully engaged with the world around her. When she arrived in Nairobi, she drank in the sights before her, made plans, set herself goals, and executed decisions. In the process, she blossomed into her own person, forged her own identity.
Initially Wairimu was awed by the big city, but she slowly carved out a niche for herself there. Wairimu’s story is a female bildungsroman—the education of a young Kikuyu woman across half a century. Her life was dominated by “learning” of different kinds. We are told that she “reveled in her own ability to learn” (24). She learned from observation of other women’s lives. She rejected the traditional hard laboring life of a Kikuyu woman: “the daily tramp for water, digging and shelling, peeling and digging again, bent under firewood.” Perceiving that other women live differently, she concludes that “[her] body, too, can be respected”:
Already, at eighteen, I had seen that it is not necessary to being a woman to be bent against the painful forehead-strap, with a little hump down on your spine and danger in bearing children because of it. I have seen hairy white women, big-eyed Indian women, big-nosed Arab women, big-boned, charcoal-black women all standing straight and not lacking for food and fire and water. (55)
In Nairobi Wairimu was as eager to learn “a new concept of elegance” from Somali women as she was to note the independent lives of young white female shop assistants and secretaries who “earned their own money” (25).
She learned Swahili “not in order to be a servant [in European households] . . . but to enter a wider world than the Kikuyu world, to understand Nairobi, . . . to go home with power” (54). She learned from her Sundays spent exploring the big city and from train trips: “You learn something if you travel on our railway,” she assures her listeners at the Refuge (98).
In the city, too, Wairimu became politically aware. She plunged into the nascent political life of Nairobi, feeling “an urgent need to participate, to make herself also known. She was about seventeen years old and she too was part of a new world” (23). She was one of the crowd who responded to Harry Thuku’s protest meeting against steep colonial taxes and forced female labor. The meeting was dispersed by the police with violence and bloodshed, but Wairimu “learned something about power that day” (49). Some twenty-five years later, she participated in a much larger and bloodier resistance to colonial rule when she joined the Mau Mau movement as member and recruiter. In telling about these experiences, she reveals something of the much-neglected role of Kenyan women in the struggle for justice and freedom. At the Thuku riot in the early twenties, for instance, Wairimu joined “a big group of women.” When the men were ready to give up, it was the “women [who] called the men cowards and urged them to fight it out” (47–48). And, long after, Wairimu remembers the heroism of one of the murdered leaders of that doomed meeting:
Not many people were like Mary Nyanjiru, who had a song sung about her even after she died outside the police lines. . . . We used to sing it all the time, and I still sing it now when I need to get my courage up. (54)
Wairimu’s learning also encompassed the widespread disillusionment of the postcolonial period. The farm where Wairimu picked coffee was bought by a fellow Kikuyu. The workers “rejoiced. But not for long. We found ourselves turned away, new clansmen brought in: they said we were too political, bargaining, counting hours.” In telling her story, Wairimu sarcastically notes that “fighting for land and freedom we had not grudged the hours, or money either.” She concludes with resignation. “But so it was. At seventy one does not expect consideration” (113). Eventual
ly, Wairimu landed at the Refuge after her “little [tea] kiosk [was] kicked to pieces by uniformed men [municipal police] doing their duty to build the nation” (114).
Central to Wairimu’s early life—and what enabled her growing self-confidence and independence—was that she became a wage earner and therefore “a chooser and a doer”: “At the end of the month you got some money, and so you were like a man and could do a lot of choosing for yourself” (18). On one of Wairimu’s visits home, her mother, commenting on her daughter’s single state, suggested that “sometimes it is better to be humiliated than alone.” For her part, Wairimu rejoiced that “the dowry of learning” she received from her ex-lover was paid to her rather than to her father. She tried to explain to her father why her ex-lover, James, did not get her “so cheap”: “He taught me to read. That is not a little thing. He taught me how to live in a cement house and keep it clean. That is also something people pay money for their daughters to learn” (61). Hugging her “new knowledge and her growing horizon” to herself (95), Wairimu had “learned a lot . . . about how the world works” (57).
Even as a young woman she could appreciate what Waitito gave her in exchange for her virginity:
As I picked [coffee], I thought and thought, and I realised that this was the gift Waitito had given me in return for what he took from me. He had opened a door through which one could see picture after picture, more lively and colourful than the black, dead pictures which get on to each side of a page on a newspaper, and try oneself out on each, accepting or rejecting. Before there had been pictures—Wairimu, girl—Wairimu, bride—Wairimu, mother—Wairimu, elder’s wife—Wairimu, grandmother—but nothing to choose between them, only to be chosen. (54)
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