The Present Moment

by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

  Similarly, all the main characters are centrally or tangentially involved in or affected by the Mau Mau movement. But their responses to memories of the movement differ radically. Priscilla and Wairimu are both Kikuyu from Nyeri. The former anxiously represses memories of the Emergency because during that period she suffered a searing and traumatizing experience: the white family she and her father worked for was attacked by Mau Mau fighters; Priscilla’s father and the young white child she looked after were brutally murdered; the child’s screams and the blood from her slit throat continue to haunt Priscilla. Wairimu was a member of and recruiter for the Mau Mau movement. She too has memories of some of the darkness of that time, of “the silent garrote and the evening roadblock” (45), and of the loss of good friends. But for Wairimu the insurgency represented a necessary fight for freedom:

  One let no tears be seen for those emergency losses. Others I lost respect for, gabbling the solemn oath only to save their skins, or making use of it to aggrandise themselves. But many stood firm, through fire, suspicion, deep double meanings and a web of trust. (113)

  The novel’s main characters are all nominally Christians, but the promptings and circumstances that led to their adoption of this alien faith were rather different. Sophia, a Muslim, converted for love of her second husband. Nekesa, once a prostitute, was moved to embrace her faith owing to the kindness and care shown to her by a Christian group when she was injured and helpless: “Every day one or other of the group was around, begging me to praise the Lord. Do you wonder that I did? No one had ever taken that much trouble over me before” (138). Nekesa’s religious earnestness (“The New Testament was all she wanted to hear. She had come to it late and couldn’t have enough of it,” [89]) is in sharp contrast to Wairimu’s pragmatism. The latter was seemingly motivated to accept Christianity as much by the opportunity it gave her to learn to read and gain knowledge as by personal conviction: “Ostensibly a baptism class of the Church of Scotland, [the evening school on the coffee farm where she worked] attracted many men and boys who wished to learn to read and a few women. . . . [Wairimu] was thrilled by the new knowledge she found in [the gospels] and the absorbing puzzle of working the words out. In 1939 she was baptised Mary” (94–95). Wairimu was able to hold in easy balance her Christian faith on the one hand, and on the other, her nationalist fervor and her role within the anti-Christian Mau Mau movement: “[In 1952] meetings were being called to oath as many as five hundred people at a time. . . . But me, I was very careful. I never missed church—in any case, I enjoyed going to church” (112).

  The style of The Present Moment is characterized by simplicity of language, a seeming artlessness that belies the patterning involved in a work of art. The intricate plot ties the characters’ present to their past, links their lives, and anchors them in the turbulent history of their country in the twentieth century.

  Finally, the gentle underlying force of The Present Moment, as of all Macgoye’s fiction, is the author’s compassionate tone and inclusive vision, which is possibly influenced by her strong Christian faith. For understandable reasons, much African fiction has displayed a bitterness toward the colonial past and bleak disillusionment with and antagonism toward the postcolonial present. Macgoye is concerned with important social, political, and gender issues in The Present Moment, but her authorial persona is not programmatic, shrill, or hectoring. This is not to say that Macgoye’s critical judgment is blunted by “niceness.” Her insights are sharp and she can be tart, even when the subject is close to her own heart. But nothing human is alien to her, and no voice is ignored or excluded, not the weakest or most abrasive of characters. Macgoye’s is a quiet voice. She shows, not tells. She dramatizes how issues play out in the lives of these individual women, and the identity and the vision of each woman is accepted and gathered into the whole in Macgoye’s generous telling.

  Valerie Kibera

  Ontario, Canada

  June 2000

  NOTES

  1. Just how remarkable Macgoye’s position is becomes evident when one compares her work with that of two other European writers—Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) and Elspeth Huxley—who lived in Kenya for long periods of time and whose Kenya-based works (Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass by Dinesen, The Flame Trees of Thika by Huxley) are much admired in the West. Both authors write lovingly about their years in Kenya. Neither was totally unsympathetic to her African “characters.” But, given their own situation as part of the white ruling class in a British colony, they could present only the colonial, European perspective of their times. Neither Dinesen’s or Huxley’s work is without interest or artistic merit. But it is irrelevant today in a way that Macgoye’s is not.

  2. See Njau’s Ripples in the Pool, Ogot’s The Promised Land, Land Without Thunder, and The Other Woman, Were’s The Eighth Wife and Your Heart Is My Altar, and Mugo, Daughter of My People, Sing! and The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti.

  3. See, for example, Nwapa’s Efuru and Idu; Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, A Question of Power, and The Collector of Treasures; Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy: or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint; Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen, In the Ditch, The Slave Girl, The Joys of Motherhood and Double Yoke.

  4. See Ngcobo’s Cross of Gold and And They Didn’t Die; Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike; Bâ’s So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song.

  5. Prominent among these critical studies are a study by Oladele Taiwo and two collections, one edited by Peterson, the other by Jones.

  6. Critical works that entirely neglect women writers include Palmer, Gakwandi, and Gikandi. Brown’s Women Writers in Black Africa was a welcome exception.

  7. Macgoye comments on feminism in her interview with Telleh-Lartey, in Ikonya’s profile, and in her letter to the author.

  8. Perhaps because of her insider outsider status in her adoptive country, Macgoye is especially attuned to the ethnic heterogeneity and cultural hybridity of Kenyan society. She reared her own children on the assumption that they should be able to steer their way with grace and flexibility “in a polyglot country where they are going to meet people with wide disparities of lifestyle and belief” (Wajibu 7).

  9. Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, with its notion of the heteroglossic nature of human life and art, enables especially rewarding readings of literary texts such as Macgoye’s, which reflect our present world of overlapping, hybrid, and interdependent cultures. See particularly The Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.

  WORKS CITED

  Aidoo, Ama Ata. Changes. 1991. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993.

  ———. Our Sister Killjoy: or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. London: Longman, 1977.

  Bâ, Mariama. Scarlet Song. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. Harlow, Eng.: Longman, 1986.

  ———. So Long a Letter. Trans. Modupé Bodé-Thomas. London: Heinemann, 1981.

  Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas P, 1981.

  ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984.

  Brown, Lloyd W. Women Writers in Black Africa. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981.

  Dinesen, Isak. Out of Africa. New York: Modern Library; London: Putnam, 1937.

  ———. Shadows on the Grass. London: Joseph, 1960.

  Emecheta, Buchi. Double Yoke. New York: Braziller; London: Ogwugwu Afor, 1982.

  ———. In the Ditch. London: Barrie, 1972.

  ———. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: Braziller; London: Heinemann, 1979.

  ———. Second-Class Citizen. London: Allison, 1974.

  ———. The Slave Girl. New York: Braziller, 1977.

  Fall, Aminata Sow. The Beggars’ Strike, or, The Dregs of Society. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. Harlow, Eng.: Longman, 1981.

  Gakwandi, Shatto Arthur. The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa. London: Heinemann, 1977.

  Gikandi, Simon
. Reading the African Novel. London: Currey; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1987.

  Head, Bessie. The Collector of Treasures. London: Heinemann, 1977.

  ———. Maru. New York: McCall; London: Gollancz, 1971.

  ———. A Question of Power. London: Davis-Poynter, 1973.

  ———. When Rain Clouds Gather. London: Gollancz, 1969.

  Huxley, Elspeth. The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood. New York: Morrow; London: Chatto, 1959.

  Ikonya, Philo. “Marjorie Macgoye, the Evergreen Author.” The Sunday Nation (Nairobi) 1 May 1994.

  “An Individual Response to the Challenges of Modern Life.” Wajibu: A Journal of Social and Religious Concern, vol. 4, no. 4 (November–December 1989): 6–8.

  Jones, Eldred Durosimi, Eustance Palmer, and Marjorie Jones eds. Women in African Literature Today. London: Currey, 1987.

  Macgoye, Marjorie, O. Chira. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1997.

  ———. Coming to Birth. Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986.

  ———. Homing In. Naitrobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1994.

  ———. Letter to the author. 1 January 2000.

  ———. Moral Issues in Kenya: A Personal View. Nairobi: Uzima, 1996.

  ———. Song of Nyarloka and Other Poems. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  ———. The Story of Kenya: A Nation in the Making. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1986.

  ———. Victoria and Murder in Majent go. London: Macmillan, 1993.

  Ngcobo, Lauretta. And They Didn’t Die. 1991. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1999.

  ———. Cross of Gold. London: Longman, 1981.

  Njau, Rebeka. Ripples in the Pool. Nairobi: Transafrica, 1975.

  Nwapa, Flora. Efuru. London: Heinemann, 1966.

  ———. Idu. London: Heinemann, 1970.

  Obyerodhyambo, Oby. “Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye: Child of Two Worlds Approaches Seventy.” Sunaa (1998): 6–7.

  Ogot, Grace. Land Without Thunder. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968.

  ———. The Promised Land. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966.

  Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara. “The Female Writer and Her Commitment.” African Literature Today, 15. (1987): 5–13.

  Oladele, Taiwo. Female Novelists of Modern Africa. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.

  Palmer, Eustace. An Introduction to the African Novel. New York: Africana; London: Heinemann, 1972.

  Petersen, Kristen H., and Anna Rutherford, eds. A Double Colonialisation: Colonial and Postcolonial Women’s Writing. Sydney, N.S.W: Dangaroo Press, 1986.

  “Profile of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye.” The Weekly Review (Nairobi) 12 September 1986: 29–30.

  Spice, Nicholas. “Looking After Men.” London Review of Books 9 July 1987: 4–5.

  HISTORICAL CONTEXT

  Precolonial African Societies

  The forty ethnic groups recognized in Kenya today represent a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The Kikuyu, Luyia, Luo, and Kalenjin peoples are the largest in numbers; others include the Gusii, Kamba, Maasai, Mijikenda, Samburu, Somali, and Turkana. Some peoples, especially the Kikuyu in the more fertile southern half of the country, combined subsistence agriculture with raising cattle and other livestock in scattered settlements of families related by patrilineal ties and ruled by councils of elders. They formed broadly patriarchal societies, where the senior man in a family was recognized as having the right to control land and other resources and to reallocate them when necessary. Wives gained rights to land or cattle only through a viable marriage to a man of the lineage.

  These were by no means isolated societies, but continuously proliferating communities with localized leadership. Regular patterns of trade and intermarriage forged links between neighboring peoples; ceremonies of blood brotherhood created fictional kinship ties across ethnic lines to stimulate trade. Ethnic identities thus tended to be rather fluid, as changing patterns of trade, rainfall, disease, or enemy raiding parties might prompt families to move away and join a different group. Colonial political and economic structures later tended to freeze these rather loose associations into more permanent ethnic identities and to pit them against one another.

  A rather different situation prevailed along the Indian Ocean coast. Swahili society, like the Swahili language, is the product of a profound interaction of Arab/Persian and African elements that took place over centuries. Founded more than a thousand years ago, Mombasa was the largest Swahili settlement along the Kenya coast and had absorbed immigrant traders and sailors for centuries. More recent Omani Arab immigrants (whose numbers increased measurably in the middle and later 1800s) considered themselves superior to their darker Swahili cousins, an attitude that led to occasional conflict under colonial rule.

  The Swahili generally saw themselves as urban dwellers, followed the ways of Islam, and marked themselves off by language, dress, and behavior from their up-country neighbors. By the early twentieth century, Mombasa was a cosmopolitan city with a mixture of Swahili, other African, Arab, and Asian inhabitants, and a small number of Europeans. The Swahili language became a lingua franca among Africans of different backgrounds throughout the hinterland as well.

  The Imposition of British Colonial Rule

  The British ruled Kenya from 1895 to 1963, a period covering only two or three generations, yet the long-term impact on African societies was substantial. For the agricultural peoples of western and central Kenya, two aspects of colonial rule had the greatest effect on their lives: the constant demand for land and for cheap labor and the active presence of Christian missionaries.

  British interests in East Africa were originally commercial and strategic. Thus one of the first colonial projects in Kenya was the construction of a railway from Mombasa to the shores of Lake Victoria to provide regular access to Uganda. Begun in 1896, the Uganda Railway ultimately shaped both the economic geography and the political history of the Kenya colony. Alarmed by the vast expenses of railroad construction, colonial officials hoped to generate revenue by using the railroad to carry agricultural products for export. They assumed that only white farmers could adequately develop the territory and moved quickly to attract white immigrants, primarily from Britain and from South Africa.

  More than five thousand Europeans had come by 1914. Settlers were rewarded with large tracts of the most fertile agricultural land, the so-called White Highlands, at low cost. The White Highlands covered roughly 7.5 million acres of land in central Kenya, including many areas claimed by the Kikuyu and their neighbors. At its height in 1950, the white population in Kenya consisted of some twenty-nine thousand people.

  British colonial officials helped provide the cheap labor that settlers demanded through restricting land available for African use, imposing “hut taxes” on the African population, and instructing to local officials to “encourage” men in their area to meet the labor needs of local white settlers—encouragement that sometimes involved the use of force. A formal labor registration system was developed in 1921 whereby all Africans over sixteen were required to carry a kipande, or labor pass, which listed the dates and terms of their current wage employment. At first the law was applied only to men and to women who worked or traveled outside their home area. Men who were found without their pass or whose card showed they were not currently employed could be forced to work on white-owned plantations. Young women sometimes worked for white settlers as well; it was widely believed that their manual dexterity made them ideal for picking delicate coffee berries and tea leaves.

  Settlers often avoided labor shortages by allowing African “squatters” to live on their farms—to build temporary huts, plant small gardens to feed their families, and keep a number of livestock—in exchange for working a specified number of days during the year. By 1945, nearly one-fourth of the Kikuyu population was living as squatters on white-owned land.

  Africans living near Mombasa were able to work for white employers as daily �
��casual labor” at the port of Kilindini and elsewhere on terms that allowed them to choose when they would work. Especially during the early decades of colonial rule, coastal men often refused long-term contracts, working on their own farms during key parts of the agricultural season and only presenting themselves for daily labor during the off seasons. They were also free to participate in the lively beni dance processions and competitions that were a highlight of coastal society. But men from central and western Kenya were forced to travel long distances and to work on contracts lasting from three to six months. Their wives were generally left behind in the rural areas, expected to fend for themselves and to continue the same levels of agricultural production despite the withdrawal of male labor.

  Christian missionaries, representing many different denominations, poured into Kenya from Europe and North America. In the early years they were often members of the Church Missionary Society (Anglican), the White Fathers (Roman Catholic), or the Church of Scotland Missionary Society (Presbyterian). Despite the importance of African lay teachers in the spread of Christianity, mission churches kept key positions within their hierarchy firmly in in the hands of white missionaries; this tendency later sparked the growth of a number of separatist African churches.

  Besides propagating the faith, missions were critical suppliers of education, health care, and social services in rural areas. While government efforts in both education and health care were oriented toward the needs of the white population, mission stations operated schools, rural clinics, and orphanages for Africans. Those who persevered in mission educational systems had access to better-paying white-collar jobs, but African families knew the mission schools would turn their children away from traditional beliefs. Some missionaries encouraged early Christian converts to move away from their extended families and form separate Christian villages, sometimes around a mission station. Conversion thus tore apart the social fabric of a number of rural communities in the early days of colonial rule. In Mombasa and other Swahili towns, families sent their children to Islamic madrasas (koranic schools) instead. Despite African demands, a network of government-supported secular schools did not become a reality until the 1950s.