Let’s celebrate Ogot’s extraordinary life

The Chairman of the Committee of Soviet Women, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova meets with Kenyan writer Grace Ogot. PHOTO| B.ELIN

What you need to know:

  • I then had my interview with Prof Ogot and left. At the door Mama said, “Go well. We like you people who keep busy at work at university.”

  • This is how I remember Grace Ogot. And I would wish that we remember her in terms of that last exhortation of hers, that those of us who claim to be knowledge producers should continue to produce knowledge about Kisumu, Kenya, East Africa, Africa; about Africans — our histories and stories.

That Grace Emily Akinyi Ogot has passed on is sad in the manner all deaths are unwelcome.

If it is difficult for those of us who knew Mama Grace from a distance, only mediated by her books and photos, it must be very painful for her immediate family. This is why often the injunction that we should celebrate, rather than mourn, the death of such a heroine and matriarch is always made at such times. I’d prefer to celebrate her. I’d prefer not to speak of Mama Grace only in terms of what I knew of her: her writing.

I last met Mama Grace exactly a year ago, this month. I had gone to Kisumu to interview her husband, the historian, Prof Bethwel Ogot. When I met the legend himself at their home in Kisumu, Mama Grace was present.

In fact, as we drove into the compound, Prof Ogot said, “You know, Mama will be out of the house when she hears the sound of the car.” Indeed we had hardly parked when Mama walked out of the house. She was frail but that famous smile welcomed us home.

She asked Prof. Ogot, “Who is the visitor?” “He is one of the people who study your books. He is from the University of Nairobi,” Prof. Ogot answered.

Mama asked again, “Which ones in particular?” I told her that I had just been teaching The Days of My Life recently.

I then had my interview with Prof Ogot and left. At the door Mama said, “Go well. We like you people who keep busy at work at university.”

This is how I remember Grace Ogot. And I would wish that we remember her in terms of that last exhortation of hers, that those of us who claim to be knowledge producers should continue to produce knowledge about Kisumu, Kenya, East Africa, Africa; about Africans — our histories and stories.

For it is history and stories that made Grace and Bethwell one of the true ‘power couples’ in Kenya. Theirs was a family that was steeped into knowledge production and dissemination with the intention to serve their people — Kenyans. Mama Grace was a multilingual who at one time drove a Landrover through the muddy tracks of Nyanza and Western Kenyan, doing social and community work.

Without doubt, this travelling and work was enabled by stories – those she picked from the people she met and helped and those she told those people.

So, to remember her properly, I’d rather people went out to the bookshops and libraries to buy or borrow her books to read.

Grace’s stories, as scholars would say, were always concerned with the encounter between African traditions and European modernity. As a pioneer, she tested the push and pull of both forces. She travelled far from home, not to look for a husband as it was wont for girls in those days — who she actually found far from home although he was a homeboy — but to look for an education.

This wasn’t an easy pursuit for an African girl — it was about journeys on foot and rail; meeting strangers with strange foods, languages, habits, religious beliefs. It was risking one’s life for the unknown.

Therefore, what one encounters when reading The Days of My Life is a very tenacious spirit. One is struck by the author’s determination to travel and discover.

It is in those journeys that she discovered school beyond the elementary stage; she encountered medicine and became a pioneer nurse in East Africa; she met a fellow Luo traveller in England — where they both sought further knowledge — who became her husband; she began writing in England and added a new occupation to her nursing; she became one of the pioneer African businesswomen in Kenya; became a publisher — Anyange Press in Kisumu; joined politics in her marital home and ably represented the people of Gem, among other things she did.

For the feminists and those who profess the development of the girl child, but probably more for the humanists among Kenyans, the story of Mama Grace is a worthy example of what a woman can do when given a chance and supported by the men in her life.

In Grace’s case she tells the story of her father’s tradition-challenging actions of educating her and opting to do house chores in order for Grace and her siblings to go to school. Later in life, she met a man who did not just love but cared enough about her work as a nurse, writer, politician, businesswoman, community developer etc.

To read The Days of My Life and Mama Grace’s other writings, is to co-experience the extraordinary life she led as a person steeped in her people’s traditions and culture but also one always in search of ways of improving her life beyond what her immediate environment provides.

We, therefore, need to look for examples of progress in her stories whether it is in the countryside and Luo tales of Land Without Thunder, The Promised Land and Miaha or in the stories of modernity and change in The Graduate as we pursue the dream of a progressive Kenya.

Like her name ‘Akinyi’ suggests, we have to start such work early in the morning, like she always did and lived an enviable life.  As they say among her people, Mama Grace is in good company of recent Kenyan writer ancestors Asenath Bole Odaga, Margaret Ogola, Ali Mazrui, Mwangi Gicheru and Omar Babu.