Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye has had a profound impact on the literature of Kenya, her adopted homeland. To date, she has published seven novels, two collections of poetry, children’s stories, historical studies, and cultural criticism. Regardless of the form they have taken, all of Macgoye’s works at their most basic level share a common theme: they explore the challenges, especially for women, of negotiating a changing world. While these challenges take a particular shape in postcolonial Kenya, Macgoye likes to remind her readers that movement, migration, and social change have always been part of the human experience.
Macgoye’s writing has won her literary recognition in East Africa and abroad. In Kenya, her poems are read by schoolchildren, her novels are part of the university curriculum, and her work has become the subject of graduate-level dissertations. On the basis of artistic accomplishments alone, therefore, Macgoye ranks in the top tier of first-generation writers from East Africa, alongside other leading figures like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Grace Ogot, and Okot p’Bitek.^ But her influence has a significant personal side, as well. Macgoye has been the model and inspiration for many East African writers, thanks to her tenacious and principled commitment to promoting the literature of the region. She has been an active member of the Kenyan literary community in its various manifestations over the decades, and the writers’ groups, meetings, and readings that Macgoye organized in Nairobi during the late 1970s have become the stuff of legend. In her early seventies at the turn of the millennium, Macgoye is regularly characterized in feature stories in the Kenyan press as the mother or grandmother figure—even the “doyenne”—of the countiy’s literature. One such profile, in East Africa’s longest-lived newspaper.
describes her simply as a “national treasure” (“Catching Up”).
Coming to Birth is Macgoye’s second novel to be published and her best-known work. For a Kenyan audience, the story is all too familiar: A naive young woman from rural Western Kenya joins her new husband in the city at a time of social unrest. Far from her familiar support structures, she is initially overwhelmed in this alien environment, but eventually manages to adjust to the exigencies of urban living, and in the end even finds that the city offers her some measure of emancipation. In Paulina, Macgoye offers an ordinary, unpretentious protagonist, who knows not to expect too much from life, but who must come to terms with dramatic social change. As the story of Paulina’s transformation, then. Coming to Birth depicts very real concerns, and it has the distinction of being one of the first Kenyan novels to present these concerns from a woman’s perspective. But there is more to Coming to Birth than Paulina’s story, since hers is merged with the national story—the story of Kenya. As Macgoye herself has put it. Coming to Birth presents a personal narrative set against a particular historical backdrop:
It attempts to show something about the consciousness of women which was emerging during those years. Something about the emergence of the concept of being a Kenyan, and a good deal about the consciousness of town life. (Troughear)
The novel’s title alludes to births on various levels. There are literal births, of course, including the anticipated birth that closes the story, but Paulina’s gradual transformation symbolizes a coming to birth as well—the birth of a confident and self-reliant woman. And wrapped around Paulina’s story is the birth of Kenya as an independent entity. The tale begins in the troubled 1950s—-the gestation and labor period leading to the birth of the new nation in December 1963—and continues through the first fifteen years of independence. Not surprisingly, Macgoye infuses the novel with the imagery of childbearing: gestation, labor, miscarriages, growing pains, and the emotions that accompany them. The present progressive of the title suggests that for
Paulina and Kenya alike, birth is a process rather than the work of a moment, and that this process is ongoing. Consequently, Coming to Birth offers a rich thematic repertoire. It is a feminist story about a woman overcoming great difficulties to make her way in a male-dominated society. It is about national identity and history, exploring the birth and early life of a new nation. It also suggests that life, like history, appears simple in retrospect, but is enormously complex and uncertain when we are living it. Life and history involve a complex series of difficult decisions, in which flawed and imperfect people, buffeted by forces beyond their control, try to make the most of their lives with limited knowledge and resources.
Coming to Birth was an immediate success when it was first released by the British publisher William Heinemann and by its Nairobi-based affiliate, Heinemann Kenya (now East African Educational Publishers), in 1986. Because its subject matter and style suited it to various educational levels, the novel soon appeared on the reading lists of Kenyan schools and universities. Heinemann Kenya quickly released a supplementary study guide for students, authored by the Ugandan writer and critic Austin Bukenya. In the year it was published, Macgoye’s novel won an international award, the Sinclair Prize, and was released in yet another edition (now out of print) from the London-based feminist publisher Virago. This new edition of Coming to Birth from The Feminist Press is a v/elcome event, as it brings this important Kenyan novel within reach of a wider audience outside of East Africa.
Marjorie Macgoye defies easy categorization, as a writer and as an individual. British by birth but Kenyan by choice, she arrived in Nairobi in 1954 at the age of twenty-six, as a bookseller for the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the mission arm of the Anglican Church. Six year later, she quit her job to marry Daniel Oludhe Macgoye, a Luo medical officer to whom she had been unofficially engaged for two years. Along with 9 million others, she became a citizen of the new Republic of Kenya soon after it received its independence from Britain in 1963, and except
for a four-year stint in Tanzania she has lived and worked there ever since, and raised four now-grown children.
Because of this background, Macgoye is an unusual, perhaps even a unique, figure in the literature of Kenya and of Africa. She certainly does not fit any of the typical categories of African writers. She is naturalized rather than native-born, so that while she is undoubtedly Kenyan, and while her marriage into a Luo family gives her special insight into that community’s experience and sensibility, Macgoye clearly occupies a position very different from that of Kenya’s indigenous black writers. At the same time, while there is a large community of white Kenyans— many of them former settlers or their descendants—this category seems even less apt, if only because Macgoye has consistendy rejected the privileges that go along with being white in a place like Kenya. Writers from this group, who produce what is referred to in Kenya as “expatriate literature,” include Elspeth Huxley, whose works describe growing up in a settler community in central Kenya, and Isak Dinesen, the pseudonym for Karen Blixen, whose book about her experience as an unsuccessful coffee farmer outside of Nairobi was made into the popular film of the same name. Out of Africa. Literature of the type produced by Huxley and Blixen is written from an outsider’s point of view, with outsiders’ concerns in mind, and it displays a consciousness of being part of a European colonial diaspora. Macgoye, by contrast, writes from a fundamentally different point of view and with radically different ends in mind. As a result, she is a Kenyan writer, but sui generis.
Macgoye’s unusual life is best understood in light of three influences: her working-class background, the emancipating role of education in her life, and her commitment to a socially active Christian faith. She was born Marjorie Phyllis King in Southampton, England, on October 21, 1928, the only child of working-class parents. Her father, Richard Thomas King, was a clerk in a shipyard. As the oldest boy in his family, he had been forced to leave school and go to work at age twelve, and missed the more satisfying and lucrative artisan training that his younger brother enjoyed. Marjorie’s mother, Phyllis, did complete school and was
a teacher before she was married, a job which she did not enjoy. When Marjorie was growing up, Phyllis did not work outside the home, but she later took in paying boarders. Marjorie’s maternal grandparents lived with the family during Marjorie’s early years, until their deaths in the mid-1930s, and her paternal grandparents lived nearby. Her childhood was affected by the Great Depression and by two wars: World War I was a recent memory that had left its mark, and World War 11 overshadowed her teenage years. The wars affected all of British society, of course, but as an important passenger and cargo port city, Southampton was a prime military target; in her memoirs, Macgoye recalls two severe attacks, along with constant disturbances.^
Writing and reading were always part of Macgoye’s life. She describes herself as being “fed on books” as a child, and a poem she wrote at age seven won publication in the Daily Mirror. She made it to secondary school on a scholarship, graduating in 1945 and taking university entrance exams when World War II was in its final stages. Marjorie had always assumed that higher education was beyond her reach—the only person that she knew who had been to university was the neighborhood doctor—but again she was awarded a scholarship, this time to the Royal Holloway College of the University of London, a small women’s college in Egham, Surrey, just outside London. The college experience opened a new world to Macgoye, bringing her into contact with the current scholarly debates of the day, as well as international political and social issues. It was here, also, that she sensed a call to the mission field.
Macgoye’s parents were churchgoers, although her grandparents were not. At college, Macgoye became what she now describes as “an earnest member” of the Student Christian Movement, a theologically and socially liberal alternative to the more evangelical Intervarsity Fellowship. When she felt the call to missionary work, she assumed that it would be in Africa: “It was not a burning desire to see people baptized,” she says, “but rather to be a witness” (personal intendew). The mission field was booming at the time, but for various reasons—which in retrospect, Macgoye
identifies as partly class bias and partly her own idiosyncracies— it would be six years before a missionary society took up her application. Following graduation in 1948, Macgoye spent those six years working in bookshops and other stores in London, involving herself in Labour Party politics, and at the same time completing a Master’s degree from Birkbeck College, which catered to part-time students. She wrote a thesis on Thomas Carlyle and periodical criticism of the nineteenth century, and she published some of her academic work. Fully expecting to be sent to West Africa, Macgoye prepared by studying Yoruba. But when her call came, it was for a post that had unexpectedly opened in Nairobi, where CMS needed someone to work in the agency’s bookstore.
The sudden nature of the opening meant that Macgoye never passed through the traditional one-year training that CMS required of its missionaries. This untraditional route is typical for Macgoye, who as a missionary was always something of a maverick, never following the standard path. When she arrived in Nairobi, for instance, she soon realized that the mission compound on Bishop’s Road, on the summit of the elite Nairobi Hill, was far removed from the daily lives of the people she was supposed to serve. Within the year she moved instead to the mission house on the edge of Pumwani, the large “African location” that had grown up on what was then the city’s outskirts. Today, the city has surrounded and absorbed Pumwani, but it remains one of Nairobi’s major slum areas. Pumwani provides the early setting in Coming to Birth\ in fact, Macgoye and another CMS worker who lived in the house with her appear in the novel as Ahoya and her assistant, Macgoye being “the short one with glasses and a bicycle” (30-31). From her new home, Macgoye would ride her bicycle each day to the CMS bookstore in Church House—at the time, the tallest building in Nairobi.^
It was during a visit to a Sunday school at Remand Prison, on the edge of Nairobi’s industrial area, that Macgoye met her husband-to-be, then a medical assistant for the Ministry of Health. The two were married at the Anglican Church in Pumwani on June 4, I960. Interracial marriages were not unheard of in Kenya in this era, but when they did occur they tended to
involve leading Kenyan political figures. Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, had an English wife, and it was the marriage of the lawyer-politician C. M. G. Argwings-Kodhek to an Englishwoman that had caused the miscegenation law to be changed. Macgoye’s marriage, as she notes, was “rather different from politicians who were bringing back white wives. I had been in the country for srx years before marrying” (personal interview). Furthermore, she was not marrying into the Kenyan elite; Daniel Oludhe Macgoye was a junior civil servant.
The couple immediately moved to Western Kenya where they would live for the next eleven years close to the hospital where Daniel was posted. It was during this time that Macgoye was integrated into her husband’s family and into Luo customs and attitudes, and she credits her mother-in-law, Miriam, with a spirit of generosity and welcome that made this adjustment successful.^ Macgoye gives herself a second cameo appearance in Coming to Birth, when Paulina travels to Kisumu to observe the Independence Day celebrations in December 1963:
Paulina spotted the little white girl who had been in Pumwani, with two children now and a black husband, and, though they did not really recognise her, they greeted her civilly in Luo and exchanged congratulations on the occasion. ( 52 )
Macgoye indeed had two children at the time of independence: Phyllis Ahoya was bom in Kisumu in March 1961, and George Ng’ong’a was born in May 1963, during a visit to England. Two more sons were born while they lived in Kisumu: Francis Ochieng’ in January 1965 and Lawrence Thomas King Odera in March 1966. For the rest of the decade, Macgoye occupied herself with raising her children, teaching part-time at Kisumu Girls High School, and writing steadily, placing a number of her poems in East African literary journals.
Kisumu is located on Kenya’s western edge, on the shores of Lake Victoria and close to the borders of Uganda and Tanzania. It is Kenya’s third-largest town, after Nairobi and Mombasa,
which meant that while Macgoye was not at the heart of the nation’s cultural life, she was nonetheless well connected to contemporary developments. Makerere University in Uganda was at the time the leading higher education institution in the region, having produced many of East Africa’s first-generation writers and academics. Because the East African Community was still intact, communication and travel between Kenya and Uganda was routine.^ In Coming to Birth, Kisumu is where Paulina begins her journey to independence, by enrolling in the Homecraft Training School. She learns to know Kisumu quite well—it’s smaller than Nairobi, after all—and through Paulina, Macgoye evokes the atmosphere of the town in the 1960s: “Sunny in the morning, scorching in the afternoon, with a wind suddenly blowing up before dark, thunder storms sometimes and dust devils nearly every day” (42). The lively marketplace, the religious rivalries, the constant threat of changes in the level of Lake Victoria—all of these are elements of her own Kisumu experience that Macgoye writes into Paulina’s story.
It was during this era that Macgoye came to know the Ugandan poet and academic Okot p’Bitek, whose influence on her writing was profound. In 1966, Okot had energized the East African literary community with the publication of Song of Lawino. The poem is about the seduction of Westernization, a key issue for African societies in the 1960s. Even more significant, it offered a radically new poetic form for East Africa, a free-verse style based loosely on oral poetry from Okot’s Acholi community, in eastern Uganda. East African writers quickly took to the new style and tone of the poem. Okot himself followed up with Song of Ocol (a sequel to Song of Lawino), as well as the less successful “Song of a Prisoner” and “Song of Malaya” (published together in the volume Two Songs). Macgoye had the opportunity to hear Okot recite the original, Acholi version of Song of Lawino at a 1965 reading in Nairobi before its publication in English, and during 1968 and 1969 Okot lived in Kisumu, where he was associated with the University of Nairobi’s Extramural Centre. Although she is famous for her willingness to challenge aspects of Okot’s literary vision, Macgoye gives a nod to his influence in the title of her own major poem. Song of Nyarloka.^^
Living in the largest town in Western Kenya, Macgoye was at the epicenter for Luo political aspirations, which were becoming increasingly frustrated during this time. Despite the rhetoric of national unity and the call for Kenyan identity to supercede tribal loyalties, the major political story in the decade following independence was the struggle for control of the Kenyan state by leaders of the Luo and Kikuyu communities. It was a struggle that the Luo were to lose, as the Kikuyu consolidated their position under Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta (even though they were unable to secure the presidential succession, carried off in 1978 by Vice President Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin). The first major blow for the Luo came in 1966, when one of their leaders, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, was forced from his post as vice president Odinga formed a new political party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), the first serious challenge to the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) in many years. Not surprisingly, the KPU’s base of support was in the Luo area of western Kenya, and the two-party structure smoldered uneasily until 1969, when the conflict came to a head. Two leading Luo politicians were killed that year: Argwings-Kodhek died in a suspicious motor vehicle accident in January, and in July an even more important figure, Tom Mboya, was assassinated in broad daylight on a Nairobi street.
A few months later, yet another important event took place in Kisumu—an event which Macgoye places at the heart of Coming to Birth (and also grants a prominent role in the poem Song of Nyarloka). In October 1969, in a politically charged atmosphere, President Kenyatta and his entourage made a rare trip to Kisumu to preside at the opening ceremonies for a new hospital. Whether the unrest at the Kisumu rally was incited by Kenyatta’s entourage in order to provide an excuse for retaliation, or whether it was invented after the fact to justify the shootings that occured, the result was that Kenyatta’s motorcade made an abrupt departure, with soldiers firing tear gas and bullets into the crowd as they left town. Among the dead were schoolchildren who had been required to stand by the roadside to salute the president. A news blackout meant that the shooting and deaths were not publicized. Macgoye rushed to Nairobi,
where she tried without success to inform the international press. “Song of Kisumu,” her poetic response to the aftermath of the incident, was originally published in the East Africa Journal and later appended to the first section of Song of Nyarloka —the only segment not originally written as part of that longer work. She puts the incident in the central chapter of Coming to Birth, where it marks a crucial turning point. In the context of the story as a national allegory, the fatal shooting abruptly terminates the life of Paulina’s firstborn just as it terminates Kenya’s initial hopes for a harmonious and just political life. “The country had eaten its people,” the narrator concludes (84). Immediately afterward, Odinga’s KPU was banned, and Kenya returned to being a one-party state.
Following the Kisumu incident, Marjorie and Daniel Macgoye were understandably eager to remove their children from the Kisumu schools, where they might be required to stand by the roadside for presidential motorcades. Macgoye immediately took up the offer of a post managing the University of Dar es Salaam bookstore, moving there with the children in 1971 (shortly before the publication of her first novel. Murder in Majengo). Macgoye’s four years in Dar es Salaam, her only years spent outside of Kenya, turned out to be among the most intellectually stimulating and artistically fruitful of her life, in part because she was now free of obligations to her extended family. For the first time in a decade, she recalls, she was able to write in the evenings after the children were in bed. More importantly, Macgoye was now in the thick of the Dar es Salaam academic community, which in the early 1970s was a hotbed of African intellectual debate, especially for leftists attracted by President Julius Nyerere’s vision of African socialism. While relishing the intellectual stimulation, Macgoye often felt at odds with the more extreme Tanzanian activists. In Kenya, Macgoye’s poetry had at times been criticized for being too political; in this more radical climate it was deemed insufficiently committed to a progressive political agenda. In Dar es Salaam, Macgoye finished Song of Nyarloka and wrote Victoria. In Coming to Birth, she includes a nostalgic nod to her memories of the Tanzanian city, with its “sleepy
hot streets and the sight of a ship’s funnels appearing to pass along in the midst of the town” (102).
In 1975, Macgoye returned to Kenya for good. The family settled in Nairobi, and for five years she managed the S.J. Moore bookstore—at the time the richest source of quality literature in the city, according to Austin Bukenya. For Kenyan literature, these were dynamic, eventful years. New titles were appearing from Ngugi, Ogot, and other established names, and there was a concurrent explosion in popular literature—thrillers and romances, often based on European and American models and often excoriated for their lowbrow aspirations, but very successful commercially. This was also the time of Ngugi’s now-famous literacy and drama work with a peasant cooperative at Kamiriithu, which led to his arrest and eventual exile. Along with the poet Jonathan Kariara, Macgoye instigated monthly poetry readings at her bookstore for several years. She also worked on Coming to Birth, completing it in 1979. Ngugi himself read an early draft and encouraged Macgoye in the project.
It took seven more years before the novel would appear in print, during which time Macgoye quit her post at S.J. Moore, working as a publisher’s sales representative (which allowed her to travel throughout East Africa) and as editor for the University of Nairobi’s correspondence courses. By this time, Macgoye was widely known within the Kenyan literary community, but the 1986 publication of Coming to Birth, and its subsequent receipt of the Sinclair Prize, a British award for works of social and political significance, boosted awareness of Macgoye to new levels. The novel’s success opened the door to publication of more of Macgoye’s works, among them the novels The Present Moment (1987), which is also being republished by The Feminist Press; Homing In (1994), the story of a settler widow, which won second place in the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1995; and Chira (1997), the first serious Kenyan novel to highlight the issue of AIDS. Her husband died of stomach cancer in 1990, and today Macgoye continues to live in her modest flat in Ngara, near Nairobi’s city center.
Coming to Birth has a methodical and uncomplicated structure.
with each of its seven chapters relating a significant stage in Paulina’s development and each corresponding to a distinct, chronologically arranged period in Kenyan history. Chapter one covers 1956 and 1957, two particularly unstable years. At the time, British rule was under unprecedented challenge, and independence, if not imminent, at least appeared inevitable in the long run. The narrative, reflecting the general view at the time, suggests that independence seems likely within twenty years (1)—far beyond the seven years that it actually took. Since none of Britain’s African colonies had yet taken that step, the twenty-year scenario would have seemed realistic to many. What was peculiar to Kenya, creating much of its instability, was the challenge to colonial rule from the armed insurgency known as the Mau Mau movement. The rebellion flourished in the central highlands, where settlers had appropriated large tracts of the country’s most desirable land from the Kikuyu community, and when Macgoye describes the “accepted fact” of the Emergency (1), she is referring to the heightened security measures taken by the colonial administration between 1952 and 1958, in response to the Mau Mau insurgency' These measures were designed to restrict the movement and association of the Kikuyu and of the related Embu and Meru communities (indicated as “KEM” in the signboards prohibiting entry). In the rural areas of central Kenya, many Kikuyu were forcibly evicted from their homes and moved into centralized and more controllable “villages.” Prison work camps were set up for suspected rebels and sympathizers. In Nairobi, curfews and pass laws restricted movement, and entire sections of the city in the so-called “African locations” were cordoned off by barbed wire.*^ Pumwani and other such “locations” with a high density of Kikuyu residents were of particular concern for colonial authorities. Their “Operation Anvil” forced many Kikuyu from these areas, resulting in housing opportunities for members of other communities— like Martin Were, a Luo.
Fresh from her village home in western Kenya, and possessing limited political awareness, Paulina is understandably disoriented when she arrives on the morning train in Nairobi. This is her first experience with urbanization, and while Nairobi in 1956 was
nowhere as large as it is today, it was certainly large enough to be confusing. Readers who remember colonial-era Nairobi will see that Macgoye has carefully replicated the cityscape and its ambience, from the “khaki longs” that Martin is wearing (1) to the placement of the railway station and its landhies (railway worker’s housing) in relation to the rest of the city, and even the types of housing in Pumwani itself. The main events in chapter one are Paulina’s shocking plunge into city life and her miscarriage, events that parallel the nation’s awakening to the volatility and violence of the Emergency. By the end of this chapter, however, the Emergency seems to be easing and Paulina is slowly adjusting to the rhythms and requirements of city living.
Chapter two covers 1957 to 1962, the era immediately preceding Kenyan independence, when the movement toward self-government was becoming inexorable. The Emergency restrictions were lifting, and Jomo Kenyatta was emerging as the leader of a group of Kenyan politicians who were to lead the country to independence from Britain, following the model of Ghana, which in 1957 became the first British colony in Africa to receive its independence. For many Kenyans, this was an era of optimism and promise, carrying the hope that independence would usher in a new era of freedom, justice, and prosperity for all Kenyans. Politicians had not yet lost the common touch, as the narrative suggests by highlighting how Moi and Ngala lodge in Pumwani.^ For Kenyan readers today, there is considerable irony in this passage, given the disappointing behavior of the political elite since independence. As the novel shows, many of the promises of independence were never fulfilled—they were barren hopes, to use the imagery of the novel. The police raid that contributes to Paulina’s miscarriage reminds readers how the government in postcolonial Kenya uses force against its own people in the same way that the colonial administration did.
Just as the period of self-government presages the nation’s fate, the events in this chapter offer a taste of what is in store for Paulina: The intimations of Martin’s infidelity with Fatima precede his more public affair with Fauzia, the hints by some of her relatives that Paulina should conceive with another man—a practice, Macgoye
suggests, that “custom was not too hard on” (35)—paves the way for her later affair with Simon, and Paulina’s visit to the Homecraft School leads to her eventual enrollment there. Paulina’s miscarriages do not bode well, particularly given their metaphorical implications for the nation at large, and Martin’s prospects, which were so promising at the start of the narrative, are in decline, as evidenced by his downwardly mobile move to Kariokor. Some things are going well, however. Paulina begins her journey to financial independence, first by crocheting and then by joining the Homecraft School. Martin and Paulina confirm their wedding in a church ceremony. Paulina’s second, confident arrival in Nairobi is a sharp contrast to her first, suggesting a new level of maturity and competence. Despite the series of miscarriages, there is a significant birth in this chapter—the mixed-race child Joyce, who offers Paulina a pretext for friendship with Amina, a woman whose example gives Paulina both inspiration and warning. Like Fatima and Fauzia, Amina is from the coastal Swahili community. Her friendship with Paulina, like biracial Joyce herself, suggests the hope for a new, multicultural Kenya.
Related to the idea of multiculturalism is the tricky role languages play in the birth of this nation. With forty distinct ethnic groups and languages, forging a genuine and just national identity from Kenya’s remarkable diversity has been a dilemma for the country. Swahili is a mother tongue on Kenya’s coast, but has historically been adopted first as a trade language and later as a national language, throughout the country. Most Kenyans, especially those with a limited education like Paulina, know Swahili only on a relatively rudimentar)^ level, which is why she feels at a disadvantage against the savv>" ways and language of w^omen like Fatuma and Fauzia, who know the “deep” Swahili so well that “they could always make it too hard if they wanted to” (34). Their advantage backfires when Martin beats Fauzia, whose cries in Swahili are ignored by neighbors because “true disaster can only proclaim itself in the tribal language” (58). Even though this is a “tribal language” for Fauzia, most Kenyans would think of it as a second or even third language.
The actual moment of Kenyan independence is surprisingly
anticlimactic, as Macgoye turns the focus of chapter three, which covers 1963 through 1968, away from political events and onto Paulina’s inward, personal development. The June 1, 1963, celebrations are for Madaraka, or internal self-government, which was a step on the way to Uhuru, the complete political independence that came six months later. For Paulina, however, the celebrations contrast with her personal experience: This “great year dragged on” (51), and even as the new nation comes into being, “something had died in her” (52). Paulina’s relationship with Martin is disintegrating, and it is telling that while she is seen attending the celebrations, he is not mentioned in relation to independence at all. Martin, in fact, is worse off than he was at the start of the novel; Paulina, by contrast, is more autonomous.
Chapter four, which covers 1969 to 1971, constitutes a pivotal period in the story. Political events return to the fore, but they are almost exclusively setbacks, as the euphoria of independence withers in the face of power struggles and economic stagnation. The period was a difficult one throughout the region: the novel makes reference to the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane, the founder of the Mozambican independence movement that eventually won the nation independence from Portugal in 1974 (72), and to Idi Amin’s overthrow of the Ugandan president, Milton Obote, in a January 1971 coup d’etat that ushered in an era of terror and chaos for that country (90). In Kenya, as we previously noted, 1969 was a year of retrenchment for Luo political aspirations and for national unity. The trial of Njenga, Tom Mboya’s alleged assassin, becomes a transparent cover-up, since the “one question which would have made sense of the trial” (82)— the question of which highly placed politicians were behind the assassination—^was not allowed to be aired. Martin is experiencing the equivalent of a midlife crisis, growing but not maturing (78), his autonomy shrinking in relation to the growth of his cynicism. Amina greets him as Bwana Mkubwa—“Mr. Big Man”—a friendly but satirical salutation which only serves to remind him of his dashed aspirations (80). Above all, the tragic death of young Martin Okeyo in this chapter recapitulates the death of East
Africa’s economic and political aspirations. With her son’s death, many of Paulina’s hopes are killed, just as the optimism of independence is irrevocably put to rest. It is a barren moment, as Paulina contemplates her prospects: “He would go to the earth, like herself, unperpetuated and unfulfilled” (84). There is a poignant irony here, as young Martin has just been described as a child who, like “a real Luo,” was “more keen in a funeral than anything else” (73). He ends up in the Kenyan equivalent of a pauper’s grave—a public plot rather than a burial on the homestead—without any of the usual rituals and observations (85). As the chapter ends, Paulina, like her country, feels that her life has reached a dead end.
As Austin Bukenya points out, the date that opens chapter five should probably be 1973 rather than 1975, since Mr. M’s campaign for reelection to Parliament would have occurred in the general election of 1974 (Notes 36). In any case, the action in this chapter moves through the end of 1975, Kenya’s most politically volatile year since 1969, and the result is an increased level of background tension and anxiety. There had been a coup attempt in 1971, which was easily squelched, but in 1975 cracks were appearing in the formerly solid rule of KANU and of the aging President Kenyatta, who was to die three years later. The bomb blast at Nairobi’s major bus terminus was a real event, from March of that year, but it was the disappearance of the Kikuyu politician and businessman Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, generally known simply as “J.M.,” that suggested the high level of jostling for power, even within the Kikuyu elite. Although wealthy, Kariuki had a reputation for being on the side of Kenya’s poor, and he was a hero of the independence movement; the book that was republished following his death (108) is '‘Mau Mau” Detainee, his 1963 account of being imprisoned during the Emergency. After Kariuki was reported missing, rumors about his fate, including the suggestion that he was merely visiting Zambia, did not end until his mutilated body turned up at the city mortuary, where it had lain unidentified for several days. As in the Tom Mboya assassination, and as in the unsolved murder in 1990 of the Luo foreign minister Robert Ouko, the general consensus was that high powers
in the government were behind J. M.’s death, although none was convicted/" Macgoye’s narrative turns bitterly lyrical in denouncing the culture of fear, whispers, and silence that prevents Kenyans from “tumbling to” the truth, even when that truth is obvious (107). In the meantime, the ruling party, KANU, was having internal power struggles of its own, as evidenced by the detention of its deputy speaker, the Nandi politician Jean Marie Seroney and his Luhya counterpart, Martin Shikuku, for publicly criticizing their own party. Chelagat Mutai, a young female member of Parliament, was imprisoned for more than two years, ostensibly for an old offense but actually for criticizing their detention.
For Macgoye’s plot, the most significant developments during this era are the steady expansion of Paulina’s world and the concurrent shrinking of Martin’s. While the two are reunited in this section, it is on terms strikingly different from the terms of their original relationship. Working in a politician’s household, Paulina grows in political awareness and even shows the first signs of political activism with her unsuccessful campaign to challenge Mutai’s imprisonment. Nairobi is now her home in a way that it had never been before; in fact, her rural home now seems an alien environment. Martin, meanwhile, is increasingly cynical and disillusioned, a far cry from the politically active young man we saw in the novel’s first pages.
When Macgoye began writing Coming to Birth she planned to end the narrative in 1976, thereby rounding out the tale with a neat, twenty-year span of the nation’s life. But the years 1976 through 1978, which provide the backdrop for the novel’s last two chapters, turned out to be the final moments of a distinct era in Kenyan history—the Jomo Kenyatta era. Extending the narrative for two additional years lends Paulina’s story an even more effective allegorical punch than Macgoye had initially anticipated. Kenyatta died in August 1978, concluding a presidency that covered all fifteen years of Kenya’s existence as an independent nation. The jostling for power following his death, won by then-Vice President Moi, has been recorded in dramatic fashion in The Kenyatta Succession, an unusual work of Kenyan
investigative journalism coauthored by Joseph Karimi and Philip Ochieng. Ochieng’s reputation as a leading journalist is attested to by the special mention Macgoye gives to his editorial following the Mboya assassination (82). Coming to Birth never actually mentions that succession struggle, since the story ends in March 1978, five months before Kenyatta’s death. Paulina is in her third month, meaning that her child—the “very great hope” that concludes the novel—would be due in September, a date that for Kenyan readers would be pregnant with meaning, to say the least. How would the birth of a new political era affect the nation?
In chapters six and seven, the increasing corruption and cynicism in the political realm contrasts with Paulina’s remarkable new personal involvement in social concerns. Political detentions continue, most notably the year-long incarceration of the novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose writings had become increasingly critical of the Kenyatta regime.“ The government is doing relatively little about the growing number of children who are living and surviving on the streets. Meanwhile, Mr. M, who had seemed a decent man when Paulina first went to work for the family, is betraying his wife and family through his sexual affairs. As a parliamentarian, Mr. M should take the lead in addressing social problems, but instead it is Paulina who takes tangible steps on behalf of the street children. Although she is still a servant, Paulina is more confident than she has ever been, willing to speak up for what she believes is right—both to her employer and to the nurse who sees her in the final scene. She is indeed, as Mr. M notes, “a new woman” (139). Even Martin, roused from his cynicism by Ngugi’s arrest, “sat down solidly to read” Petals of Blood —Ngugi’s longest and most complex work (144). In the end, this new woman, on the edge of a new era in the nation’s growth, waits for the future with a mixture of uncertainty and hope. By any standards, Paulina’s transformation is remarkable.
Jonathan Kariara, Macgoye’s friend and fellow poet, once asked her why she seemed so obsessed with birth and its associated imagery (Macgoye, personal interview). His premise is astute; this
type of imagery is central in Coming to Birth and runs throughout Macgoye’s work. It symbolizes not only personal and national development but also the artist’s creative process; the act of writing, for Macgoye, constitutes an artistic bringing to birth. This is by now a familiar formula in postcolonial literature, even literature by men. For instance in A Grain of Wheat, the definitive literary statement on Kenyan independence, Ngugi concludes the narrative with the hope of a child for Gikonyo and Mumbi. In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie pulls together the loose ends of his sweeping vision of postcolonial India by giving Salim Sinai a son who represents the prospects for a new national future, following India’s own Emergency.^^ The difference is that for these male writers, evocations of labor, birth, miscarriage, and so on remain strictly metaphorical (and they are only one metaphor among many—for Ngugi, for instance, biblical imagery or the footrace at the end of his novel carry even greater symbolic significance, while Rushdie uses a stunning array of metaphors, including chutney-making, to explore his ideas about history and art). For Macgoye, childbirth carries a more personal burden, since it describes female reality; the device becomes metonymic rather than metaphoric.In any case, Macgoye’s answer to Kariara was simply that she writes about birth because it is fundamental to a woman’s experience.
It might surprise some readers, then, to know that Macgoye resists defining herself and her work as feminist. Among African women writers, however, she is by no means unique in this regard. The Botswanan writer Bessie Head, who like Macgoye established her writing career in an adopted homeland and whose works also explore female emancipation in a male-dominated society, is similarly famous for insisting that she is not a feminist. Like Head, Macgoye says she wishes to be remembered simply as a writer, rather than as a woman writer. There may be several reasons for this stance, the first being simply the writer’s instinct to avoid restrictive categorization. Especially for someone like Macgoye, who has lived her life consistently against the grain, resisting obvious labels may be instinctual. More fundamentally, despite the fact that her theology is decidedly progressive in other ways.
Macgoye finds certain facets of feminism in conflict with her religious principles. Specifically, she views sexual differences as divinely established and believes any attempt to eradicate those differences to be ill-advised. In one of her essays in Moral Issues in Kenya, she urges readers to retain a sense of those things she considers unique to the female experience—’’the joy and responsibility of motherhood, the gift of nourishing and healing, the artistic insight” (74). She especially objects to anyone rejecting the validity of motherhood, as some of the more radical colleagues from her Tanzania days apparently did.^^ Finally, Macgoye is no doubt affected by the fact that mainstream feminism, as it has been translated into Africa from its European and American roots, too frequently reflects the concerns and biases of those alien origins, and is not always attentive to the specific issues of African women. For African women, siding with feminism has sometimes meant siding with colonial or Western ideology. As Chandra Mohanty famously argues. Western feminisms too easily gloss over cultural difference, making European forms of patriarchy (and European forms of resistance to it) appear as universal norms, when in fact they are not.
Despite Macgoye’s reticence about the term, it is difficult to read Coming to Birth as anything other than a distinctly feminist story, at least in the broader sense that it explores a woman’s experience of maneuvering through and eventually overcoming, in however limited a fashion, the constraints of a profoundly patriarchal society. The story, as Macgoye herself emphasizes, is about the growth of a woman’s consciousness, and in this respect the contrast in the trajectories of Martin’s and Paulina’s lives is striking; Coming to Birth relates the empowerment of Paulina, who ends up a “new woman,” and the concurrent diminution of Martin’s status as a man. At the end of the story, their roles are dramatically reversed. Instead of Paulina moving into his home, as custom would require, Martin is taken into hers, and on her conditions. She is the political activist, at ease in the city and its various social settings, while he is cynical and depressed. Paulina, who in the novel’s opening pages could only resign herself to being locked in a small and strange
room—“Being married was, it seemed, a whole history of getting used to things” (6)—is now “the one demanding to grow, to get out, to do things, and he was tired and disillusioned” (112).
The novel also highlights political events of significance to Kenyan women. In 1969, a year that is otherwise already full of tragedy, Kenya’s Parliament retracts the Affiliation Act (72), a colonial-era piece of legislation beneficial to some women because it required fathers to take responsibility, including financial responsibility, for their children born out of wedlock. For Kenyan women, its annulment was a serious setback. The imprisonment of Chelagat Mutai, one of Kenya’s few female members of Parliament, drives Paulina to a new level of political action, which leads to the first time that she “set up her will against Martin’s” (111-12). In the end, the novel suggests that Kenya’s first attempt at nationhood has been a disastrous failure under male leadership, and it may be time for a different approach that would draw on a lifeembracing, female ethic:
Perhaps women’s work was like that^—the word for creation was the same one you used practically for knitting or pottery. Men’s work was so often destructive—clearing spaces, breaking things down to pulp, making decisions-—and how often did the decisions amount to anything tangible? Words in the air, pious intentions, rules about what not to do. She was glad that a lot of her work lay in making and mending things. (129)
Similar ideas about women and their role in society wind through all of Macgoye’s work in various guises, and she is enough of an insider that she can credibly challenge patriarchal elements in Kenya and in Luo tradition. Macgoye is famous for her attack on what she terms “domestic slavery,” the practice of exploiting (usually female) household servants. This is the burden of her well-known poem, “Song of Freedom,” which tells the story of an urban family’s mistreatment of a young, rural, female relative in this way, and it resurfaces in Coming to Birth in her criticism of the Okelo family’s treatment of Paulina (91).
Macgoye is also famously critical of what she considers an undue obsession with extravagant funeral rites among the Luo; she takes on the issue directly and at length in Moral Issues in Kenya, and touches on it in passing in Coming to Birth (73, 89). Macgoye’s works—fiction and nonfiction alike—offer a consistent vision of these sorts of issues and of how they affect Kenyan women. Taken as a group, Macgoye’s protagonists represent the richest and most compelling collection of female characters in Kenya’s novelistic tradition. They include Lois Akinyi (in Murder inMajengo), Wairimu, Rahel, and Sophia (in The Present Moment), the eponymous Victoria (in a sequel to Murder in Majengo), Ellen Smith and Martha Kimani (in Homing In), and of course Paulina.
Beyond this specifically feminist vision, Macgoye’s works offer a thoughtful analysis of how ordinary people are affected by history, and the possibilities of affecting it in turn. Bruce Berman, in his study of the colonial state in Kenya, suggests that an appropriate way to understand any history, but especially the history of the colonial system, is not as “melodrama, with the forces of good arrayed against the forces of evil,” but rather as “tragedy, in which the great majority in each group did the best they could according to their various and often conflicting values and interests, and within a context they only dimly, and frequently quite inaccurately, understood” (xii). This is precisely the perspective on Kenyan society that permeates all of Macgoye’s writing. Toward the end of Coming to Birth, Paulina meets up with Amina, whose pluck and assertiveness she has always admired. The two women share their news, and their concluding comments sum up their contrasting ways of viewing the world:
“We have learned to take what comes and make the best of it,” [Paulina] said.
“To make what comes and to take the best of it,” answered Amina firmly. “But there’s my bus coming: I must go.” (146)
Neither view, the novel suggests, is entirely accurate. People are not completely passive and helpless in the face of world events, but neither is it possible to transcend these events completely. There is an echo of Marx here: People make history, but not always under the conditions of their choosing. Macgoye’s novels explore the various stories and events that combine (“enfold” is actually her favored verb) to create “the present moment”—which serves as the title for her subsequent novel.
If Coming to Birth has a weakness, it is undoubtedly the dialogue, which at various points is less than convincing, taking on vocabulary and cadences that seem more natural to Southampton than to Nairobi. The conversation between Martin and Amina in chapter four, for instance, where Amina urges him to rent her “nice rooms, furnished, water laid on” (81), or the surprisingly standard grammatical constructions of the street children in chapter six, do not quite ring true. Characters end up sounding too much like one another. When the dialogue becomes ironic rather than earnest, it is far more successful. The exchange with Rhoda, for instance, is quite good. Like a colonial mistress whining about the difficulty of finding good help, her complaint that “life in Nairobi is hard” (122) elicits little sympathy from her former classmate Paulina, and her tiring refrain, “you know,” reveals Rhoda’s pretentiousness.
What tends to be more effective than the dialogue is Magcoye’s frequent use of a narrative technique known as free indirect discourse.^^’ To express what a character is thinking, writers have several choices. They may state a thought indirectly, putting it in the narrator’s voice, but clearly identifying it as the character’s internal reflections. An alternative is to quote a character’s thoughts directly, in the same way that one would quote the character’s speech. A third way, which Macgoye deploys throughout Coming to Birth, is to use what is sometimes called free indirect discourse, which presents a character’s thoughts and expressions as part of the narrated portion of the text (therefore indirect), clearly from that character’s perspective but not explicitly tagged or marked as coming from that character (therefore “free”). This technique allows an unusual closeness between the
more objective voice of the narrator and the subjective mind of the character, and it is therefore less crucial than in directly quoted speech to get the wording or phrasing exactly right for that character. In the third paragraph of Coming to Birth, for example, the first and fifth sentences of the paragraph are from the external narrator’s perspective, but the second through fourth are Martin’s interior monologue, even though the shifts are not denoted by direct quotations, and the third-person voice remains the same:
The overnight train from Kisumu had not yet pulled in. It would be her first time on a train. She could probably count the number of times she had been in a motor vehicle, even. How Nairobi and his mastery of Nairobi would overwhelm her! She was sixteen and he had taken her at the Easter holiday, his father allowing two cattle and one he had bought from his savings, together with a food-safe for his mother-in-law and a watch for Paulina’s father. (2)
The use of this free indirect discourse gives Macgoye narrative possibilities that she exploits quite effectively. In the first place, it allows her to present characters sympathetically but also ironically We sympathize because of the direct access we get to a character’s emotions, but we are also struck by the irony of how those emotions do not always correspond to reality. Sympathy and irony mingle particularly well in the novel’s opening, where we are struck by Paulina’s vulnerability and naivete as, for example, when she notes that “Being married was, it seemed, a whole history of getting used to things” (6).
Free indirect discourse is also effective in revealing the minds of characters who find themselves at a crucial juncture, hanging between reflections on the past and anticipations of the future. Macgoye uses this to good effect at the novel’s close, where Paulina is caught in precisely such a moment, suspended between the disappointments of her past and the fragile hope for a new future:
A pram, Paulina thought suddenly, would be a help. Baby out on the lawn while I am busy in the kitchen. Baby going out shopping with me, not left with a little nursemaid. In any case my employer doesn’t hold with little nursemaids and has quarreled with some of the other big ladies about it in the name of education for girls. A pram or a pushchair with a canopy for sunny days; it was not longer just a daydream, and in any case she would no longer find it easy to carry the weight. (149)
A final advantage to this technique is that it allows the narrator to range freely and intimately from the mind of one character to another. In Coming to Birth, the consciousness that dominates the opening pages is Martin’s, but by the fifth page the emphasis shifts to Paulina, whose consciousness dominates the rest of the book. Macgoye also uses the technique to insert a more subjective narrative voice that does not belong to any character, but rather seems to express a communal or even national consciousness, which is another way of linking the story of Paulina to the story of Kenya. An excellent example appears in the description of the aftermath of the murder of J. M. Kariuki, where the voice is not that of an objective narrator, but also not that of an identifiable individual:
And when the body was found, discreetly mutilated, you knew what the event was that for weeks you had been expecting, although the real event was still not known. The police officers went about their leave or their business outside the station without referring to it, the mortuary keeper who had a well-dressed corpse of appropriate size and weight and characteristics in his charge did not tumble to it. The airline clerks checking flights to Zambia did not tumble to it. The children playing in the streets did not tumble to it— children who were of the age to have been shot in Kano or Patel flats. . . . Even those terribly sharp children did not tumble to it. (107)
Macgoye’s prose finds its best moments when her poetic instincts shine through, which often happens in the aftermath of a crisis. In the passage above, for instance, Macgoye uses parallel syntax and repetition, understated allusion, and an angry but lyrical tone to express the national outrage in a particularly effective manner. Another outstanding example appears after young Martin Okeyo’s murder in the Kisumu incident. Macgoye describes Paulina looking from the wrinkled face of an old man to her own reflection and finally to her dead son’s features, in a passage that powerfully captures the grief and loss of the moment (84).
Coming to Birth won the Sinclair Prize the same year that Wole Soyinka became Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature. It was published in Britian in a new series from Virago Press that included major works of fiction by African women writers, such as Zoe Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and Manama Ba’s So Long a Letter. So it was natural that the novel, and its author, should come to the attention of the international literary review circuit, especially in Britain, Australia, and South Africa. In addition to praising its lyricism, many reviewers recognized the novel’s sense of authenticity—what one called “its scrupulous precision and its intensity of tone” (Hinds). Coming to Birth, suggested another, “is modern Kenya’s response to Out of Africa, ” meaning that its relevance and truthfulness contrast with Dinesen’s nostalgic fantasy representation of the country (Sinclair). A few critics objected to the novel’s overt political focus. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement found this aspect of the novel simply unconvincing (Maja-Pearce), while others considered it downright unartistic, including the critic who lamented that in the novel, “obstetrics . . . are soon absorbed by mere politics” (Hawtree). Not all critics would preface the word “politics” with the word “mere,” of course, and one even faulted Macgoye for being insufficiently politicized, her vision for Paulina too limited (Nri). Most, however, found the balance of personal and political to be effectively executed; the story of Paulina and the story of Kenya, Hinds suggested, “interweave: they do
not run parallel.” In the end, of course, it was precisely the political significance of Coming to Birth, combined with its artistry, that appealed to the judges for the Sinclair Prize.
By contrast, critical commentary by Kenyans seems to take the novel’s historical and political vision as an uncontroversial given.What these critics find far more noteworthy is its commentary on contemporary women’s issues. As Kibera points out, Macgoye’s female protagonists “present a kind of Kenyan ‘herstory’ in which private necessity or inclination mesh with widening public opportunities to afford women the means of controlling their lives” (“Adopted Motherlands” 312). Bukenya offers an interesting analysis in his contention that Coming to Birth invites a feminist deconstructive reading, if one examines the novel’s deployment of childbirth and of language. Viewing childbirth as production, the novel shows that women like Paulina can produce without a man. By creating her own home, Paulina stands Luo notions of correct social order on their head—^yet there remains the paradox that producing children also reproduces the social order (Bukenya, “Narrative”).
In contrast to some international reviewers, who find the feminist message of the novel to be undermined or at least muted by a conclusion that valorizes Paulina only through childbirth (and perhaps in contradiction to Macgoye’s own commitment to the importance of motherhood), both Masinjila and Kibera argue that despite Paulina’s longing for a child, her womanhood—her discovery of her potential and a sense of self—are not achieved through marriage or even motherhood. “Childlessness almost seems a necessary qualification for women desiring or even being capable of living a full life,” Kibera argues: “Paulina’s childlessness constitutes the very reason she must and can undertake her odyssey in search of an identity” (“Adopted Motherlands” 325).
In the end, it is Paulina’s ordinariness that makes her story so compelling for all readers, but especially, perhaps, for Kenyans. Again it is Kibera who puts it well: Paulina stands for all Kenyan women, and to the other births in the novel we must add this one:
Ranged behind Paulina is a cross-section of Kenyan women, differing in status, tribe, consciousness. But all, some hesitantly, others boldly, are seeking their way to a new consciousness, yearning to be participating, not peripheral, members of their communities. (“The Story of Paulina”
29)
Her coming to birth is also theirs.
J. Roger Kurtz
State University of New York, Brockport
May 2000