1. Ngugi, East Africa’s best-known writer, produced the first Kenyan novel in English, Weep Not, Child (1964). Ogot, who has combined writing with a career in politics, became Kenya’s first woman novelist with The Promised Land (1966). The Ugandan Okot wrote the major poem Song ofLawino (1966), a work that dramatically impacted East African literature.
2. In addition to the published sources cited, the biographical information presented here draws on my own conversations and correspondence with Macgoye. It is also informed by an unpublished autobiography, read with her permission, which Macgoye intends for posthumous publication.
3. As its name suggests, this building housed the administrative offices for the Church Missionary Society in Kenya and many tenants. It stands on a central location on what is now Moi Avenue, directly across from the former site of the U.S. Embassy, which was destroyed by a bomb blast in August 1998.
4. A section of Song of Nyarloka, titled “For Miriam,” celebrates her mother-in-law’s ability to meet social change with grace and integrity.
5. In 1967, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda established a set of agreements that eliminated trade and labor barriers among the countries, essentially creating an East African common market. Known as the East African Community, this arrangement included a common airline, railway, postal service, and other such cooperative efforts. The chaos in Uganda created by Idi Amin effectively dismantled the organization, which was officially disbanded in 1977.
6. The connection between Okot and Macgoye is additionally strong because the Acholi, Okot’s tribe, and the Luo, the tribe into which Macgoye
had married, are historically and culturally related, with similar Nilotic languages and customs. In fact, Macgoye reports that Okot would refer to her as “my elder sister,” an important title in the Nilotic tradition because it is the older sister whose dowry enables the younger brother to marry in his turn. (She was three years his senior.) But like siblings, they had their differences. Macgoye wrote the poem “Letter to a Friend” in a pique, in response to public comments by Okot that offended her. She intended it for Okot alone, leaving a copy for him on his desk. The poem offers a pointed challenge, but despite this (according to Macgoye, he admitted that the poem hit home), Okot liked “Letter to a Friend” well enough to insist that it be published in the East African literary journal Ghala. It also appears in both of her poetry collections.
7. In addition to the enigmatic name Mau Mau, fighters referred to themselves as the Land and Freedom Army. While Mau Mau was defeated militarily, it played an important catalytic role in the achievement of independence. The experience was a divisive one for many Kenyans, especially Kikuyu, and the official discourse about Mau Mau in the postindependence era has been a complicated one, as many of the political elite in independent Kenya were loyalists rather than rebels. The reality is that few active participants in Mau Mau have benefited from the fruits of independence, which has led to a contentious struggle over the portrayal of the movement in the country’s literary and historical texts. For historical analyses, see Kershaw and also Maloba, and for a discussion of the ideological issues at stake in the literary representations of Mau Mau, see Maughan-Brown’s study.
8. Macgoye describes the ubiquitous barbed wire as one of her first impressions of Nairobi when she arrived in 1954, and Paulina soon learns of it as well (8). The first Kenyan edition of Coming to Birth features a prominent strand of barbed wire in its cover design.
9. Daniel arap Moi went on to become Kenya’s longest-serving member of Parliament, and his tenure as president (beginning in 1978) was to last longer than Kenyatta’s. Ronald Ngala was a cabinet member when he died in an automobile accident in 1971.
10. Kariuki’s disappearance stiU looms large in the Kenyan consciousness.
In March 2000, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his disappearance, his family and political pressure groups made national headlines with their efforts to reopen an investigation into his death. The government, lauding Kariuki as a lost patriot, gave lip service to this effort, although no new information or convictions resulted.
11. While he had always been an outspoken activist, it was Ngugi’s involvement in peasant literacy and drama, specifically the production of the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (/ Will Marry When I Want) , that was the immediate catalyst for his arrest. He was released a year later, following an international outcry. For useful sources on Ngugi, Kenya’s best- known writer, see Sicherman, Cantalupo, and Ogude.
12. The street urchin, based on characters like Che, Johnny, and Mohammed Ali, has become something of a stock figure in Kenyan literature of urban life. For examples, see Meja and Maina in Meja Mwangi’s Kill Me Quick or Eddy Onyango in Thomas Akare’s The Slums.
13. India’s Emergency, unlike Kenya’s, was a postcolonial phenomenon, referring to the martial law imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975. In Rushdie’s novel, it is a defining moment for the new nation; like the Kisumu shootings in Macgoye’s novel, it terminates a period of national growth and optimism.
14. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar argue that images of imprisonment and of enclosure in nineteenth-century British and American literature remain mere images—“metaphysical and metaphorical” in writing by men, but represent something deeper—“social and actual”—in writing by women(86). I am suggesting that the same observation applies to the common use of birth imagery in postcolonial literature.
15. Macgoye tells of her anger at the suggestion, bandied about in the academic community, that the primary reason for raising children is to offer more bodies for the liberation struggle. The poem “For Adeola—Militant,” which appears in the collection Song of Nyarloka, is addressed to Adeola James, the Guyanese academic and feminist who had articulated this idea. The poem begins, “Certainly not.”
16. The use of free indirect discourse has a long history in English- language literature. Major writers who are typically cited in examples of its use include Jane Austen, Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf While critical attention to this narrative technique is long-standing and well developed in the French and German critical traditions (which refer to it with the respective terms style indirect litre and erlebte Rede), it is a more recent subject of discussion in the Anglo-American tradition. Even the term itself is still under discussion: “free indirect discourse” is a direct translation from the French, but Ann Banfield prefers the term “represented speech and thought” while Dorrit Cohn calls it “narrated monologue.”
17. For other reviews of Coming to Birth in the international press, see Adolph, Bryce, Forshaw, Hough, Khan, MacLeod, Neville, Pullinger, Sen, Walters, and Winstanley.
18. For reviews and commentary in the Kenyan press, see Karmali, Kibera, Gethiga Gacheru, Margaretta wa Gacheru, Ikonya, and Soper.