Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye: Mother Africa, born in Southampton

World-class artists and writers occupy a terrain where class-consciousness trumps ethnicity. It is a place where the elites who live in gated neighbourhoods cannot go.

As early as the mid-l950s, the seeds of Kenya’s plutocratic postcolonial state were being sown, providing the framework, context and life-long concern of Kenya’s foremost public intellectual: Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye.

The prolific outpouring of poems, histories, novels and newspaper commentaries over decades from this Christian Socialist attested to an outstanding woman of steely courage and boundless energy perpetually at war with conventional wisdom. Yet despite the homilies pouring into the press after her death, revealing Marjorie to be a national figure, the essence of the woman remains concealed.

Who exactly was the enigma called Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye?

Marjorie was born in Southampton, the southern English port city known for as a wellspring of working-class consciousness and for its ethnic diversity, where in 1912 the ill-fated Titanic embarked on its maiden voyage.

Arriving in l954 in Kenya, Marjorie was to experience at first hand again a collision with another unseen iceberg. At the height of the Emergency, she found a Nairobi plunged in a violent colonial conflict, a divided city full of angry citizens struggling against an unjust regime. Her own church and sponsor had chosen to side with the people.

Marjorie had already learned to navigate rough waters, having lost her mother at an early age and lived through World War II. Armed with a master’s degree and being an omnivorous reader, her moral compass was provided by the world’s most enlightened philosophers/writers.

From Saint Augustine to Thomas Carlisle to George Orwell to Sembene Ousmane to Ben Okri, all were chosen as fellow travellers. Their thought-worlds transcribed in historical essays, novels and poems were beacons of understanding lighting Marjorie’s own voyage.

AFRICAN SOCIALISM

The Dar School progressives, especially the egalitarian philosophy of Julius Nyerere himself, resonated with Marjorie’s own vision of an alternative socialist universe.

The Tanzanian president’s African Socialism became a template for Marjorie’s own thought. Cuba was the nation Marjorie often cited as the best place to live.

Hard-wired progressive academics David Rubadiri, Walter Rodney, Issa Shivji and John Lonsdale too were helpful in clearing the political landscape of Kenya’s Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 and other brain-clutter. Sustainable development and deconstructionism were never to be part of Marjorie’s repertoire.

On the other hand, Marjorie’s life-long immersion in the Christian faith also gave shape and context to her entire life’s work. From Richard Thomas King, her beloved father and chief role model, she received the gift of a rigorous Christian education. From birth she was presented with a complete thought-world grounded in love, compassion and integrity.

It was her father’s working class values that most probably led her to script General Mathenge, a work the late poet and her great friend, Jonathan Kariara considered the most important poem on the Mau Mau movement.

Her own experience of Christian socialist activism led also to her penning the life of mid-19th century Church Missionary Society luminary Johannes Rebmann. Only recently published, the work, entitled Rebmann, is a masterpiece of historical fiction.

INVISIBLE IN PLAIN SIGHT

Marjorie’s home as carefully arranged was a magical place. Two institutions in one, it was a holy sanctuary and community nerve centre. Minus the ritualistic Sunday morning recitations, Marjorie ministered to a steady stream of the underserved and the needy.

Sparsely furnished and in an easily accessible neighbourhood available to all, the doors of her inviting, inclusive, non-denominational church were ever open to society’s so-called pariahs — the mentally-unstable, disempowered, unwanted individuals hidden among us.

When many good citizens were oblivious to the pain of Aids victims, drug addicts, sex workers and the homeless, Marjorie was a pillar of strength. Abandoned wives, sex workers past their sell-by date and even home-wreckers who ate nails for breakfast found a patient, non-judgmental listener in Pastor Marjorie. With her soft demeanour, unassuming modesty and engaging intellect, she made her flock into better people than their former selves.

Her home also served as a meeting place for an unending stream of journalists, newscasters, interviewers, budding poets and student acolytes. Fellow missionaries and numerous friends and grandchildren from Gem, from England and elsewhere also found their way to her inviting domain.

The devotion of her extended family in her long life was Marjorie’s most compelling success and lay at the centre of her creativity. Her three sons and one daughter — actually four sons including Zadok— adored her and in turn she spent her entire life looking after their welfare.

Here the Nairobi storyteller par excellence was provided with an amazing cast of characters too. Straight out of Sholem Alechem, best-known for his Fiddler on the Roof, Francis, her second-born son, named for Francis of Assisi, is a talented musician, teacher and choirmaster.

A picture of her first son George in serious discussion with (then Senator) Barack Obama presided over Marjorie’s sitting room while her last-born son, the peripatetic Lawrence balance between the two worlds of Kenya and Britain.

Eccentric Zadok is the pampered adopted son, an enabled polio victim for whom the Oludhes bought callipers. He went on to become an esteemed primary school headmaster in Nyanza and fathered 10 children. Daughter Phyllis adds an English accent to the fable.

Mau Mau veteran and trade unionist Maina Macharia has been Marjorie’s link to Kenya’s history. Freedom fighter, Bildad Kaggia (in person), Harry Thuku (his home) and the former Lumumba Institute (stage-set of Nairobi’s 1960s left-leaning politicos) were just some of the significant political figures and places in her life.

Marjorie played her part well. She leaves a long legacy of sparkling written works that will endure. She provides hope; that many other intelligent people exist in Kenya who are also selfless in their unconditional love for others and who care deeply about the welfare of all of us.