Literature & Ideas
Landmark
Grace Ogot
1930 – 2015
One of the first published women writers in East Africa
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Kenya Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
Among the first women in East Africa to publish fiction in English, a nurse and broadcaster before that, and later a member of parliament and a minister.
Grace Emily Akinyi Ogot trained as a nurse in Uganda and England, worked as a midwife and then as a broadcaster for the BBC's East African service and the Voice of Kenya, and began publishing short stories in the early 1960s.
The Promised Land, published in 1966, was the first novel in English by an East African woman. Her stories — collected in Land Without Thunder and The Other Woman — draw directly on Luo oral narrative, on the spirits and the lake and the obligations between kin, and she wrote them without translating that world into terms a European reader would find comfortable. She also wrote in Dholuo, which almost nobody of her standing was doing.
She was one of very few women present at the meetings and conferences where East African literature was being defined in the 1960s, and her position in that room was contested at the time in ways her male contemporaries' was not.
She went into public life, serving as a member of parliament for Gem, as an assistant minister, and as a Kenyan delegate to the United Nations and to UNESCO. She was married to the historian Bethwell Ogot. She died in 2015.
The Promised Land, published in 1966, was the first novel in English by an East African woman. Her stories — collected in Land Without Thunder and The Other Woman — draw directly on Luo oral narrative, on the spirits and the lake and the obligations between kin, and she wrote them without translating that world into terms a European reader would find comfortable. She also wrote in Dholuo, which almost nobody of her standing was doing.
She was one of very few women present at the meetings and conferences where East African literature was being defined in the 1960s, and her position in that room was contested at the time in ways her male contemporaries' was not.
She went into public life, serving as a member of parliament for Gem, as an assistant minister, and as a Kenyan delegate to the United Nations and to UNESCO. She was married to the historian Bethwell Ogot. She died in 2015.
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