Theme
Grace's short story “The Green Leaves,” from her 1968 collection of short stories called Land without Thunder, was published by the East African Publishing House in Nairobi, Kenya. Many of the stories in this collection are loosely based on tales that her grandmother told her as a young girl growing up in rural western Kenya. More than simply folk tales, his short stories also reflect, through the traditional genre of the folk tale, a number of recent developments in Kenya’s history, in particular its colonial past and subsequent national independence movement, its changing gender roles, and its economic and urban growth. All these developments have contributed to Kenya’s passage from a traditional agrarian culture to a modern, urban society. Much of the social turmoil that attends such rapid change is revealed in her stories.
In the Introduction to their book Challenging Hierarchies: Issues and Themes in Colonial and Postcolonial African Literature, authors Leonard and Shaka have articulated five common features found in African literature. The list is as follows: using proverbs and aphorisms, depicting social customs, incorporating myths, relating politics to social and cultural issues, and writing concisely. These criteria are relevant while reading his work, as well as other writers’ work produced during the African wars for independence against European colonizers. The cultural disruptions due to British colonialism is a major theme of many works written by postcolonial African writers such as Achebe and Flora.
As a writer coming of age at the time of Kenyan independence in 1963, he turned to the conflicts that occurred between the Lao people and the colonialists as a source for her stories. In particular, the early stories of his, such as “The Green Leaves,” reveal the tenuous grasp that many indigenous cultures in Kenya had on their traditional ways of life with the takeover of Kenya’s political and economic infrastructure by British colonial forces. This is rendered in the scene in which tension flares between the clan leader and the white policeman over the “right” way to deal with robbery. The two different systems of justice are brought into conflict with the traditional way, that of murdering the thief, being seen as barbaric and outdated.
Not only does she reflect on the injustices of the colonial system in Kenya, but she also contributes to an aspect of literature that, for the most part, was overlooked by many African writers who at the time were predominantly male: the experiences of being a black African woman. Specifically, her stories often reveal the limitations of men and the inability of women to make a cultural impact due to being disempowered by patriarchy within both traditional and colonial societies. Thus, she brings a dual perspective to her works that centers on issues of oppression due to gender and complicated by nationality and colonialism.
Author Biography
Writer and politician Grace was born in 1930 in the Central Nyanza area of Kenya. Trained as a nurse while a young woman, she worked in Uganda and England before returning to Kenya. As a young and upcoming writer, she first entered the Kenyan literary scene in the early 1960s when she began to publish stories in the African journal Black Orpheus. Many of these stories, of which “The Green Leaves” is one, later became part of the collection Land of Thunder, published in 1968. Her 1966 novel, The Promised Land, was the first novel published by a woman by the influential East African Publishing House. Since then, she has published two other novels, The Graduate, in 1980, and The Strange Bride (1989), which was written in Lao, her native language, and translated into English. She has also published two other volumes of short stories in English.
Her most recent literary contributions have been written in her native language and have been received by the Lao people in Kenya with much enthusiasm. Several of these are historical novels that attempt to document the early history of her people, the Lao, and contribute to the growth of vernacular literatures produced by and for specific populations in Africa rather than for an international audience. Her books in Lao continue the storytelling heritage of its people and also provide a version of history that is Afrocentric rather than Eurocentric. As she claims in an interview with Don, “It is my hope that people can have proper respect for their own language and will learn it so that it will not be lost and swallowed up by English.
Besides her career as a writer, she has been a tutor, a midwife, a flight attendant, a journalist for the BBC, a community development officer, and most notably an assistant minister of the Kenyan government. She has taken an active interest in the cultural and political concerns of Kenya and was the founding chair of the Writer’s Association of Kenya.
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