The Present Moment by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

Author:Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye [Macgoye, Marjorie Oludhe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558618961
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wairimu resumed her memories.

‘There was another strike in Kisumu in 1947. It didn’t amount to much, and I wasn’t inspired to spend more hard-earned shillings going off to see more water at the other end of Kenya. In any case those days we believed you Luo people ate only fish, and that would not have suited me at all. But it was a sign that things were happening. In July the Colonial Secretary from England – Creech-Jones, that was: they change them faster than rika leaders – came to Nyeri and told us he had been sent by the king to listen to our complaints: he did not stay around long enough to do much listening, but we hoped that our leaders had explained all the points.

‘I went because I hated to miss anything new, not because I wanted to draw attention to myself. But I was over forty then, though not worn down as my mother had seemed at that age. I could read well and write a little. I knew a lot of Swahili, had been to Nairobi a number of times, had been employed for more than twenty-five years. Very cautiously the foreman approached me, and in 1949 I became a full member of the chama – no need to go into that – and a recruiter. I was not, in those sour days, thinking about the rainbow and the golden haze. But, as they say, one thing leads to another.

‘I needed a break occasionally between tickets, since there was not much for me to go home for. I’d been to Nairobi once in the late thirties and found it spread out into sets of labour lines: it was hard to keep the excitement of the centre in the landhies and quarters without much money or glamour about them. There were hardly any horse- or bullock-carts left, though someone had an idea to get rickshaws going again in competition with motor traffic. It didn’t last long. There seemed fewer Somalis – in fact, of course, there were more inland Africans, about half of them Kikuyu and a quarter Kavirondo. There were nearly ten men to each woman, though some of the workers’ wives came for part of each year, after harvest. And though I had once thought myself so sophisticated, I was at a loss now among these women, not knowing where to cross the crowded street or how to arrange my hair in the neat new patterns. I went again on my way back from Mombasa, this time studying carefully the cut of dresses and the suitable occasions for wearing shoes. In 1950, when the city was having its Golden Jubilee, I thought I would go again. Our top leaders were keeping away: ordinary people were afraid that the whole of Kiambu would be swallowed up inside the city boundary, and so they boycotted the celebrations. But I was only an outsider, after all. What harm could there be if I saw the sights and

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