Gone is the gem of Gem, full of Grace

I was panting and sweltering in the lakeside heat last Wednesday afternoon when the phone call came. Grace Ogot was gone to the “promised land”.

The grand graceful Mukyala  gone, in the middle of this fierce drought? Nnyabo, have you decided to turn yourself into Oganda, the maid, and wade into the depths of the Lake for your people? Then, surely, the rain will come.

For now, however, the rain is of our tears, of which there are torrents and torrents all over East Africa.

Mukyala is “lady” and nnyabo is “madam” in Luganda, in which Grace Ogot always spoke to me when we met.

I always remarked that Grace’s Luganda was considerably better than mine, but what is so surprising about that? She was a thorough Ugandan and Kampalan long before I came out of the bush to seek an education.

But the latest I had thought of Grace Ogot was when I was telling you recently about my Luo relatives and my good intentions to acquire a smattering of their language.

Assessment

Where was she? I hadn’t heard of her or from her in a long, long time. Apparently she was, sadly, preparing for the “last safari to Pagak”.

Mourning is never an easy process, and I must ask the reader to pardon my subjective ramblings.

As a literary practitioner writing about one of the most iconic literary figures of East Africa, I am supposed to give a coherent assessment of Grace Ogot’s work and its significance and relevance to our times and climes.

But, having had the privilege of interacting, however fleetingly, with this remarkable woman, I find it impossible to restrict my comments to just her creative writings.

Grace Ogot was many different things, all  seamlessly blended together in her unique career and personality.

It would be almost disrespectful to her to isolate one strand, whether the medical, the educational, the literary, the political, the journalistic or the “womanist”, and dwell on that to the exclusion of the others.

In any case, Grace Ogot’s literary works were immersed in her life’s experiences and struggles. The heart-warming and often heart-wrenching narratives in her short stories and novels are grounded in her and her generation’s heroic struggle to define themselves as the “transition” people between tradition and modernity, colonialism and uhuru, and ethnicism and nationalism.

Unlike us, their successors, Grace Ogot and her generation were more interested in practical activism  than in theoretical speculation. As a woman, for example, Grace Emily Akinyi did not agonise about her patriarchal society’s reducing her to a “nyadhiang” (cattle-beckoner). She just went to Ng’iya Girls, Butere Girls, Makerere’s Mulago, London’s Saint Thomas’s and performed, brilliantly.

As a writer, she did not have to pontificate about what language to write in. When she had a story to tell, she told it, in English or in Dholuo, as the narrative muse directed her. Nor did she, like Lo Liyong, lament about literary barrenness in East Africa.

When all the continent’s greats were vociferating about definitions of African literature, at the historical Makerere Conference in 1962, Grace walked in and read one of her short stories. A practical way to tell the intellectuals that you can only justifiably theorise about what you have experienced.

Similarly, when political responsibility called in Gem, she did not sit down to work out the probabilities and likelihoods of a woman being elected to Parliament in the Kenyan politics of the 1980s. She waded in, and the rest is history.

In London, when the BBC approached her to broadcast to East Africa for them, she did not hold back, citing excuses like her lack of journalistic training or her commitments at her hospital job. An opportunity had opened up for her to talk to her people from an international platform and she seized it.

This, for me, is the most memorable trait of Grace Ogot’s character. She was a woman of action, and even her creative writing was part of that action. Those ignoramuses that ridicule and heckle writers as feckless dreamers should look upon Grace Emily Akinyi Ogot and — think again!

The most attractive motif  in Grace Ogot’s writing, for me, is her exploration of the endless clash between duty and personal relationships.

Whether in hospital wards, along the corridors of academic departments or on international tours, this contest between the yearnings of the heart and the relentless call of what has to be done is never far from the core of Grace Ogot’s narrative.

The most striking story in her 1976 collection, The Other Woman, for example, is the one about a surgeon who has just performed a heart transplant operation on a female patient. He has to be with his patient overnight during the crucial recovery hours, much to the annoyance of his wife.

The wife’s competition here, the other woman, is obviously not the female patient, but the professional obligations of the surgeon.

Deeper insight into this conflict may be found in the author’s patently personal piece, “Taj Mahal”, in her 1980 collection, Island of Tears. Here, in an internal monologue, the tourist character, sitting on the steps of the Indian monument to love, experiences an exceptionally deep sense of tranquility, entirely at peace with everything in her life, including “history, my rival”.

Well, what can we say? Bethwell Allan Ogot, our now-bereaved mwalimu, is a historian. From all that we know, Professor Ogot has all along been a pillar of strength to our Mama. But it is inevitable that at one point or another, the lady might have felt that the division of attention between family and academic pursuits was not quite “balanced”.

This is a challenge faced in different forms by the families of all professionals, and the fact that the Ogots have, to the end, remained such an exemplary couple, is a Taj Mahal in its own right, the stuff of which love stories are made.

Oriti, Grace Emily Akinyi Ogot. Erokamano, and rest in peace. Weeraba, in Luganda, your other language.