Before there was JK Rowling and Harry Potter, there was Barbara Kimenye and Moses. Yes, the Moses series authored by Kimenye had a cult following amongst urban children like me, who grew up in Kenya in the 1980s. Her writings were a breath of fresh air that opened my eyes to African literature and African writers.
Prior to coming across her Moses series in standard four, most of what I read was about Western culture and authored by Westerners. I started off with the Ladybird series from basic titles that taught one to read, then graduated to titles like Little Red Riding Hood and The Gingerbread Man. Next in line were Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven and The Famous Five series.
Yet something was missing! These characters lived in a world alien to me. The closest I had been to their world was through our Sanyo black and white television. All that changed with Moses. For the first time I was reading fiction yet the characters were just like me and my neighbours.
They played familiar games, pulled familiar pranks and had teachers like our very own who would make us pay dearly for our misdemeanours. Later as I moved on to a boarding high school, I was struck by how accurate her depictions of life in an all-boys boarding school in Africa were.
While I did not ditch the ‘foreign’ works, it was the beginning of embracing African literature, an alternative that hitherto did not exist. I discovered and devoured the African Writers Series. I got intimate with the excellent work of African authors like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Okot p’Bitek, Alex la Guma and many more. I realised that Africans were intelligent enough to pen great narratives. What’s more, Africans had their own interesting tales far removed from the Western tales we had been made to believe to be the only worth reading.
It was therefore with great sadness that I learned of Kimenye’s passing via Facebook, a month after the fact. The post directed me to a link ( http://gu.com/p/3afq2) in The Guardian, a UK publication, which had a befitting obituary to her. It is said that you learn something new every day. Today I learned that Barbara Kimenye was the scion of a West Indies father and British mother and not the Ugandan I always assumed her to be. That she came to Africa as an adult and was so adept at vividly portraying the lives of African youth without having lived it is a mark of her genius. Barbara, I thank you for the wonderful stories you brought to our lives and the doors you opened to our African imagination.
