Women and the gendering of space in narratives of Kenya : a reading of Grace Ogot, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o' and Rebeka Njau

The condition of women and the social space they occupy have been two critical areas of interest in postcolonial debates and narratives. This thesis explores selected fictional, historical and autobiographical narratives of Kenya to assess the role of patriarchy on resource control - through colonial authorities, missionaries and cultural institutions - and how that affects women. The thesis considers the period from that of heightened anti-colonial struggle to recently won independence - periods that overlap and entangle with one another as the power structures shaped by British colonialism were replaced with those mired in neo-colonial practices. Combining this historical approach with an engagement with debates on space (Krishnan, Lefebvre, Soja) and the theoretical postulations of entanglement (Bakara, Mbembe, Nuttall,) the thesis examines the condition of women and their level of participation in social, political, and economic spaces. Furthermore, the thesis draws attention to how both domestic (private) and public spaces serve as locales where the exploitation, oppression and subjugation of women were perpetuated. The fictional narratives on which the thesis focuses include two collections of short stories by Grace Ogot: Land Without Thunder (1968) and The Other Woman (1976); Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o's novels: The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977) and Matigari (1987); and Rebeka Njau's novel, Ripples in the Pool (1975). The thesis draws attention to the ways in which Njau and Ogot's fiction benefits from their writing from a vantage point as Kenyan women. It explores their presentation of female characters which assert their agency and are assigned central roles, alongside being given voices to decry their situation and enable them to reject the victimhood society throws at them. Putting Ngũgĩ's novels into dialogue with the works of these two female contemporaries then enables new readings of Ngũgĩ's work that cast light on the ways in which he reinscribes narratives of anti-colonial nationalism that are always already inflected by patriarchy. My reading of Ngũgĩ's presentation of his female characters points to how he decentralises their roles, effaces their agency and uses them as symbols. This is the first sustained study to put these three significant voices, who all attended the influential Conference of African Writers of English Expression in Makerere in 1962, into dialogue and emphasises the value of studying the narratives of Kenya across genders. To build on its historicising approach and to explore how different forms of narrative reveal the space and condition of women in colonial and early post-independence Kenya, the thesis engages with historical debates with specific reference to Jomo Kenyatta (first Kenyan president), alongside Tabitha Kanogo and Cora Ann Presley. Whilst complementing analyses of fictional and historical debates, that of autobiography reveals another facet to Kenyan women's oppression and subjugation in pre- and early post-independence Kenya. The final chapter of the thesis explores autobiographical narratives, focusing on Grace Ogot's Days of My Life (2012), Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o's Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (2010) and Rebeka Njau's Mirrors of My Life: A Memoir (2019) and argues for their significant intervention as a form of literary activism.