Mama Grace Onyango and a lakeside feminist revolution

Last week, I hit Kisumu City with a bang. It was my first physical outing from the Kampala suburbs in eight months, and I spent Thursday and Friday enjoying what I best love doing at the lake – loving and praising my sisters, and gently urging them to lead a feminist revolution.

The occasion and the setting were perfect and the opportunity too good to be missed by a rogue like me.

The Kisumu County and city authorities are renovating and revitalising the former Kisumu Social Centre, now renamed the Mama Grace Onyango Social Centre, reinstating its status as the focal venue for cultural, social and intellectual activities that it had been in its heyday.

Our day, Thursday November 12, was a feast of colourful activities, energetically curated by veteran poet, folklorist, thespian and all-round cultural activist, Obat Akatch Masira, the newly-appointed Director of the Mama Grace Onyango Social Centre.

The Centre Governing Board, headed by chairman Elijah Adul Onyango, could not have made a better choice than Masira, a genuine galley slave of the arts.

I still call Masira a “young man”.

That is what he was when I first met him at a drama workshop I was facilitating for him and his evergreen Misango Arts Ensemble, in Kisumu, about 30 years ago, if I remember rightly.

Cultural exploits

Since then, we have interacted at numerous drama and other cultural activities across the country, and I keep following his cultural exploits all over East Africa and overseas.

The two things that have always struck me about him are his unflagging energy and his unshakeable belief in the value of performance and the arts in general. These, I think, are the qualities that keep him permanently young.

More seriously, however, cultural workers like Obat Masira deserve our admiration because in Kenya, as in most African countries, the arts simply do not pay.

 In other words, it is very difficult to earn a decent living from creative work, like writing or the visual and performing arts.

Our people like and enjoy music, books, plays, films, dances, textiles, paintings and sculptures, but they simply do not know how or why they should pay for them.

We may plead poverty, the challenge of the choice between buying a novel or a packet of unga for the family, and all these well-known dilemmas.

I, however, think the underlying problem is that we have not been properly educated about the value of the arts and the need to keep artists alive and comfortable as they create their inspiring works for us.

Public budgets

This lack of education and concern is obvious not only at the individual level but also in public policies.

What percentage of our public budgets, for example, is allocated to culture, literature and the arts in our counties and countries?

The lack of financial and other material support for creative workers forces most of our artists either to desert their calling altogether or to seek other employment to sustain themselves, devoting only a small portion of time to their art.

Those, like Masira, who stick full-time to the artistic path bravely accept the prospect of lifelong hardship and poverty in this rabidly material world.

But the centre had invited me and my fellow academics, Profs Francis Owino Rew and Humphrey Jeremiah Ojwang, to relaunch the intellectual debates that had been a main feature of the centre in the past.

My colleagues and I were understandably humbled.

We were following in the footsteps of the likes of Okot p’Bitek, David Rubadiri and even Chinua Achebe, who had at one time or another dispensed words of wisdom from the rostrum from which we were now pontificating.

My co-presenters, however, (both my former students at KU), had a demonstrable right to be there, both being closely related to the great city professionally and by upbringing.

Indeed, they did not disappoint.

Prof Rew, who moderated our debate, laid emphasis on the need for knowledge on and respect for our city’s history and the people, like Mama Grace Onyango, who have significantly contributed to that history.

Memorabilia and monuments

Prof Rew commended the Kisumu authorities for renaming the social centre in honour of Mama Onyango Grace and suggested it should be a major repository for memorabilia and monuments to all major players in Kisumu and Nyanza history.

My friend, “Japuonj” Humphrey Jeremiah Ojwang, the literary and linguistic anthropologist from UoN, vividly recalled his young days and growing up in Kisumu, and later working there. Congratulating the City on honouring the Hon. Mama Grace Onyango, Kisumu’s first African mayor and Kenya’s first woman Member of Parliament and Deputy Speaker, Ojwang revealed to the audience his ongoing work in what he calls African feminist epistemology, the woman’s specific way of knowing the world and dealing with it.

The don relates this to the practical ways in which women’s knowledge systems contribute to food security in our grassroots communities.

This connected with my own modest contribution to the discourse, which comprised three main ingredients.

Colossal success

The first was the acknowledgement of the colossal success of our Kenyan mothers, like Grace Onyango, Phoebe Asiyo, Grace Ogot, Jael Mbogo, Pamela Mboya, Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye and many others, in the face of the odds stacked against them in a male-dominated society.

Secondly, the emancipation and empowerment of our women still faces serious hurdles, yet our sisters and daughters continue to achieve tremendous feats.

Good examples are seen in the Lakeland literary successes of the works of Margaret Ogolla, Bole Asenath Odaga, Alakie Mboya and the new generation of Jennifer Owuor, Lupita Nyong’o and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.

This led me to the final appeal that our sisters, especially in Lakeland, should lead us into the brave new world of genuine gender equity, in which women and men should work hand in hand for a truly cultured and progressive society. This is what I envisage for my grandchildren, Anyango and Okinyi.

Did I tell you I am a “nyawana” (fellow parent or in-law) near the Lake?

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