Old People Should Give Some Space To The Youths To Mourn Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
She died on Tuesday, 1st of December 2015, the same festive season around which Dorris Lessing and Tabley Rocherreau died in 2013, December and just like August, is usually fateful month for the people of Kenya and Africa in general. However, by Saturday 5th December 2015 five days had passed since the death of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye without the voice of any Kenyan or African youths being heard in the Mourning of this parent of the African literature.
It was only the elderly, above the cinquagenerian age bracket and mostly from the political class and conservative literary circles that had their voices dominating the mourning stage, both in the print (Saturday Standard and Saturday Nation in Kenya) and the electronic media as well as the social media.
This is a vice of socially exclusion of the youths that was conceived and hatched in the political and economic cultural environment but it is now being infiltrated into mourning culture with the final effects of slowly suffocating the emotional rights of the African youths.
Let it be understood, but in a snarl, that the African gerontocracy is also a defenseless psychological subject of the popularity syndrome, they are emotionally propelled to mourn loud in the funeral of the great deaths not as a way of empathy and sympathy with the bereaved but as an opportunity for cheap political popularity, intellectual showing-off and (needless) self-preservation.
It has not only happened in this passing-on this white daughter of Africa, but it has been a senseless culture of the African elderlies in the 21st century, they are very current in rarely giving space to the young to mourn their dead parents. It was also a case when Nadine Gordimer died in July, 2017 and also when Chinua Achebe, Francis Imbuga Mazisi Kunene, Grace Ogot and Sembene Ousmane died; the mourning voices were all political and academic elderlies, groaning loudly in all types of the media of the day in the full dint of the economic mettle of the mourners.
This is in pure contravention of the earlier Africa civilizations that gave their youths an opportunity to mourn in case of death of the grandmother or grandfather, even if they mourned without feeling grieve but it was informal training to them so that they could mourn finely come a future eventuality of the same nature.
The Kenyan and African youths must be given a leeway by the elders to Mourn Macgoye, because of very many reasons; Marjorie is a mentor to the youths, it is the youths that have studied her books; Coming to birth and many others as well as stage performing her poems; Song of Nyarloga, Freedom Song and others; It is the youth that derive a lot of reasons and lessons from her exemplary lifestyle of achieving a noble station in her life of being called a white Luo and a white African, the lessons so significant to the modern youth in the compulsory social trap and cultural quagmire of living in the globalized multi-ethinic,multi-racial and multi-gendered society;
It is the Nairobi youths, I included that benefited greatly from the intellectual generosity of Majorie Oludhe Macgoye, especially palpable in her bookshop culture where she allowed those of us that did have money to buy a book to walk in, go behind the bookshop and read any book of our choice, including Frantz Fanon’s the Wretched of the Earth as well Black Skin and White Masks not forgetting the Facts of Blackness;
It is the youths that enjoyed in the afternoon literature classes with a thrill on reading Marjorie’s joke in her essays on language about the language dilemma of the one translator in Nairobi who translated the Australian spoken English that, to dayi is the dayi of Sainti Marka into a Kiswahili version that kufa ni kifi cha matakatifu mariko (meaning; to die is the death of saint Mark) instead of the intended meaning which was supposed to be; today is the day of saint mark! Please listen, you elders of Kenya in particular and Africa in general, it is the youths that have loosed a great deal in the death of Marjorie.
Alexander Khamala Opicho