THE PRESENT MOMENT
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
Afterword by Valerie Kibera
Historical Context by Jean Hay
THE WOMEN WRITING AFRICA SERIES
WOMEN WRITING AFRICA
A Project of The Feminist Press at The City University of New York Funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation
Women Writing Africa is a project of cultural reconstruction that aims to restore African women’s voices to the public sphere. Through the collection of written and oral narratives to be published in six regional anthologies, the project will document the history of self-conscious literary expression by African women throughout the continent. In bringing together women’s voices, Women Writing Africa will illuminate for a broad public the neglected history and culture of African women, who have shaped and been shaped by their families, societies, and nations.
The Women Writing Africa Series, which supports the publication of individual books, is part of the Women Writing Africa project.
THE WOMEN WRITING AFRICA SERIES
ACROSS BOUNDARIES
The Journey of a South African Woman Leader
A Memoir by Mamphela Ramphele
AND THEY DIDN’T DIE
A Novel by Lauretta Ngcobo
CHANGES
A Love Story
A Novel by Ama Ata Aidoo
COMING TO BIRTH
A Novel by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
DAVID’S STORY
A Novel by Zoë Wicomb
HAREM YEARS
The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879–1924
by Huda Shaarawi
Translated and introduced by Margot Badran
NO SWEETNESS HERE
And Other Stories
by Ama Ata Aidoo
TEACHING AFRICAN LITERATURES IN A GLOBAL LITERARY ECONOMY
Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, nos. 3 & 4 (fall/winter 1998)
Edited by Tuzyline Jita Allan
YOU CAN’T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN
A Novel by Zoë Wicomb
ZULU WOMAN
The Life Story of Christina Sibiya
by Rebecca Hourwich Reyher
Published by The Feminist Press
at The City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
First ebook edition, 2015
First Feminist Press edition, 2000
Originally published in 1987 by East African Educational
Publishers/Heinemann Kenya, Nairobi.
Copyright © 1987 by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
Afterword copyright © 2000 by Valerie Kibera
Historical Context copyright © 2000 by Jean Hay
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical essays or reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Macgoye, Marjorie Oludhe.
The present moment / Marjorie Oludhe ; afterword by Valerie Kibera ; historical context by Jean Hay.
p. cm. — (Women writing Africa series)
eISBN: 978-1-55861-896-1 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-55861-248-8 (paperback)
1. Women—Kenya—Fiction. 2. Old age homes—Fiction. 3. Aged women—Fiction. 4. Kenya—Fiction.
I. Title. II. Series.
PR9381.9.M19P74 2000
This publication is made possible, in part, by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in support of The Feminist Press’s Women Writing Africa Series, and by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, with the support and encouragement of Sonia Simon-Cummings. Publication of this book is supported by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. The Feminist Press would also like to thank Joanne Markell and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity in supporting this book.
The digitization of this project is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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