Name Charity Waciuma | Role Writer | |
Charity Waciuma (born 1936) is a Kenyan writer, who wrote several novels for adolescents and an autobiographical novel, Daughter of Mumbi (1969). Her work draws on Kikuyu legends and storytelling traditions. In the 1960s Waciuma and Grace Ogot became the first Kenyan women writers to be published in English.
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Biography
Charity Waciuma grew up in pre-Independence Kenya, during the violent anti-colonial struggle between the Mau-Mau and British rulers. Her first name was chosen according to Kikuyu naming traditions to take it from among father's and mother's relatives, thus given her father's younger sister's name Wanjiku (the gossip). Her last name Waciuma means beads, or actuary a nickname from her great grandfather.
She became one of Kenya's pioneering writers for children with the publication in 1966 of her first book Mweru, the Ostrich Girl, which was followed by her other titles for young adults: The Golden Feather, Merry Making, and Who's Calling?. Her autobiographical work Daughter of Mumbi, published in 1969, tells of the tensions felt by an adolescent who was torn between her allegiance to traditional identities (Mumbi was the mythical female founder of the Kikuyu) and a father who sees his support for British colonial rule as an allegiance to modernity. The book is dedicated to Waciuma's father, who was killed during the Mau Mau Emergency.
Charity Waciuma wrote in English hesitantly on the controversial cultural tradition of female genital excision, while not all authors of African descent in the 1960s did. Her works were published before the decolonization of Kenya. Writing about the sensitive issue was neither after the fight for women’s rights has become prominent, nor the society acknowledged the physical and psychological result of that particular practice for affected women before the global attention.