Rebeka Njau
Rebeka Njau (born 1932) is a Kenyan educator, writer and textile artist.[1]
Biography
She was born in Kanyariri in the Kiambu district,[2] attended high school in Nairobi and studied education at Makerere University College in Uganda.[1] She was a founder of Nairobi Girls Secondary School and served as headmistress from 1965 to 1966. Her one act play The Scar (1965), which condemns female genital mutilation,[3] was first published in the journal Transition in 1963[4] and is considered to be the first play written by a Kenyan woman. Her play In the Round was performed in 1964 and was banned by the Ugandan government.[3]
Her first novel Alone with the Fig Tree was rewritten as Ripples in the Pool (1975), which was awarded the East Africa Writing Committee Prize.[3] Njau also writes under the name Marina Gashe.[5]
She married the Tanzanian artist Elimo Njau but the couple later separated.[5]
Selected works
- Ripples in the Pool (1975)
- The Hypocrite and other stories, short stories (1977)
- Kenyan Women Heroes and their Mystical Power, historical (1984)
- The Sacred Seed, novel (2003)
References
- ^ a b Killam, G D (2004). Literature of Africa. p. 181. ISBN 0313319014.
- ^ Head, Dominic (2006). The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. pp. 807–08. ISBN 0521831792.
- ^ a b c Gikandi, Simon; Mwangi, Evan (2013). The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945. pp. 263–64. ISBN 0231500645.
- ^ Jones, Wilma L (1995). Twenty Contemporary African Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliography.
- ^ a b Evan Mwangi (February 16, 2013). "Author to bare it all in memoir coming soon". Daily Nation.
Further reading
- Alex Wanjala, "Orality in Rebecca Njau's The Sacred Seed", The Global South, 5:2 (2011), 93-106.
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