By Ogova Ondego
Published March 29, 2021
Kiunyu is born and is being raised by his mother, a prostitute, in a Nairobi slum when she dies and the late mother’s colleague and friend takes him in till 11 when he is relocated to the rural village of his late mother. To cut the long story short, Kiunyu completes school, lands a civil service job, ends up in jail and then teams up with a childhood friend to eke a living the only way urban African ‘hustlers’ know.
This story line, from Son of Woman, a Kenyan popular literature novel by Charles Henry Mangua, almost saw me pulled out of a school that had lent me the book to read during my very first mid term break at home. So angry was my cousin that he threatened to ask my my dad back in western Kenya to pull me out of the national school I had joined in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, after completing primary school on the account of, he said, exposing boys with impressionable minds to pornography.
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But had I been pulled out of that great secondary school that was once reserved for European boys during the colonial days, I probably wouldn’t have been here to pay this tribute to writer Charles Mangua who died on March 20, 2021.
Born to Henry Ndegwa and Epharus Wangui of Mukurwe-ini in Nyeri on the slopes of Mount Kenya in 1939, Mangua was among the very first Africans to start writing nine years after Kenya’s independence from the British. He concentrated on the plight of people who migrated to towns from rural areas in the quest for better prospects in life but ended up with dashed hopes.
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Son of Woman, Mangua’s debut novel published in 1971, not only marked what critics and scholars describe as ‘the beginning of popular literature in Kenya’, but went on to sell more than 10 000 copies in its first six months and the publisher, Spear Books, was forced to reprint the crime fiction novel six times to meet the ever growing demand from readers. The book is reported to have outsold any other literature previously published not just in Kenya but the entire East African region comprising Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
What still baffles many is what made the novel that was considered by many as using graphic, cynical, satirical, impolite but humorous and engaging language so popular; was it the fact that it had been written by an African or was it due to the various disappointing urban social issues that resonated with Kenyans after Africans had gained self rule to determine their own destiny but had failed to meet the expectations of many?
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Apart from taking offence at his language, literature theoreticians fault Mangua on his treatment of female characters in Son of Woman and Son of Woman in Mombasa. Critics say female characters are misrepresented, stereotyped and demeaned as subservient beings who employ their femininity, sexuality and charm to seduce and manipulate their male counterparts to enable them get ahead.
Mangua, whose writing of Son of Woman is said to have influenced many other writers in Kenya, also wrote A Tail in the Mouth (1972), Son of Woman in Mombasa (1986), Kanina and I (1994), and Kenyatta’s jiggers (2000).
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Mangua was father of seven grown up children who are scattered across the world; they are Koinange Mangua in Kenya, Henry Ndegwa in USA, Lucy Wanjiru in England, Eric Mbari in Mauritius, Andie Mutahi Mangua in France and Njoori Mangua (Germany). Fred Wachira, who was based in Australia, is deceased.
Charles Henry Mangua (1939 – 2021), the social commentator, critic and novelist who worked for African Development Bank in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, while he wrote and who was largely misunderstood by many, was buried at the Lang’ata Cemetery in the city where his Son of Woman is set on March 25, 2021.
