Expatriate Kenyan poetry: Marjorie Phyllis Oludhe Macgoye and Stephen Derwent Partington

Abstract

English-language poetry in Kenya emerges and begins to develop in the 1970s, a decade later than the Ugandan one. It was at this time that the first truly brilliant examples of poetic work appeared – these are poems of Jared Angira and Micere Githae Mugo, who later became classics of Kenyan literature, whose work characterises the two main directions of Kenyan English-language poetry of the second half of the 20th century – critical-realistic and philosophical-mystical [Frolova: 75–90]. Studying the English-language poetry of Kenya draws attention to such an interesting phenomenon as the Kenyan poetry of expatriate writers. These are the creative work of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye and the Stephen Partington, whose creative work cannot be called typical for East African literature. Both Macgoye and Partington are ethnic British, who had moved, each at own time, to Kenya and devoted themselves to literature, and, what is most important, called Kenya their homeland and themselves, Kenyans. In their poems, one can feel sincere love for the land, which has become their home, sympathy for Africans who suffer social injustice, and huge efforts to understand African reality through the eyes of a European.