Download e-book for iPad: Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya by Kenda Mutongi

Marriage Family

By Kenda Mutongi

ISBN-10: 0226554201

ISBN-13: 9780226554204

ISBN-10: 0226554228

ISBN-13: 9780226554228

Growing up within the Maragoli group in Kenya, Kenda Mutongi encountered a complicated contradiction. whereas the younger academics at her village university railed opposed to colonialism, a lot of her elders, together with her widowed mom, praised their former British masters. during this relocating publication, Mutongi explores how either the demanding situations and contradictions of colonial rule and the frustrations and screw ups of independence formed the lives of Maragoli widows and their advanced family members with one another, their households, and the bigger group.             in the course of the 20th century and into the twenty-first, charges of widowhood were remarkably excessive in Kenya. but regardless of their numbers, widows and their households exist on the margins of society, and their lives act as a barometer for the cruel realities of rural Kenya. Mutongi right here argues that widows live on by way of publicly airing their social, monetary, and political difficulties, their “worries of the heart.” at first geared toward the boys of their neighborhood, after which their colonial rulers, this approach replaced after independence as widows more and more invoked the language of citizenship to call for their rights from the hot leaders of Kenya—leaders whose failure to fulfill the desires of standard voters has resulted in deep disenchantment and changed Kenyans’ view in their colonial previous. An leading edge combination of ethnography and old examine, Worries of the Heart is a poignant narrative wealthy with insights into postcolonial Africa.
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Extra info for Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya

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Born in rural Illinois and educated at Urbana High School, the Reeses had been to Africa before; they had taught Zulu children in Durban between 1899 and 1902, and they had also preached among African gold miners in Johannesburg—both offered rare and valuable experience. 27 feeble little lads looking for food 29 Treating the sick in Maragoli (from Friends Collection and Archives, Earlham College) Their stay in Kaimosi was short, for they immediately identified Maragoli, with its dense population, as a particularly attractive area to seek converts.

And yet even as they struggled to cure their ailing bodies, the local people were beseeching them for remedies—Bwana, nataka dawa (Master, give me medicine). The ulcers, wounds, malaria, smallpox, and snakebites that pestered the locals cried out for immediate attention, and the three men were overwhelmed by these requests, for they had neither the medicines nor the training necessary to treat the sick. ”24 Now that the injured and ailing could be directed to the care of Mr. Blackburn, Hole, Chilson, and Hotchkiss could start working to establish their industrial training school, which, they hoped, would teach those who came to the mission station how to saw timber, make bricks, and build square houses (as opposed to the villagers’ round huts).

In those days there was a lot of hunger, you know. ” As he continued, he studied me to see if I believed him. “They were strange, and she was afraid that they would kill my father and eat him up. ” In due course Kefa let me know that his grandmother had worried that his father, as the firstborn son, would not take care of her as expected. He looked up and appealed to me directly: “If he died, who would protect her? Who would provide for her? ” “You are right, you are indeed correct that way. But the stories of whites as cannibals were too real, too scary.

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Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya by Kenda Mutongi


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