Grace Ogot

Grace Ogot (born May 15, 1930, Butere, near Kisumu, central Nyanza Region, Kenya—died March 18, 2015, Nairobi) was a Kenyan author of widely anthologized short stories and novels who also held a ministerial position in Kenya’s government.

One of the few well-known woman writers in Kenya, Ogot was the first woman to have fiction published by the East African Publishing House. Her stories—which appeared in European and African journals such as Black Orpheus and Transition and in collections such as Land Without Thunder (1968), The Other Woman (1976), and The Island of Tears (1980)—give an inside view of traditional Luo life and society and the conflict of traditional with colonial and modern cultures. Her novel The Promised Land (1966) tells of Luo pioneers in Tanzania and western Kenya.

A nurse by profession, she was educated at the Nursing Training Hospital in Uganda from 1949 to 1953. She served at the St. Thomas Hospital for Mothers and Babies in London and from 1958 to 1959 as a midwifery tutor and nursing sister at Maseno Hospital in Kenya. Her fiction drew upon her experience as a nurse; several of her works focus on the conflict between traditional and Western medicine. In 1959 she married the historian Bethwell Ogot of Kenya.

Grace Ogot was appointed to the National Assembly in Kenya in 1983 and elected to a vacant seat in 1985. She subsequently became assistant minister of culture and social services under Pres. Daniel arap Moi and was the only woman to hold a cabinet-level post at that time. She was a member of the National Assembly until 1992 and held her ministerial post until 1993.

Ogot also worked as a scriptwriter and an announcer for the British Broadcasting Corporation, as a headmistress, as a community development officer in Kisumu, and as an Air India public relations officer. She appeared on Voice of Kenya radio and television and was a columnist in View Point in the East African Standard.