| dc.description.abstract | This project emerges from deep admiration for the writings of many dedicated feminist
playwrights, prose writers, poets and even essayists who are not only attuned to their own
community's aspirations and social plight but also to those of women world wide.
Ogola's presentation of gender issues in the Luo society in The River and the Source and
I Swear by Apollo is her unique way of ordering experience and bringing about change in
society. In the two novels, she presents the most pressing issues of many men and women
in Africa and the Luo community in particular. Writers like Ogola have employed their
literary gifts not only to inspire and educate, but also to entertain their audience.
The women's reaction to the society's gender roles is another reason for their rejection of
the prescribed roles. They see the society's distribution of gender roles as oppressive to
them and since the very society does not offer forum to discuss this, these women use
symbolism, satire and irony to bring out futility of the society's failure to bring out these
anomalies and its effects empower both men and "Yomen.
The objective of this study IS to examine how the male and female characters are
portrayed in Ogola's works. The study also seeks to analyze the roles and values of
characters in Ogola's texts. This study is predicated on the hypothesis that Ogola's male
characters are deliberately diminished while the female character is over elevated.
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Three theories are applied in this study: sociological, stylistics and feminist literary
theory. Ogola deals with society, how society views men and women and what changes
the author would like the society to embrace. The manner in which she presents her
characters is worth looking at and that is why stylistics as a theory is part of our study.
This study is library based and the internet is browsed and any criticism on Ogola's
works relevant to our topic of discussion is considered.
In the first chapter we look into Ogola's background, her artistic vision with a view of
understanding and appreciating her uniqueness of portraying different gender and in the
light of this and what other African writers could project.
Chapter two of this work looks at the way Ogola portrays her characters and what society
demands of these characters. It further explores what constitutes of the institutions of the
Luo traditional community. We not only show the relationship between Ogola's prose
and the Luo conception of men and women but we also examine her characterization in
relation to what she would love the society to be.like. We note that Ogola invokes Luo
. traditional beliefs to present her vision and even demonstrates that some of these beliefs
are redundant.
The third chapter focuses on the mode of presentation of Ogola's works. It is vital to
know which vehicle Ogola uses to present the society's characters and how she really
wants them to be. In this project we demonstrate how workable gender equality can be.
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It is through style that Ogola is able to advance a vision whereby change in society is
enhanced through heroic characters. The most significant conclusion drawn from this
study is that Ogola's place in the literary history of Kenya is firmly entrenched. She
writes at a time when people and especially women echo the wind of change and to be
specific equality of gender and a need for women writers to be firm contributors to the
change. Her unwavering faith in people's ability to rise above unfair social norms, above
gender lines makes her work valuable contribution not only to Kenyan or African
literature but world literature. | en |
