ENGLISH 8 – AFRO-ASIAN LITERATURE

Lesson 1: The Rain Came

Grace Ogot
– a Kenyan from the Luo ethnic group, is recognized as one of the foremost female authors of
English-language fiction from the African continent. After attending a 1962 African literature
conference at Makerere University, in neighboring Uganda, at which East African work was not even
on display, she was inspired to publish her writings. At that conference, Ogot read aloud her story
“The Year of Sacrifice,” which was subsequently published in Black Orpheus in 1963; this story was
later reworked and retitled “The Rain Came.”
Ogot first learned the traditional version of this tale, about a chief's daughter who a medicine
man claims must be sacrificed in order to bring rain, from her grandmother in evening
family storytelling sessions in the elder's hut. She felt an affinity with the daughter, Oganda—as well
as a fear that she, too, might someday be called upon to be
sacrificed. As she told Oladele Taiwo, who appraises her work in Female Novelists of Modern Africa, 
she resolved as a youth, “If one day I can write, I shall write the story of Oganda so that other people
can know she was sacrificed for the welfare of her people.” With its traditional setting and foundation
in oral history, its focus on the fate of a young woman in a patriarchal society, and its sustained life-
or-death ten- sion, “The Rain Came” is one of Ogot's most renowned stories. It can be found
in her collection Land without Thunder (1968) as well as the anthology Global Cultures: A Transnati
onal Short Fiction Reader (1994), edited by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.