• Google has celebrated her birthday through her award-winning novel, The River and The Source.
• She was born on June 12 in 1958, and went to Alliance Girls High School.
Google has joined Kenyans in celebrating the 60th birthday of the late Kenyan novelist Margaret Ogola who died on September 12, 2011.
Ogola was an author, paediatrician, and a human rights advocate.
In addition to her writing career, she served as a paediatrician and the medical director of Cottolengo Hospice, a hospice for HIV and AIDS orphans.
She was born on June 12 in 1958 and went to Alliance Girls High School.
Ogola later joined the University of Nairobi where she earned her first degree, Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery in 1984.
After graduation, she worked as a medical officer at Kenyatta National Hospital. In 1990, she earned her Master of Medicine in Paediatrics at the University of Nairobi.
She also took a Post Graduate Diploma on Planning and Management of Development Projects at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa in 2004.
Google has celebrated her birthday through her award-winning novel, The River and The Source.
The novel focuses on the lives of several generations of Kenyan women, starting in a rural 19th-century village and tracing the descendants of a matriarch named Akoko all the way to modern-day Nairobi.
Along the way, the novel addresses political and cultural changes as well as the AIDS crisis, always highlighting the role of women in African society.
After being rejected by various publishers, Ogola’s novel went on to win the 1995 Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature and the 1995 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.
Ogola said, “The inspiration for this book came from my mother, who handed down to me the wisdom and lives of her own mother and grandmother.”
Highlighting the courage of African women in their everyday lives, Ogola’s book became required reading for many Kenyan secondary school students.
Ogola completed on her final book titled Mandate of the people before her death.
"This strength and support that is found in the African family is the most important part of our culture and should be preserved and nurtured at all costs.” Words of the late Margaret Ogola.