Barbara Kimenye is remembered as one of East Africa’s most prolific writers, having authored over 50 children’s books whose popularity peaked in the 1980s. She is most well-known for the ‘Moses’ series published between 1968 and 1987, which chronicled the life and adventures of Moses, a schoolboy in a boy’s institution in Uganda. Today her books have sold over a million copies in the East African region. Born Barbara Clarke Holdsworth in London in 1929, she had a way with words from a very young age, even writing her own newspaper at the age of 11.

She began her education at Keighley Girls’ Grammar School before moving to London. There she studied nursing and later found work at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. She met her husband, Bill Kimenye, during this period and moved with him to his home town, Bukoba in Tanzania, in the mid-1950s where she lived until the end of their marriage.

In 1956, she moved to Uganda where she had friends. While in Uganda, she was invited by Edward Mutesa II, who was the Kabaka at the time, to work in the Buganda government as a private secretary. She also worked as a feature writer for the Uganda Argus newspaper. When Milton Obote took over as president of Uganda, Kimenye fled to Kenya with her two children and found work as a writer for the Daily Nation in 1965. In 1973 she moved to The East African Standard and wrote a column titled ‘Mainly for Women’, which covered social issues affecting women. It was during this period that she wrote her first book, Kalasanda, which was about life in a Ugandan village. She wrote Kalasanda Revisited in 1966.

In 1976 she moved back to England for a short while and worked for Brent Council as a race relations adviser, while continuing to write. She decided to return to Uganda in 1986 and spent three years there immersed in full-time writing. Thereafter, she set her sights on relocating to Kenya, and the next ten years of her life were spent writing at least one book each year. Kimenye moved back to London in 1998 and was engaged in community affairs until her death in August 2012, aged 82. Apart from the landmark ‘Moses’ series comprising 15 books that turned her into a literary icon, Kimenye published several other books such as The Runaways, Beauty Queen, The Money Game and Gemstone Affair. Her last book was Prettyboy, Beware, which highlighted social issues that affect young people such as prostitution, poverty and dropping out of school Despite being born in the United Kingdom to a British mother and a Haïtian father, Kimenye considered herself Ugandan, claiming that the details of her early life had no bearing on her career as a writer.

Her experiences in Uganda in- formed much of her writing in terms of setting and characters. Her stories gained immense popularity because African children found them relatable; they came as a welcome break from the British books offered as their habitual literary diet, such as those authored by Enid Blyton. Kimenye had an extensive knowledge of the workings of traditional African society and exposed issues within the society with humour. She is also admired for being able to recreate the experiences of a Ugandan teenager without having grown up there. Her books were popular in schools and were recommended by educators in the region for students in late primary school level and high school level. This was due to Kimenye’s captivating storytelling techniques and the quality of the grammar and other linguistic devices in her stories.

Kimenye’s legacy lives on in her books and in the memory of all those whose childhoods were shaped by her stories.