Barbara kimenye autobiography examples

Barbara Kimenye (née Clarke Holdsworth), described by Nancy J. Schmidt as “one of East Africa’s most prolific children’s writers”, was born on 19 December 1929 in Halifax, Britain, to a West Indian doctor father and an English Catholic mother.

Kimenye attended Keighley Girls’ Grammar School, and when she was older, moved to London to train as a nurse. It was in London that she met the son of a Bukoba chief in then Tanganyika, William Kimenye, who would later become her husband.

The married couple moved to Bukoba in the mid-1950s.

The marriage of Barbara and William Kimenye did not last long: the couple separated and Barbara, pregnant with her second child, decided to relocate with her toddler son Christopher to Kampala, Uganda, where she had many friends – who now occupied high political positions – from her student days in London.

Kimenye worked several different jobs during her time in Kampala: she was employed as private secretary in the government