KIE Picks River and The Source as new KCSE set book

Out goes Prof Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between and in comes The River and the Source by Dr Margaret Ogola.
The Kenya Institute of Education has picked the late Ogola's family saga as the new Kenya Certificate for Secondary Education set book to be studied in schools for the next five years.
Also making a comeback to the secondary education curriculum is Prof Francis Imbuga's play, Betrayal in the City, which was a set book in the late 1980s.The play is a story about how a university student, Jasper Wendo, helped topple an African dictator in a bloodless coup following the killing of his brother, Jere.
This is the second time that the institute, which determines the national curriculum has used Dr Ogola's novel and the third that is using Prof Imbuga's play as set books. The first time that the novel was studied was between 1998 and 2001. The book, published by Focus Books in 1994, won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1995 and the Commonwealth Writers' (Africa Region) Best First Book prize the same year.
The author died of cancer in September, 2011, the same month as the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laurette and fellow countrywoman Wangari Maathai.
The school edition of Prof Ngugi's book was published by East African Educational Publishers five years ago. The original novel by the same title was published by Heinemman in 1965 under the African Writers Series pioneered by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's whose ground-breaking novel, Things Fall Apart, has also been a set book twice in the Kenyan curriculum, the latest being between 1988 and 1991. The school edition was re-edited to make it conform with changing cultural and education realities, including re-writing the sections on female circumcision, also commonly referred to as female genital mutilation.

Dr Ogola's novel is a story of three generations of women from the same family and traces their journeys through life at different stages of Kenya's history and how they confronted the challenges of their time, from lack of education to living with HIV. Dr Ogola was a pediatrician at the Kenyatta National Hospital. 
Also picked by KIE this year is Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle to be studied under "Plays from the rest of the world category". The school edition of the book is published by Target Publications. Wikipedia describes the play as "a parable about a peasant girl who rescues a baby and becomes a better mother than its natural parents".
Brecht, who was born in Germany in 1898, wrote play in 1944 while he was living in the US. He died in August 1956.
Target is publishing the play under license from Penguin Books. The publisher's swahili book, Kidagaa Kimemwozea, by Prof Ken Walibora, was also picked in the Kiswahili category. Prof Walibora teaches in the US.
Kidagaa Kimemwozea replaces Utengano (authored by Prof Said Ahmed and published by Longhorn) while Caucasian Chalk Circle replaces EAEP's An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen.
Betrayal in the City, meanwhile, replaces John Ruganda's Shreds of Tenderness, which was published by the Oxford University Press, Kenya.
The new books will be taught and examined alongside Witi Ihimaera's novel, The Whale Rider, which was selected last year. Prof Ngugi's book was to have been replaced at the same time but the decision was deferred until this year.
According to the New Zealand Book Council, Ihimaera, 68, is the first Maori writer to publish short stories and a novel. His book has been described as "a magical, mythical work about a young girl whose relationship with a whale ensures the salvation of her village.