In Memoriam: Margaret Ogola

• Post by: TNF Editor
• March 31, 2019

Two Speeches by Margaret Ogola (1958-2011) On June 12 of this year, Google honored the late Dr. Margaret Ogola with a “Google doodle” on the Kenyan Google homepage, on what would have been her 61st birthday. Margaret Ogola is best known for her award-winning novel, The River and the Source, which follows the life of four generations of Kenyan women. She was also the Medical Director of Cottolengo Hospice for HIV & Aids orphans, for which she was given the Familias Award for Humanitarian Service at the World Congress of Families II in Geneva, Switzerland (1999). Ogola was a devout Catholic, a prominent conservative, a wife, and the mother of four children. In recognition of her devotion to the natural family, we are pleased to reprint the speech she gave in Geneva, followed by her speech at World Congress of Families I in Prague (1997). Sex and Politics Address to the World Congress of Families II Geneva, Switzerland, 1999 From the dawn of consciousness, human cultures have attempted to harness and direct the potent power of transmitting life in various ways.  Most cultures clearly stipulated not only the person or persons with whom one could have relations but the very manner in which the sexual act may be done. Primitive peoples living close to nature mostly believed in a triple human presence in the world, for example: The living dead—including dead ancestors who lived in the spirit world, but who retained an interest and a certain amount of power over the living.The living—whose duty it was to keep alive the memory of the dead and to appease their spirits, as well as to transmit life to the unborn.The unborn—whose well-being depended on the behavior of the living; thus a curse earned by the living could affect their children, leading to misery, suffering, and death. Therefore, for example, one could not marry a relative—meaning any clan member or even a member of the maternal clan (among some tribes). To have sexual inter