Barely a month after the death of Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana, another great woman writer of Africa and Kenya, Micere Mugo, died on June 30, 2023.

About who she is, Mugo once said: I am Micee Githae Mugo. I am Micere, the one who troubles, the one who visits. The one whose name comes from Njeri, one of the nine daughters of Mumbi. So Micere is a version of Njeri. I am a woman. I am the mother of Mumbi and the late Njeri. I am a daughter of the Githae family and by former marriage, of the Mugo family.

I am a native of the Kirenyanga district in Kenya. I am a daughter of the Kenyan soil. I am a border crosser, defying geographical containment. I am Zimbabwean. I am African. I am Pan-African…I am a citizen of the world. I have no less than eight children named after me all over the world, and so I have been reborn many times…

Most of the people who paid tribute to Micere Mugo in the past week used the term “fearless” to describe her.
No wonder this renowned African playwright, poet, author, activist, and lecturer was presented with the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award by London’s Royal African Society. The award honours and pays tribute to those who have made a major contribution to African literature. Prof Micere Mugo is a long time advocate for social justice and human rights in Kenya and beyond.

Founded at Africa Writes in 2019, the Lifetime Achievement in African Literature Award is given to writers, academics, publishers and translators with careers spanning 20 years or more, in recognition of their life-long achievement within the field of African literature.
Receiving her award, Mugo said: I am touched by the spirit behind the award, and the urgency of honouring people while they are still alive.

Micere Githae Mugo born Madeleine Micere Githae in 1942 was a playwright, author, activist, instructor and poet from Kenya. In 1980 she became the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nairobi, making her the first woman in that university to become a dean. She was forced into exile in 1982 due to political activism. She then moved to teach at the University of Zimbabwe in 1982 and later the United States after she was stripped of her Kenyan citizenship by the government. This was despite being born in Baricho, Ndia constituency, in Kirinyanga County. At the time of her death she was professor of literature in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.

Micere Githae Mugo is an internationally known world speaker recognised for her literary works, essays and writings which she has used as a platform to advocate for social justice and human rights in Africa especially Kenya. She has been described by most of her colleagues as a teacher and a woman of virtue, integrity, principle, and benevolence. As an educator, she liked to challenge her students to think beyond what they learn in the books and what they hear. She has written various plays, her most well known having been jointly authored with Ngugi Wa Thiongo called The Trial of Dedan Kimathi.

Micere Mugo’s play with Ngugi Wa Thiongo, The trial of Dedan Kimathi mesmerises with characters from the Kenyan guerrilla war in the 1950’s waged by Mau Mau.
There is a memorable scene in which the colonial soldier searches a Kikuyu woman who is actually on her way to feed the Mau Mau guerrillas in the forest. The scene is well set: “A woman is seen walking across the stage. Between 30 and 40, she is mature, slightly built good looking with a youthful face…” She is a simple peasant woman who is beautiful, strong, and clever and undeterred.

The play is based on Dedan Kimathi (1920-1957). Belonging to the Gikuyu ethnic group, he was one of the most influential and charismatic leaders of the revolutionary struggle for independence. Kimathi was well educated and spoke Gikuyu, Kiswahili, and English fluently.
He taught at the Karunaini Independent School in Nyeri, before becoming a freedom fighter. His fellow soldiers gave Kimathi the titles of Field Marshal and Prime Minister.

In 1955, during the State of Emergency, the British, recognising his growing influence, offered a bounty for his capture. He was hunted down (October 1, 1956) by British officer Ian Henderson, followed by a “fake trial” where ironically, rather than accusing Kimathi of leading the armed revolution, he was charged with carrying a firearm. He was executed at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, the same prison where Ngugi was held without charge decades later.

Kimathi’s legacy was obscured for years thanks to the British propaganda (he was buried in an unmarked grave) until only recently when Kimathi was honoured as a significant architect of Kenya’s independence struggle.

Through her scholarship and poetry, you quickly see that Micere Githae Mugo is an avowed marxist, feminist and nationalist. Her position is informed by a nuanced understanding of African women in the context of history. Talking to Adeola James in 1986, she says, “The kind of writer that I have a lot of time and respect for is a writer like Alex La Guma. I admire the fact that his writing was not only talking about struggle, but he was part and parcel of the struggle in South Africa. I admire somebody like Ngugi Wa Thiongo, whose example and position in life has demonstrated his commitment to the struggle of the Kenyan people. This kind of writer I want to identify with.”

About women and feminism, Mugo says, “The African woman occupies the lowest rung of the ladder.” She clearly states that women in Africa are oppressed by both African patriarchy and colonialism. To her, they bear the double yoke. Mugo says that as feminists, we must know that not all women are oppressed because some women are part of the oppressive capitalist class because of their own historical positions and race. More specifically, Mugo says, “There is nothing wrong in singing about women but I think we must be careful to define and specify which women we are singing about…”

In her collection of poems called My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs, Micere Mugo comes across as a very conscious and deliberate poet. She is not lost in poesy for its emotional sake but she is involved in a very pointed mode of poetry that sees the feminist struggle as part of the human struggle.
Her poetry though feminist, identifies with the African landscape and culture and claims that positive African culture has always been intrinsically feminist. In her first poem, she writes feminist nationalist rhetoric:

The beautiful ones
were born
in the land of Me Katilili
the home of Koitalel arap Samoei
on the soil of Muthoni waKirima
the birthright of Kimathi wa Wachiuri.

Probably Micere Mugo’s most energetic and dazzling poem in this collection is called “To be a Feminist is.” Her critical message is that while the work of African feminists is about encouraging equity between men and women, feminism should transcend that and crave for the same sense of belonging that all the masses crave for in Africa regardless of their gender. For her, to be feminist “is to celebrate my birth as a girl, to ululate that my gender is female. It is to make contact with my being.” She struggles against patriarchy and western imperialism in the same breath:

“For me
to be feminist is
to denounce patriarchy
and the caging of women
it is
to wipe the fuzziness
of colonial hangovers
to uproot the weeds
of neo-colonial pestilence.

For me
to be feminist is
to hurl through the cannon
of my exploding
righteous fury
the cannibal
named capitalism
it is
to pronounce death sentence
on the ogre
named imperialism.”

Mugo’s feminism in the poem called “The woman’s poem” imagines women of the world standing together regardless of the boundaries of their countries so that together they “explode defrosted and refrigerated woman hood pestled and mortared over time.” It means that Mugo imagines a time when womanhood was a perfect place and that space was only defiled by the struggles to dominate other people and other lands.

Mugo’s feminism gives in to the desire to create united national and international vision of people in Africa and the Third World. She tends to think that feminism tends to have capitalist traits and would be ameliorated with a dose of Marxist-nationalist thought. You see this in poems like “We will rise and build a nation.” She thinks that the divisions between man and woman are a project that can easily be dealt with compared to the chasm between the rich and the poor or that between the North and the South:

“For me
to be feminist is
to have dialogue
with my father
and my brother
to invite their partnership
as fellow guerrillas
it is
to march with them
to the war torn zone
of Afrikana survival
it is
to jointly raise with them
the victory salute.”

In the preface to this collection, Mugo admits that she has had a continous dialogue with Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel The beautiful Ones are Not yet Born and agrees with him that “the neo colonial ruling class is made up of ugly creatures of prey, but insisting that even in the midst of all this ugliness, beautiful human beings have been born.”

This means that Mugo finds Armah pessimistic about the future of independent Africa. Mugo believes that the African personality can start to be reworked towards beauty once more because initially Africans are born amidst beautiful lands with people with beautiful relations. They must find regeneration from that idea. The beast in us has to be defeated so that the angel in us is born:

“The beautiful ones
were born
in the lowlands of despair
through valleys of elusive hope
across ridges of obstinate resistance
on the highlands of mounting optimism.”

Asked on what could be her advice to young writers, Mugo says: “The best advice I could give is that they should do it for the love of it; do it for the pure joy that writing brings. Writing, and even becoming a published writer, is not necessarily going to make you famous or make you money: in fact, you may very well die poor! You need to be in love with writing; let the impetus come from deep within you; feel it in your bones and in the very depths of your soul. Allow the message to possess you to the extent that you cannot hold it back. In the spirit of Haki Madhubuti’s poetry collection’s title, Don’t cry, scream!”

Former Chief Justice of Kenya, Willy Mutunga, said Micere’s revolutionary spirit will continue living. “Our Comrade, Sister, and Revolutionary, Professor Micere Githae Mugo has joined our ancestors some four hours ago. May she shine in the light of the ancestral abode as she shone on earth with revolutionary light. Her revolutionary spirit lives,” Justice Mutunga said.

President of Kenya, William Ruto, joined Kenyans in mourning Professor Micere Mugo. He said last Saturday that the late poet had many wonderful achievements that were inspirational. “I join the people of Kenya in mourning the passing of Prof Micere Mugo, a celebrated Kenyan scholar, teacher and activist as well as to celebrate her many wonderful achievements for which she is rightly recognised as an iconic trailblazer and inspirational pioneer.”
Some years ago, Micere Mugo herself disclosed that she was a two-time cancer survivor. For a long time, she battled cancer of the bone marrow. May her soul rest in peace.

Memory Chirere