Reflections
Micere Mugo and the Struggle for Politics
14 min read.Mwalimu Micere Mugo’s intellectual positions were profoundly political. Personalising Mwalimu’s story removes from it the historical and the political context, yet the point of memorialising those who have left us is to enter them in the annals of history.
I wanted to wait until the rites to honour her life were completed before writing about Mwalimu Micere Mugo, because I wanted to respect those who knew her intimately. I didn’t. I met Mwalimu only three times, once at Riara University, another time at University of Nairobi, the third time at the memorial of her daughter Njeri Kui. All were public events, so I’m almost sure she barely remembered shaking my hand, or me reintroducing myself or being reintroduced to her, especially when she was grieving her daughter.
So, I do not grieve Micere Mugo as I would a close friend. Instead, I grieve her as my milestone. Since the day I heard her speak in person, almost ten years ago, at the University of Nairobi, she has been my intellectual north star. My guiding light. When I heard her weave her ideas with her poetry, and engage the audience in her performance, I knew that that is what I wanted to be; not necessarily an oraturist like her, but an intellectual who weaves humanity into her thought, relations and politics. And then being in literature, many of my colleagues were taught by her and were friends with her. So her influence on me is probably what she aspired for, which is to influence humanity through humanity.
I waited for a different time to publicly grieve Micere Mugo because in Kenya, connections like mine to her, based on influence and ideas, are not respected. That’s because Kenya hates ideas, for the simple reason that ideas point to the world beyond the self. And that’s power. I learned to articulate that reality only recently. As I struggled through the hypocritical hijack of the decolonial narrative, and the neoliberal takeover of our education system that culminated in CBC, and as I gained insights through my discussions on my Maisha Kazini channel, I slowly understood that the hostility I faced was due to an entrenched hatred of thinking in Kenya. Thinking, to paraphrase Lewis Gordon’s idea of disciplinary decadence, is to transcend the boundaries of the material and of the imaginary. That means that thinking is necessarily power, because as Gordon says, power is the ability to influence the world beyond oneself.
So the fact that I was so deeply influenced by Micere Mugo is evidence that she was a thinker, which is evidence of her power.
That is why Mwalimu Micere is such a threat. And not her alone. In Kenya, anyone who dares to think is a threat. Her literary son, Binyavanga Wainaina, who organised the Kwani? 10th Anniversary that invited Micere Mugo, once wrote that in Kenya, “We have learned that ideas are dangerous. To innovate is to threaten power.” So during this period of mourning for Mwalimu, I decided that maybe I should maintain my peace, since I did not personally know her that well.
But right from the beginning, I suspected that my position was a problem.
You see, mourning someone in intimate terms, especially when one is not a close relative or friend of the recently transitioned, can sometimes go awry. It can personalise their story too much that we withdraw them from the historical and the political context, yet the point of memorialising those who have left us is to enter them in the annals of history. From what I could see, the memorialising of Mwalimu was getting a little too personalised for my comfort.
The fact that I was so deeply influenced by Micere Mugo is evidence that she was a thinker, which is evidence of her power.
I began to notice this with the media focus on Micere Mugo’s bio-graphy immediately after the sad news broke that she had left us. I’ve deliberately separated “bio” as a prefix, because the media reports were largely on what she did, where she was born, to whom she was born, where she went to school, whom she married and divorced, the children she had, and how she died. Yes, how she died. She had battled cancer for over two decades, had triumphed once and battled the second round for almost two decades. But somehow, the media made cancer the hero of her story, to the extent that one journalist penned a dirge to bone cancer rather than to her. Another media house reported that she had “succumbed to cancer” when actually she had bravely fought it. And had lived for a full eighty years. As a cancer survivor myself, I know the unnecessary drama that circles around cancer patients and never leads to an actual conversation about the stress, the environmental factors that increase the likelihood of cancer, and worse, the extremely high cost of treatment. In fact, Kenya has a deliberate policy of turning cancer treatment into a commercial product called “medical tourism”, meaning that the government’s focus is only on treating the rich.
I seem to be digressing from Mwalimu, but I’m not, because my point still remains that in Kenya, our words and ideas are not allowed to point beyond ourselves. They are channelled to dead ends of pity where we can no longer think about society and what to do about society. And that’s what the media was doing to Mwalimu Micere.
Personalisation can also be sympathetic, but even when that happens, it is no less depoliticising. Worse, it is more difficult to critique. That’s the liberal depoliticization. In Mwalimu Micere’s case, it came in the form of praising Mwalimu Micere for her political resistance when, as the Kenyan capitalist story goes, she didn’t need to. This line was echoed by the veteran novelist and academic Austin Bukenya. Bukenya points to Micere’s fairly privileged background and relatives in high places, and then says that “she could have lived a life of glamour, affluence and tranquillity in her beloved Kenya”. In a group I’m in, people reacted to an extensive obituary that revealed Micere’s rejection of an offer for land from the government by saying what a nice person she was to have sacrificed so much.
Indangasi is not providing facts; he is telling a story based on the very weak idea of “sacrifice” as an anchor of legitimacy.
This thinking is more insidious than the media one, because it is difficult to critique without appearing nasty. However, the problem remains that it fails to understand that resistance to power is often a political decision; not a moral one. Morality is individual; it is about being good. But political decision comes from a consciousness of how one’s individual actions and destiny are connected to those of other people. If anyone knew this, it was Micere Mugo. Her struggle for Utu, or Ubuntu, that sees individuals as inextricably tied to society and vice versa, were the themes of her life, her poetry, essays and performance. Micere Mugo’s intellectual positions were therefore profoundly political. If she was simply moral, or a good person, she might have followed the trajectory that Bukenya says was available to her.
This point is extremely important, because right now, the bulk of Kenya’s resistance to abuse of power is stuck in capitalist moralism embodied in, especially, the liberal academia and civil society. It so happens that at the same time I was concerned about the depoliticization of Micere Mugo, Okoiti Omtatah, himself also a thespian, was talking on different forums about the heist of the Kenyan public through fictitious debt. Omtatah’s message has been profoundly political and philosophical. He has talked about how the Kenyan public mind needs to be revived through political education, so that Kenyans understand the relationship between how we vote and our financial mess. However, it has been frustrating to watch the interviewers miss the political nature of his message. Instead, the conversation goes the way that Austin Bukenya’s tribute to Micere Mugo went: we marvel at the fact that Omtatah did not cave in to withdrawing the legal challenge to the Finance Act in exchange for a hefty sum of money. We praise him as an individual for resisting corruption, when Omtatah is asking us to move our gaze from him to the social issues he is pointing at.
At the heart of this fascination with personal sacrifice for the country is the fundamentally Euro-Christian message embodied in a Jesus who gave up his riches in glory to save sinful creatures of humanity. I profoundly disagree with this reading of Jesus because, like for Mwalimu Micere and Omtatah, it depoliticises Jesus. Jesus was born in the Roman Empire and his message challenged the political establishment at the time, especially the comprador elite in the form of the Pharisees. He was subjected to a political execution, rather than moral stoning, after a corrupt judicial process. That political aspect of Jesus’s story has been dumbed down, especially by the evangelical and charismatic denominations that preach a no-pain Christianity. That no-pain Christianity has suppressed the value of mourning even in Christian worship itself, because mourning interferes with the always-happy faith that they preach.
We praise him as an individual for resisting corruption, when Omtatah is asking us to move our gaze from him to the social issues he is pointing at.
The result is that this charismatic Christianity presents a Jesus who is suicidal and whom Christians must emulate by ignoring the political nature of our suffering. This message was projected by the Kenyan media when Dr Mogusu, a young doctor, died from Covid after working on contract, without receiving his pay, and without resources to pay for admission to ICU when he became sick. The Nation played down the political issues surrounding Dr Mogusu’s death with the headline “Young doctor who gave us his life,” next to a picture of a smiling Mogusu. When Mogusu’s colleagues tried to use his plight to resist the cynicism of the government in its treatment of health workers, they were lectured by the then Cabinet Secretary for Health, Mutahi Kagwe, on how the government expected doctors to mourn their colleague properly – which in essence meant not mentioning the problems of the healthcare system that caused Mogusu’s death.
I have argued elsewhere that this action of Kagwe demonstrates that mourning is a political act that empire seeks to contain by offering us the concept of “sacrifice”. With this concept, empire tells us that victims of its injustice “gave their lives”, or suffered “when they didn’t need to”. However, political resistance despite knowing the risk of persecution does not necessarily mean that you are looking for the worst to happen to you. It means you are living in an unjust society where you cannot do ordinary nice things like healing the sick and teaching the poor without being crucified. In such a context, people need to change the society’s political structure. However, to divert the people from arriving at that conclusion, empire praises its victims for giving up their lives, the way Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for giving up his life for justice. Similarly, to go on about Mwalimu Micere’s “sacrifice” without an accompanying analysis of the politics to which her actions and ideas pointed is a form of depoliticization.
The worst part of depoliticization, however well intended, is that it leaves the ground fallow for a major attack on moral grounds. That attack would come, not surprisingly, from Henry Indangasi, professor emeritus of the famous Department of Literature of the University of Nairobi. Unlike me who was losing patience with the moralist tributes to Mwalimu Micere, Indangasi was profoundly irked, but for different reasons. While I was concerned that the fixation on Micere’s biography was too much, Indangasi felt that that fixation still wasn’t enough, and sought to push it to the extreme by arguing that the sacrifices which Mwalimu Micere is credited for were self-serving, if not immoral.
The political project of Indangasi’s tirade against Mwalimu Micere is simple, and more than that, is explicitly announced. His beef with her, in his words, is that she saw literature as “almost exclusively about politics”. What should concern us here is Indangasi’s definition of politics. In Indangasi’s view, politics is something that can be separated and isolated from other facets of life. In other words, politics is individual, not social, and we can only relate socially through institutions; not with each other through relationships or as a collective.
To go on about Mwalimu Micere’s “sacrifice” without an accompanying analysis of the politics to which her actions and ideas pointed is a form of depoliticization.
This individualist concept of politics leads Indangasi to accuse Mwalimu Micere of failing to “draw the line that separates the personal from the political, or if you like, the private from the public”. But here, the don contradicts his definition of politics as an individual phenomenon that can be isolated, because by contrasting politics to the personal and the private, he is essentially saying that politics is necessarily social and public.
Thus we witness here a convoluted discussion of what politics means. At one point, Indangasi sees politics as individual and therefore requiring divorce from thinking, at another point he sees politics as public and requiring distinction from the private. In the end, Indangasi has no choice but to reveal what his agenda really is, which is to assert institutions of the (colonial) state as the sole site of power, which in this case, would be the University of Nairobi and its Literature Department. For him, the only politics available to Kenyans is through accessing institutions, like that of academia. That is why he concludes that literature is an “institution”, which essentially implies that human beings can only be literary if they do so through academia. And we know the results of such politics. We have heard new literary voices dismissed as “literary gangsters” or Kenyan writers being blasted for producing substandard, rather than “world class” literature. Or worse, graduate students at the University of Nairobi’s Literature Department being failed because they didn’t bow to the dictates of either the gurus of stylistics or of oral literature.
In other words, Indangasi is promoting a particular political ideology while pretending not to do so, and ranting about those thinkers who are not so pretentious as to present themselves as apolitical. His ideology is, in fact, what Mwalimu Micere explicitly disagreed with. Mwalimu Micere belonged to the persuasion of Africana existential philosophy in which, to borrow the words of the philosopher Lewis Gordon, politics is about ordinary life. How we love, how we eat, how we die and how we are mourned, which are the subjects of literature, are profoundly political. In fact, Gordon argues, oppression is the imposition of extraordinary circumstances on ordinary life. From this perspective, politics is not individual views of power, as Indangasi suggests, but the collective discussion of, and decisions about, what power should do.
In the end, Indangasi has no choice but to reveal what his agenda really is, which is to assert institutions of the (colonial) state as the sole site of power.
Mwalimu Micere beautifully articulated this view of politics through the concept of Utu or Ubuntu, where who we are and who others are is inextricably linked. One memorable articulation of this is found in a preface to her poetry collection My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs, where she wrote: “A few have even asked me whether I ever write poetry on love and other ‘non-political’ themes. My response has been that within the context of exploitation and powerlessness experienced by the majority in Africa, the so-called Third World and the rest of this planet called earth, love is a very political theme. I say, for the poor, there is no private space to even engage in love making!”
It is this view of politics that has led me to use Micere Mugo’s poems in my theory and political classes, rather than the typical literature classes where we would do the stylistic analysis that Indangasi is renowned for. In very simple language, Mwalimu’s poems articulate a political philosophy where love, solidarity and collective action are the foundation of healthy politics. I insist on students reading her poems aloud in my classes, especially because that very act of audience participation and refrain in Mwalimu Micere’s poems is a political act that challenges the individualisation and institutionalisation of politics and knowledge.
Which brings me back to the lesson I learned from my failed advocacy against CBC, which is that Kenya is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-political, and it does so through controlling speech and ideas, so that speech and ideas never transcend the individual. Mwalimu Micere devoted her life to fighting against this idiocy, and she was not alone. Binyavanga did it. Yvonne Owuor does it through her fiction and numerous essays on the imagination. Parsalelo Kantai wrote about it in his essay “The Redykyulass Generation”. ES Atieno Odhiambo called us to reflect on it in his famous article on the “ideology of order”, which he opens with reflections on how Jomo Kenyatta and his government shut down thinking through ideas of development and through state violence. Keguro Macharia has also pointed at it through his essay on the particular vernacular. Even Taban lo Liyong was pointing to it in the 1960s, but his message has been drowned in the hurt feelings of Kenyan academia following his statement wondering if East Africa was a literary desert. These are just some of the other Kenyans, many of them on social media, who are getting tired of the suffocation of ideas and the imagination as a way of suppressing politics from below in Kenya.
Indangasi is promoting a politics of anti-politics that functions by denying people’s political agency and reducing them to their biography.
The weapon in this war on politics is the argument that the academy should be insulated from politics, or the idea that discussing the plight of the poor and the oppressed is the monopoly of Marxism. This Cold War framework was imposed on Kenya through the university from the ’60s to ’80s, when Kenyan higher education policy and the teaching of social sciences was driven by British government and American philanthropic foundations. Aspects of this intellectual engineering have been discussed by scholars like Mwenda Kithinji who looks at the political intrigues behind the establishment of the University of East Africa. So while Indangasi may have “caught feelings”, as we say in Kenya, about Mwalimu Micere’s “spurious dichotomy between the anti-imperialist and pro-imperialist intellectuals in Kenya”, the reality is that imperial interests in Kenyan education remain a big concern, as I learned when studying the ideology behind CBC.
Indangasi is promoting a politics of anti-politics that functions by denying people’s political agency and reducing them to their biography. And we are witnessing that extension of anti-politics in the supporting arguments about the need for two sides of the issue, or the need to accept criticism, as if Indangasi was simply criticising Mwalimu Micere. Such propaganda is related to the Kenyan ideology that depicts disagreeing with someone as an attack on who they are rather than an engagement with what they are saying, which again sends us back to the bio-politics which Indangasi was promoting. It is also based on a Kenyan fascination with performance of thinking as opposed to actual thinking, where Kenyans judge thinking not by the ideas and the conversation but by whether it meets superficial criteria of having two positions at polar opposites. For such people, critique is for the sake of being contrary rather than for advancing a conversation.
Another strategy employed by supporters of the essay entails casting doubt as to whether Micere Mugo made sacrifices for her country or not. Apart from this logic being based on the frivolous, imperial and Euro-Christian idea of self-sacrifice and falling on one’s sword as the ultimate expression of love for one’s country, it forces us into the awkward and toxic position of using Moi’s persecution of his political critics to judge a person’s ideas or legacy. That manipulation into using oppression as the foundation of justice is absurd and unacceptable.
Yet others, including Nation journalists, are telling us that those who disagree with Indangasi should respond to the facts he has provided. Facts? What facts? The article is based on his interpretation of events. If these were facts, they would be verifiable from an alternative source. But conveniently, those who would counteract his “facts” are not there. Bob and Sally Mugabe are gone; and now so is Mwalimu Micere. Since we were not there, how are we to give our account of what happened? And that’s the point, is it not? To put us in a corner where we cannot respond because we were not there, and so we have to take Indangasi’s word for it? How is that not an assertion of power?
As others have pointed out, Indangasi had over a decade to refute Mwalimu Micere’s account of her exile when those who were there could respond to his accusations, but he conveniently chooses to do so now. These are the questions that Nation should have asked. It is interesting that the newspaper accepted Indangasi’s account without asking for empirical proof, when accusing the government of corruption makes journalists cringe and ask for documentation. In other words, Nation is asking us to dismiss a woman’s life’s corpus of work because a man belatedly provided “facts” about events that occurred in the 1980s.
And it is important to note that Indangasi’s tirade is based on a very limited time of Mwalimu Micere’s life, not on her ideas and not on the last three decades of her work. After all, in his words, he is not talking about her work. He announces in the opening line of his article that he is reacting to what is being said about Mwalimu Micere. But more than that, Indangasi is not giving us facts. He’s telling a story. The facts – his or any other – do not really matter. What his article is meant to do is plant doubt and put us who use her work on the defence. Because in Kenyanese, thinking isn’t about people in conversation; rather it’s about the winning narrative.
And that is the crux of the matter. Indangasi is angry less at Micere Mugo, and more at us who speak about her. He is not providing facts; he is telling a story based on the very weak idea of “sacrifice” as an anchor of legitimacy. As I’ve already said, self-sacrifice is an imperial narrative that we should not apply to Jesus, let alone Mwalimu Micere. But Indangasi so owns that narrative, to the point of suggesting he too could be a martyr. And so he declares: “If I am crucified for saying what I am about to say, so be it.” No, professor. We’re not crucifying you. We believe that nobody, not even Jesus, deserved to be crucified. We do not believe that the scars of crucifixion are a mark of pride. They are the scars of pain. A reminder to end oppression. So no, we’re not crucifying you. We’re holding you to account for what you have said.
Likewise, we will not descend to refuting his article by solely pointing to what a nasty person Indangasi can sometimes be. That response keeps the conversation exactly where Indangasi wanted it: in the sphere of the personal.
I wanted to write my memorisation of Micere Mugo after the send-off rites for Mwalimu Micere Mugo were over because I wanted to play along with the Kenyan culture of individualising the political. I wanted to wait because I feared being told not to challenge the political vernacular while people were still mourning. But after reading Indangasi’s article, I realised that if our mourning for Micere Mugo is not a political act, we are going to bury the memory of people like Micere Mugo, and even Stephen Mogusu and many others, under tantalising and nasty bio-graphies from media and academia that deny them their voices beyond their person. And that act perpetuates the depoliticising of our society which Micere Mugo fought against. If, as Adorno said, thinking points beyond itself, then Micere Mugo was simply a thinker, and what Kenya badly needs is simply thinking. “Deep thinking” is a fallacy where the focus is on respecting institutional protocols of thinking rather than on what the thinking is pointing us to. And despite itself, the demand for deep thinking points beyond itself to a war on politics.
By contrast Mwalimu Micere Mugo fought for our right to politics exercised through speech, through thinking and through the imagination. Clearly, that struggle continues. And thankfully, Micere Mugo has not died. She has multiplied. Ase. Ase. Ase.
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Reflections
Mwalimu Micere Githae Mugo’s Utu-Centric Scholarship
Professor Micere Githae Mugo conceptualised Utu-centric scholarship as humanising, liberative, inclusive, reciprocal and decolonising.
Professor Micere Githae Mugo was and remains my Mwalimu, my sister-most (her word), my mentor, and academic and life maitũ. In 2022, I was honoured to share the stage with her at her invitation, and she subsequently asked that I publish my brief remarks on this inheritance – this legacy of utu in scholarship that she has bequeathed us. I planned to develop this piece further because what I presented initially was limited by/to/for a particular purpose and time limit. Therefore, it is objectively non-exhaustive. However, I wish to honour her by publishing it as she heard it. A forthcoming scholarly publication will realise the task and vision of expansion. I previously shared this version of the work at the event memorialising the life of Mwalimu at the University of Nairobi on the 8th of August 2023.
The academic and activist perspectives of Professor Micere Githae Mugo insist on the significance of indigenous African knowledges, technologies, and lived experiences and practices, and how these can inform the definition of methods and languages for critical African(a) and global studies across the disciplines. Mugo, who professed a personal commitment to the philosophy of utu, defined it as the “essence of being human and demonstrating communal solidarity”. Utu as philosophy and as an active way of knowing, being and doing is grounded in the consideration of personhood and humanness. Mwalimu explicated: “The act of being human is in the affirmation of others’ humanity. Without this we are a mockery of the human essence”; and, “I subscribe to it [utu/ubuntu] – heavily! I tell you, don’t listen to anyone who suggests to you that this kind of thinking belongs to ‘primitive’ and/or ‘communist’ societies. Every human being should have this as a life motto.”
Utu/ubuntu orients radical living as both philosophy and active processes rooted in ethics and values of equity, love, and respect through which individuals and communities encounter each other and their environments. Actuating utu, therefore, is an exercise in expediting humanness and humanity. The title and chapters of Mwalimu Micere Githae Mugo’s collection of speeches and essays titled Writing and Speaking From the Heart of My Mind are a call to humanising scholarship by centring utu in the creation and consumption of knowledges. Mugo directed us to activate pedagogies, methods, perspectives, languages, and philosophies that demonstrate humane ways of doing knowledge and knowing. She directed the application of critical utu-centric thinking and scholarship thus: “I offer no apology in embracing the notion that my mind has a heart. This is because I am persuaded that the challenge for the 21st century is not to flaunt knowledge, but rather to humanise it.”
“The act of being human is in the affirmation of others’ humanity. Without this we are a mockery of the human essence.”
As we seek to define the languages, methods, and theories of utu-centric scholarship, Mwalimu Micere Githae Mugo’s ways of being, doing, and knowing should be instructive and grounding. I list, in the following, some principles of utu-centric scholarship as conceptualised by her: Utu-centric scholarship is humanising scholarship. It stands in service to the humanity of the researcher, the researched, and the audience of the work; utu-centric scholarship is inexorably humanitarian. It begins with appreciating the primary purpose of scholarship and education as a service to watu, the people. utu-centric scholarship is fundamentally liberative. It delivers inventive de-bordering of languages, disciplines, approaches, world senses and lenses. Utu-centric scholarship is inclusive and reciprocal. She invited that scholars partner with communities as ideological allies to purposefully actuate and represent utu and humility in our/their work. Note that Mwalimu embraced an expanded and inclusive definition of the identity ‘scholar’ beyond the ivory tower of academia. She considered the exclusion of the watu and their contributions from scholarship arrogant, anti-knowledge, and as compromising to the utu of the scholar and the watu; utu-centric work demands decolonising methodologies and languages.
Mwalimu’s legacy on utu-centric scholarship is evident in the areas of decolonial and feminist philosophical frameworks, performance studies, writing and theorising revolution, environmental studies, history/herstory, feminist futures, intersectional thought and practice, narrative and biography, gender and sexuality studies, and scholar activism. Mwalimu has nurtured many into the production of decolonised, humane, and equitable conferences, classrooms, publications, book series, presses, curricula, artistic productions, research, and civic and community engagement endeavours. I conclude with a quote from Mwalimu’s 2021 work, The Imperative of Utu/Ubuntu in Africana Scholarship, where she asserted “that knowledge and scholarship can either be colonising, alienating and enslaving; or alternatively, they can be conscientizing, humanising and liberating, creating new human beings with the agency to transform the world for the better”. She adds, “Africana scholars need to find out how to incorporate this collective and connective perception of life into their scholarship.”
In honouring Mwalimu’s passion for indigenous ways of knowledges, spiritualities, and practices, as well as poetry, I offer in closing a celebration of life, a praise poem from one of her sisters, Nkiru Nzegwu, SUNY Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York, also Professor Extraordinarius, Transdisciplinary Research and Graduate Studies, University of South Africa, and Founder of the Africa Knowledge Project. She sings:
Micere Githae Mugo, daughter of Mumbi who made rain with words,
Who turned fierce men into boys and made them quake,
Who could not be contained by prison walls of fear,
Who would not be silenced or made to disappear,
Who clapped like thunder and roared like lions,
Who crossed the ocean to plant new mukuyu,
Micere Githae Mugo, daughter of Mumbi, arise in power!
Reflections
Micere Githae Mugo: On The Simultaneity of Oppressions
Carole Boyce Davies looks at Micere Githae Mugo’s contribution to the topic of Black women’s leadership across the African world.
In what is affectionately or derisively called “Upstate New York”, devoid of the cultural diversity of New York City, Brooklyn, the Bronx or Harlem, Mῖcere Gῖthae Mũgo redefined and recreated African space in a myriad ways: creating community, being readily available when called upon to share knowledge, maintaining her national and international presence and commitment to Pan-African politics.
Not too long ago, Micere was invited at short notice to be the keynote speaker for a Pan-African Connections Conference at Cornell University’s Africana Center. Because she had been a visiting professor at Cornell, Micere insisted that she did not want to be paid. Though in difficult health circumstances, she saw her contribution at the ceremony to mark the retirement of Locksley Edmondson as giving back to Africana. This was significant because Edmondson had spent a critical period of his career at Makerere University and knew East Africa well.
The result was her presentation, “Locksley Edmondson as An Embodiment of Pan-Africanist Connectivity and As a Scholar Rooted In Black/Africana Studies”, which was published in the collection titled Pan-African Connections co-edited with N’dri Assie Lumumba. In declining the honorarium Micere said:
“As I requested, kindly put the money into the fund that was being proposed at the Symposium, either for ASR&C, or for Professor Edmondson. If there is no fund being set up, then I would like to donate the amount to Africana. Micere.”
Micere exemplified Ubuntu praxis in these ways, as her book The Imperative of Utu/Ubuntu in Africana Scholarship testifies. Following on from the early theorizing of this concept by John Mbiti, Micere defines Ubuntu as the way of being fully human in the world that many African cultures still retain: I am, Because We Are. Ubuntu becomes an African pre-text to Western assertions of white masculinity as the equivalent of the entitled rights to the definition of the human that entails subordinating others.
Micere’s approach included care for the next generation as was evident in her love for imparting knowledge to students and teaching memorable classes even though she was someone used to lecturing to large gatherings at African Studies and African Literature Association conferences, and as a special guest speaker at countless universities.
Another example: To an invitation from my graduate students in Literatures in English at Cornell to take part in their symposium, “Words Walking Without Masters”: Conversations on the Creative-Theoretical, Micere responded:
“A very good Monday afternoon and week to you! I hope all is well with you and your colleagues. If I may make an observation, I really like the spirit of team/collective work that shows in the way the symposium planning committee members are taking turns handling business. I’ve been an activist since my teenage days and even at 79 years of age, I remain an “addict” of team/collective/community work. Please feel free to quote me as needed, assuming you will include an acknowledgment. All the best and stay well!
MMGM.”
Micere’s quote – which totally invigorated them and was one of the earliest endorsements that their project was worthy and the first to appear on the promotional material for the conference – remains on their website.
The pathways and actual experiences of living in the African Diaspora we know have not been joyous. The first-level African Diaspora was created via the brutalities of transatlantic enslavement and forced labour migration in order to build the “New World” that the Europeans wanted to create while decimating indigenous nations.
Micere defines Ubuntu as the way of being fully human in the world that many African cultures still retain: I am, Because We Are.
The second-level diaspora of voluntary or induced African migration often came post-independence because of economic or political oppression by African neo-colonial governments. Many of these second-level African migrants are not pan-Africanists ideologically as that philosophy was meant to be destroyed with the removal of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the generation that included Patrice Lumumba of Congo-Kinshasa. Thanks to new technologies, historical examples, and the possibilities of family reunification under new migration legislation, members of this second-level African diaspora have been able to benefit from maintaining cultural connections that were not available to the earlier diasporas because of the deliberately instituted separations, or what Toni Morrison calls dismemberment, necessitating re-memory or, more recently, DNA-generated connections to prior African national or regional origins.
The pathways and actual experiences of living in the African Diaspora we know have not been joyous.
Still, at the personal level, bearing the loss that exile brings in both personal and public ways, Micere experienced a doubled and unparalleled grief and pain of that first exile and could empathize with the African and Caribbean experience from her personal experiences, and with the indigenous communities with whom she identified. Micere’s understanding of this loss was compounded by witnessing the rapid decline in health of one of her daughters; while Micere always maintained an elegant presence and a gracious smile for those she encountered, that pain lingered in her eyes.
As I worked in Upstate New York during Micere’s time there, we maintained a friendship even though we did not see each other often, her quick-witted emails shot through with wry jokes and commentary about the demise of US democracy, particularly during the last presidency. Several of these emails still exist and could be the source of a whole other discussion. Poignantly, one contains her last words to me after we honoured her via a virtual African Literature Association forum just weeks before her passing. It reveals the grace that I describe above:
“Hugs, dear sister Carole! Your summary, in terms of coverage by the Roundtable could not be neater. All of you were stunning and your presentations, WOW! Sisters, you know how to uplift and empower a sister. For this I say: Asè! Afya! Moyo!
I love you all!
Micere”
Because my most recent work was on Black women’s leadership across the African world – which led to the publication of Black Women’s Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power – I thought it important in this piece to engage with what Micere had contributed on this topic. I know she had written about the role of women’s leadership as intellectuals, as creative writers, and in community activism, and her book of poetry included some poems about women’s historical leadership.
In reflecting on her work with Ngugi wa Thiong’o on The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Micere describes women’s role in the struggle as captured in the play thus: “As for women in the struggle, one of the play’s main characters is a woman who coordinated messages from town to forest, and she trafficked guns. For women played a very dangerous role in the struggle and were hardly cowardly.”
Years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, I bought an issue of a popular journal called Africa Woman. I was pleased to find it among some files as I moved office and while looking through its pages found an interview featuring a photograph of a beautiful young Micere Mugo titled, “Dr. Micere Mugo, Kenya’s Outspoken Intellectual and Academic Critic Talks to Nancy Owano”. The quote above is taken from that interview.
Then a senior lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Micere would go on to become the first and youngest woman Dean but was even then described as “One of the most outspoken academics in Kenya today… an intellectual gadfly … who had won many critics as well as supporters with her ideas on women’s oppression, African Socialism and ‘literary imperialism’”.
But even reading the interview today, it is gratifying to see how timely and advanced her discussions were as she spoke even then about some of the bases of the African feminist politics of her generation. The yet relevant “simultaneity of oppressions” linking the need for socialist praxis as it combines with women’s rights was already revealed. Thus, it is important to note that Micere’s identification of African women’s leadership preceded contemporary scholarly articulations such as mine that were generated out of the African Diaspora experience. Over the years, she, like her co-madre/commère (in Caribbean parlance) Ama Ata Aidoo, would often in her presentations indicate the long list of women who have advanced liberation struggles. Additionally, both never shied away from identifying feminism as an ideological position to which they subscribed.
Micere’s analysis offered a dynamic first-hand praxis presented with amazing grace and charm. Her self-defined vision for the future, which has still not been realized – “I see a system where all the oppressive institutions are dismantled – politically, socially, for the sake of men and women” – offers a discussion in which she affirms that there was/still is a distinct combination of oppressive systems. Thus is revealed one of the clearest identifications of a simultaneity of oppressions analysis that appears in some of the most progressive African feminist assertions:
First of all, let me note that we cannot only speak of women’s oppression by men. In capitalist systems, women tend to be exploited by the very nature of the society particularly the working and peasant women, just as men are exploited. The difference is that women are hit particularly hard. Their most obvious hardship is being educationally disadvantaged. Then you have forms of abuse that cut across class lines: sexual abuse, wife-beating and the fact that men take advantage of woman’s role as child-bearer. But I won’t give the impression that I foster any illusions. Sexual abuse, rape, etc., do take place in socialist societies, whose conditions of maldistribution and ownership tend to breed many social problems.
It is gratifying to see how timely and advanced her discussions were as she spoke even then about some of the bases of the African feminist politics of her generation.
Seeing the need to maintain a collaborative vision for Africans generated from within African cultures, “I Am Because We Are: The Imperative of Utu/Ubuntu for Transformational Scholarship” became the title of one of her lectures and appears in her book Writing and Speaking from the Heart of My Mind: Selected Essays and Speeches. Clearly written with a recognition that this had to be one of the available sources for her documented body of thought for subsequent generations, it contains essays organized in categories as follows: Autobiographical Touches Using A Black Feminist Brush; Orature, Literature and Creativity Through a Black Feminist Lens, Culture, Class, Gender, Pan Africanism and Human Development; Democracy, Empowerment and Construction of New Sites of Knowledge.
The author’s descriptive summary in another succinct and clarifying assessment of the role of women in society describes the essays as collectively a book that “highlight[s] women as indispensable resources in society and a major driving force in every aspect of human development. The essays advocate more than just women’s inclusion in this historical process, reiterating the absolute need for their full participation, representation and empowerment in all areas of life”.
One sees right away the repeated language of feminist assertion in titles like a “Black Feminist Brush” or “Black Feminist Lens”, for, clearly, like Ama Ata Aidoo, Micere did not shy away from an identification with Black or African feminism as an ideological position but advanced with clarity that each cultural location engenders its own way of defining its approach to women’s rights. In many ways, these early stances contributed to the friendship and “mutual comradeship” between the two writers, honed in their early and instinctive lifetime friendship, seasoned in their joint exile in Zimbabwe.
In her collection of essays, and relevant to this discussion, is Micere’s assertion that a re-reinterpretation of Amilcar Cabral’s Return to the Source means returning to African women’s location as they are the source of knowledge, sustenance, creativity and life. And above all, if Pan-Africanism is to have real actuality, it must come through women’s full engagement with this assumption, philosophically. Thus, for her, “The renegotiated Pan African project has to redress this imbalance”.
Micere asserted that the leadership of African women has been consistent through the historic role of African women as leaders who have provided emotional resources to their communities and, above all, guidance in tangible ways. “Some of Africa’s great leaders were resources in community spiritualism,” she asserts. By way of recommendations for the future, she identifies some of the aims of the formation of a PAWLO – Pan African Women’s Liberation Organization – that she helped to design (and that still awaits full implementation) at the 7th Pan African Conference held in Nairobi, which engaged women’s absence from Pan-African theorizing with the following goals and principles: To promote solidarity between women by building an umbrella organization uniting women and women’s organizations that have a Pan-African agenda; to promote fora through which women can bring about effective changes to their lives in a democratic and emancipatory manner; and to equip women with the knowledge, expertise and confidence to challenge all structure of oppression; to increase women’s awareness of their ability to resist all forms of oppression as well as providing the necessary support services to assist them in their resistance; to provide a forum for women to consider issues which have a direct impact upon them and hinder their ability to effectively participate as equal citizens in their society; and to rewrite African women’s history with an emphasis and focus on women as agents rather than as victims of society.
If Pan-Africanism is to have real actuality, it must come through women’s full engagement with this assumption, philosophically.
It is important to say here that, as Micere passes into ancestry, some of these ideas that she endorsed or affirmed need to be carried over and not be lost to new generations who often think they have to start from scratch when there are available templates such as this one; this is the intent of listing them here.
A committed pan-Africanist and feminist, Micere saw the necessity of bringing these ideological positions together for the benefit of women; even if at times they have had to be effected as separate positions, now there is a mode of engaging them also as collaborative stances and ideological positions. This is one important approach that typifies the simultaneity of oppressions analysis that is a hallmark of black feminist politics and was Micere’s position, and is even more clarified today as we see it in practice visibly in the US and in other parts of the world. Micere’s discussion of gender in her chapter on “Gender, Ethnicity, Class and Culture”, critiques the predominantly male leadership as presiding over a world “characterized by war, destruction, homelessness and other forms of inconceivable insecurity”.
Thus, Micere’s advice to those of us able to advance progressive political positions for women’s rights, “African women should spearhead the launching of a truly gendered, mass-oriented, youth-empowered, re-envisioned Pan-Africanism.”
Reflections
Mwalimu Micere Githae Mugo: Walking in the Footsteps of a Great Teacher
David Mwambari shares the key lessons he learned from Mwalimu Mugo as her teaching assistant at Syracuse University that have transformed his personal and professional life.
“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” Paulo Freire
This essay creatively blends a piece I wrote for this edited volume with other reflections and email conversations with Mwalimu Micere Mugo, my mentor, teacher, and former colleague from – as she called me – her young friend.
My first ‘encounter’ with Professor Micere Mugo – my Mwalimu – was enthralling, poignant, exceptional. I first met the illustrious Mwalimu through her works, particularly the literary masterpiece My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs: Songs and Poems. This gripping and inspiring collection of poems spurred my inquiry into her life and continues to be a source of inspiration for me. I met her in person a few years later and our association morphed from mentorship to friendship. I continued to visit and communicate with her almost a decade after I left Syracuse University.
How did I end up in Syracuse? The 2007/2008 Kenya Post-Election Violence (PEV) occurred shortly after I graduated from the United States International University-Africa in Nairobi with a degree in International Relations as a self-sponsored struggling student. My interests in courses about conflict and peace studies were both academic and personal, having survived the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and other instances of violence in the Great Lakes region. Trepidation ensued as the PEV unfolded with the ruckus of rowdy youth passing from the Kibra slum through the Kilimani suburb, bearing crude weapons and baying for blood, so to speak.
Despite not being the target this time, the clamour in the neighbourhood rekindled deep-seated traumas within me. I spent days and nights asking questions, writing poems and other materials in the different languages resonant with my heart – my English vocabulary could not fully express my anxieties, anguish and search for peace. The crisis repurposed my life, and brought clarity. If I was going to delve into why such conflicts transpired in Africa, I needed a different learning environment and this time not as a self-funded student. So, I applied to pursue a Master’s degree in Pan-African Studies at Syracuse University on a two-year scholarship. As scholarship recipients, we were required to work as teaching or research assistants in the department with different professors and learn from them. In the second year of my graduate course, I was accepted as Mwalimu’s teaching assistant (TA). An African American student who had previously worked with Mwalimu lauded her as the best professor any TA could hope to work with. Each professor could only work with one teaching or research assistant at a time, so I was excited to be next in line!
While working as Mwalimu Mugo’s teaching assistant at Syracuse I learned three key lessons that have transformed my personal and professional life: How to decentre power in a learning environment; how to humanise the process of knowledge production and exchange; and how to share power, creativity, and decisions.
At that point, we had only met a couple of times as she was recovering from an illness. I arrived at her office to a warm reception and was ready to hit the ground running. However, her approach was divergent and heart-warming; she wanted to know about my family and life journey in a creative (not forceful or invasive) manner. Surprisingly, she also shared a little about her life, which was refreshing after working with supervisors who were not so open. We established that traumatic events underscored both our lives and that a friend of mine, an academic in Nairobi, was actually her nephew. In that moment, I learned that collegiality was not a mere buzzword to be relegated as an adjective to colour one’s resume. Mwalimu taught me how to introduce myself to colleagues and build rapport by letting people know that they matter. From her, I grasped what it meant to responsibly engage with questions of power differentials in the academy and, especially, how to work with students to ensure quality.
Nothing takes the chill out of the New England winter like receiving a compliment from your supervisor and s-hero! After a few preparatory meetings for the course, Mwalimu told me how excited she was to have me as a TA. Imagine that! She reassured me that I would receive the benefit of all her thirty-six years of teaching experience, despite the challenges and constraints brought by her illness. Mwalimu had just been discharged from hospital and was still attending some sessions with the doctors. Her resilience, commitment to students, and discipline were simply awe-inspiring. She understood how to maximise her reserves, which meant being wise enough to rest when it was time to rest.
In that moment, I learnt that collegiality was not a mere buzzword to be relegated as an adjective to colour one’s resume.
Mwalimu allowed me to take charge of the classroom. She would sit at the back and to the students’ surprise, put me in the driving seat. I would conduct a lecture and she would participate in class like everyone else, before giving me feedback later. She taught me how to listen to students, to encourage participation, to ensure the power of teaching and learning was shared so students could become co-creators not mere recipients, but without abandoning my teaching and supervision role. Our course was on creative writing, so she encouraged me to allow the students to write about anything – literally anything they wanted – as long as they used the writing techniques we learned. In powerful sessions where we debated students’ writing and gave feedback, I had to learn and re-learn the meaning and role of a teacher. She taught me how to manage the classroom which, in her view, was as important as the teaching materials. I learned that power is not guaranteed simply because one stands before students. Power is shared in a classroom. Respect is earned and nurtured. You help the students to be more present in their work and encourage their creativity, knowledge, and talent. Mwalimu Mugo was not only an artist in her work, but also in her approach to training those who worked with her.
The second lesson from Mwalimu Mugo involved how to mentor students. She was an ardent believer that students are human beings. Students (like their teachers) have pasts, individual personalities, and different abilities. She encouraged me to be open and pay attention to the students throughout the semester, including by getting to know as many of them as I could. This technique proved especially useful when I taught seminars or breakout groups. During each session that semester, we all had to display our names, which she memorised in a week! She had several tricks up her sleeve when calling upon students. She would use the colour of a student’s clothes or someone’s smile or attitude as an example to teach us how to write. I was bad at memorising names and shied away from this exercise. However, her gentle prodding pushed me to alternative ways to learn students’ names. Mwalimu urged me to associate each name with the writer when marking student essays and to make a habit of reading out the students’ names when handing back assignments. I have held on to that practice and now encourage students to use each other’s names to cultivate a support network in class. We shared the grading of each student’s work and discussed the grades we had awarded and the rationales behind them. This taught me how to read in detail and assess each student’s work without shortcuts. Mwalimu did the same and was always ready to change her mind on a grade if I argued my case convincingly.
Thirdly, I gleaned the power of words from Mwalimu. It did not matter how little time we had, we would always begin by checking on each other as individuals before discussing professional matters. She was genuinely interested in how I was fairing and was, in turn, open about her well-being or otherwise. It was in these brief exchanges that I learned to humanise my professional interactions and not only focus on the work. Moreover, Mwalimu Mugo was a very busy person, but you could never feel it because when you were with her, you were all that mattered. On the few instances where she had to take a phone call, she would politely excuse herself – a stark contrast to my previous experiences. In her world, manners and politeness mattered with both students and colleagues.
One snowy day, in the middle of the Syracuse winter, Mwalimu greeted me with a smile when she found me waiting outside her office. I was perplexed by the boldness of the students’ essays and was quite eager to express my opinions about them. True to form, she began by asking how I was as we walked to class. We arrived rather early, which gave me ample time to voice my sentiments about the essays. One particular essay had kept me up the night before since the student had used vivid language to describe the trauma of a violence-laced event in her teenage years. The student’s blatant elucidation of events had roused my own teenage trauma. Mwalimu listened intently but did not say much.
However, in class, we had a lengthy and spirited discussion about the essays on traumatic experiences and complicated pasts. It was an emotionally intense class during which Mwalimu gave a lecture on the use of creative writing as an artistic tool to express deeply embedded traumas and find healing. This was one of the best lecture sessions of my entire university career. It left many of us in tears because Mwalimu allowed us to process our emotions without shutting us down. After the class, Mwalimu asked me to share the poetry I had written during the Kenya Post-Election Violence period with the class. I emailed the class a copy of my poem with the simple message “see bellow” (sic.) in reference to the attachment. Mwalimu noticed my error and replied with a detailed email explaining the power of words and, in this case, of that one letter. She asked me to determine the meaning of “bellow” and “below” and get back to her. In that instant, I learned that I had been using the wrong “bellow” all my life without anyone correcting me. She cared enough to notice and to make sure I benefitted as a result.
It was an emotionally intense class during which Mwalimu gave a lecture on the use of creative writing as an artistic tool to express deeply embedded traumas and find healing.
Upon completing my studies at Syracuse University, Mwalimu Mugo recommended that I continue with graduate studies and nudged me to submit applications to a variety of PhD programmes in different parts of the world. I was fortunate to benefit from her evaluation of my teaching and research skills. She was one of three individuals whose mentorship led me to carve out a career in teaching and research.
I still employ Mwalimu’s techniques in my classes and share her influences. Students have commented on my teaching approach in instructor evaluations, particularly on the three aforementioned lessons. However, whatever my students appreciate in my approaches or whenever anyone appreciates my writing, I acknowledge that it is because I stood on the shoulders of Mwalimu Mugo, the greatest teacher, mentor, and researcher of all time.
I continued to foster my relationship with Mwalimu by visiting whenever possible and keeping in touch via email. It has been a delight to share some of my publications with her, and I look forward to dedicating an anthology of my poetry to her. In the meantime, I strive to pay it forward, to give back to the youth what I have learned from her. While I doubt I will ever match Mwalimu, it will not be for lack of work to put her lessons into practice. For instance, from 2010 to 2015, I organised and delivered a mentorship programme at her alma mater, Limuru Girls School. I made a habit of starting the event by telling the students of a young lady who once attended their institution as the first African and black student and went on to become an acclaimed scholar, a celebrated teacher, and an influential Pan-African activist.
In the meantime, I strive to pay it forward, to give back to the youth what I have learnt from her.
One time, after sharing this publication, which was specially dedicated to her, Mwalimu responded with a lovely and funny email. As always, her words made me smile, even in the middle of COVID-19:
“And then: what a great coincidence that you would email me at a time when you have been so much on my mind! Let me explain. For the last month or so, MSNBC has been running a commercial that is accompanied by “You are my sunshine…” the song that you and I once sang for our Creative Writing class to demonstrate the abundance of metaphors, symbols and imagistic language in “Song” as an orature genre. I shared with Mumbi how tickled the young people were by the free performance from their professor and TA. My intention was to email you and remind you what an amazing TA you were, but I have been battling some health hiccups. So, you got “there” before me.” MMG
This was the Mwalimu who never ceased to give compliments – even a decade after we held classes together, she was still always giving encouraging words.
I emailed her many times, especially when I published works to honour what I learned from her or when I started projects that built on her ideas. She expressed joy and congratulated me when I sent news that I won a European Research Council Grant for the TMSS project. She loved that I built on her work on orature to win major funding, and for a project that would allow for collaboration amongst many scholars and people who have faced displacement. She even asked to share the email with other colleagues in our networks. She celebrated everyone she mentored and gave generous support whenever she could. This essay discussed her impact on my academic and personal life.
When I heard the news that she had passed away, I immediately shared the following words on social media. They poured from my heart:
“My dear professor, mentor, friend who was still laughing with us, chairing a meeting recently, has left us after fighting a long illness…
Professor Micere Githae Mugo (born Madeleine Micere Githae in 1942) was a playwright, author, activist, instructor and poet from Kenya.
A mentor of mentors, a teacher of thousands who have taught thousands, a critical decolonial Afro-feminist leader … will live on through many!
Read her work!
Pole to my sister Mumbi, the family, and all lives she touched, and pole to Kenya and Syracuse Pan-African community for your loss…
Mwalimu welcomed me in Syracuse. She was having a tough time with her health in 2009–2010… We laughed. We shed tears in her office, in restaurants, on my most difficult days dealing with my own traumas.
She stood up for us to keep our studies’ funding… Oh, Mwalimu, you really cared!
She sent me emails telling me that my spelling mistakes in English could result in disasters. I learned she wrote a paragraph in a recommendation letter for my PhD application criticizing my spelling mistakes. I was so upset but later, I came to learn, as a teacher myself, that it’s not good to lie about a patient when they can be treated. I am still improving my writing. Oh, Mwalimu, I will miss you…
When I thought I liked a girl on campus, I asked her what to do from a feminist perspective. She teased me so much and laughed, then gave me some of the coolest advice.
She pushed me to go volunteer in prison, like she had done, to help those who are abandoned, ashamed, condemned by society. It is here where I got my current research question for the TMSS project. She showed many of us how through studying Art we can understand many things in societies. She guided me and gave me the confidence to apply for a PhD.
When I finished at Syracuse, I went to do mentorship to honor her at Limuru Girls School in Kenya every year for five years. She was the first Black Kenyan girl to go to that school. I took many of my friends there to work on guiding girls in transition to University.
I am grateful to have gone back to Syracuse many times and to have met in Kenya to celebrate life with her. I have the most lovely emails and humour in my inbox from our exchanges over the years. We would always sing our song “there is no sunshine when she is gone”, and indeed, there is no sunshine today! She is gone but a good teacher lives on in her students…
Prof Ndirangu Wacanga has a book of essays from many of us who walked with Mwalimu and it is such an honour to be in conversation with great minds and global icons to honour her work, life, and love.
I followed all her last hours. She went voluntarily without pain, and surprised many with her grace, leaving doctors and nurses with lessons. What else can we say but we celebrate Mwalimu…
Rest in Power, Mwalimu. You lived with so much grace. I wish for a small dose of it in my own life.
Read her poems and works”
Indeed, Mwalimu was an artist, a teacher, and an educator who epitomized Paulo Freire’s assertion, “What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” I am myself because I encountered Mwalimu Mugo and others like her.
It is only fitting that I wrap up my essay with one of Mwalimu’s poems, which embodies why her students will always celebrate her life, friendship, and mentorship!
“I Want You to Know” in Daughter of My People, Sing!
I want you to know
how carefully
I watered the tender shoots
you planted
in my little garden.
Flowers now adorn the ground
the fruits are ripe
Come
bring a strongly woven basket
and bring with you also
the finest palm wine
that your expert tapping
can brew
We must feast and wine
till the small hours
of our short days together
Joy and love
shall be our daily
harvest songs.
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