I will begin my tribute by claiming pride of association with Prof. Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, a feminist, in the finest of this tradition: A fellow Kenyan and resident of New York, an alumnus of Kangaru High School in eastern Kenya, and Dean at the University of Nairobi, my alma mater, whence, in collaboration with other scholars at the university, in the country and the continent, she laboured to shift traditional educational paradigms and policies, forcing these to include indigenous thought and practice.

My first research project, undertaken in secondary school, was assigned to me by a student who had been taught by these daring scholars and inspired by the work of Prof. Mĩcere – Mrs Cheboi, my literature teacher. It required us over a mid-term break to talk to our grandparents or someone of their generation, request them to share a traditional story in a local African language, translate the story into English and submit the assignment for grading. This assignment, which was both a celebration of the spoken word and an attempt to buffer local languages against the tides of erasure, was transformative for me. It normalised both indigenous languages and orality as forms of knowledge acquisition and transmission, a gift I have continued to appreciate and to be challenged by as a student of orature and performance. This experience was buttressed by other oral and written literary infusions; from short stories, to plays, drama, novels and African poetry – for example the collection by David Rubadiri through which I first heard Prof. Mĩcere’s voice making visible what in Kenya has come to be known as the voice of Mwikali, Atieno, Muthoni (Wanjiku) – gendered, classed voices of everyday women made invisible by the distortions of patriarchy, politics and certain distributions of capital.

I belong to a lucky generation in Kenya. One born after the pain and struggle for independence, yet close enough to the experience to hear firsthand about it and the aspirations that drove this important struggle, and the politics that characterised the immediate post-independence period. For us, one of our most valuable bequests was the work of progressive scholars like Prof. Mĩcere.

Because of the work of these intellectuals and activists, we were assured that our locations, origins, and opinions were valuable much as we were sustained by their work, words, and sacrifices. In their responses to the exigencies of the period, they developed radical, critical canons as they responded to the challenges posed to the worth and existence of African epistemologies, the character of our newly independent states, their relationships to the continent, and more urgently, to their citizens. With colleagues and artists of the word spoken and written across the nation and continent, such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, Alamin Mazrui, Asenath Bole Odaga, Miriam Makeba, Chinua Achebe, Ali Mazrui, Odera Oruka, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Kamarũ, Daudi Kabaka, Austin Bukenya, John Mbiti, and Pio Zirimu, they made the scholarly case for African Orature and Literature, performing these in ways that legitimised indigenous languages and knowledges, and more, inspiring us to become African griots, story tellers, singers, writers, theorists, poets, activists – to claim our ethnic, Kenyan, African social identities which they fleshed out and encouraged us to research, explore, enrich.

For us, one of our most valuable bequests was the work of progressive scholars like Prof. Mĩcere.

Each of these scholars, of these artists, found a way of raising issues that were important to them and used their place, personal skills, tools, to advocate and agitate. Prof. Mĩcere applied the power of drama, poetry and orature to guide us into a time before modern histories and find in it a glowing beauty as she recovered our suppressed memories with dignity and celebrated them with the flowers of the spoken word, her choice of medium, poetry.

On our behalf, Mĩcere Mũgo and her friends and colleagues asked tough questions that post-independence and the consequent experiences of tyrannies, dictatorships, tribalism, patriarchy, neocolonialism, and structural adjustment programmes forced to the fore. In the course of these critical interrogations that were often painful, we were fortunate to have Mĩcere who lovingly spoke to us in her poetry and in the integrity of her choices. Writing and living, she “held us by the hand”, telling us not only that it was okay, but indeed that it was our moral duty to ask all kinds of questions and demand that which had been fought for on our behalf – our “matunda ya uhuru”, the fruits of liberty and sovereignty; okay to question those who act in our name about what they do in our name; right to question how they access and dispose of our resources and, acting in solidarity, appropriate to insist that power treat our fellow human beings with dignity. Micere encouraged us to interrogate our locations, to step out of our “place” and question our leaders, expecting that our demands would not always be welcome but knowing that the cost, even if leading as it did for her in humiliation, rejection, and exile, would be worthwhile.

In the course of these critical interrogations that were often painful, we were fortunate to have Mĩcere who lovingly spoke to us in her poetry and in the integrity of her choices.

Throughout her career, Prof Mĩcere made clear that there are personal as well as global and class dimensions to issues of justice and peace, accepting long before these turbulent times that without justice there would be no peace. Allying with the disadvantaged, she questioned selective incarceration – whether of prisoners of conscience in Kenya or people of colour and the poor in New York – supported indigenous voices in Kenya and in the USA, examined the use and abuse of the environment (Onondaga Lake, the Mau, Karura Forest). Fighting and advocating for and alongside communities, she maintained both a humour and a humanity that allowed her to act in empathy and solidarity with others, including as she supported and mentored younger scholars like me.

In her writing and her lived experiences, Prof. Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo invites us to be passionately involved members of our communities. It is this passionate, loving, humane reflection and engagement that I am sure she would have us apply to both the complex violence of Al-Shabaab in Kenya and police brutality in the USA, inviting us to tirelessly work for peace and humanity. To find truth, joy, and beauty in each other and in our words – both spoken and written. To imagine a better world, if only in tribute to her, her work, and her struggles. Let us commit to this pursuit.

–

From an homage shared in 2015 during a two-day Symposium titled “A Tireless Pursuit” at Syracuse University in honour of Prof. Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo and adapted for a tribute in her memory during Pan African Women’s Day Celebrations at the Kenya National Theatre in 2023. 

No one, in my view, personified the Utu philosophy as Prof. Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo did.  She made this her life’s relentless pursuit. Although she asserted that she was not a loser, and acknowledged that she was not always a winner, she finally lost to cancer. But the irony in this is that, although dead, Mĩcere Mũgo still speaks to us. She speaks with a forked tongue, words of sorrow and words of joyful pride.

For the many who loved and embraced her, the many whom she embraced and whose lives she impacted, Mĩcere’s death speaks pain. A pain felt deep in the family, the academic fraternity, and in the social activism circles across the world.

It is the neverness that is so painful. Never again to be here with us – never to sit with us at the table, never to travel with us, never to laugh with us, never to cry with us, never to embrace us, never to sing, or read poetry with us. All the rest of our lives, we must live without her. Only our death can stop the pain of her death.

Yet we must learn to live as faithfully and as authentically with her gone, as we had tried to with her present.

And what does that mean?

It will take a long time to learn.

It means not forgetting her.

It means speaking of her.

It means reading her poetry and acting her plays.

This is remembering her.

We are to hold the past in remembrance and not let it slide away. Because all around us are her things, her clothes, her books, her garden, her works, her words and her ideas.

We are to resist amnesia and live up to her ideals in Utu.

This is remembrance.

I parallel Mwalimu Mĩcere’s story to Miriam’s in the Exodus 2 passage. And to honour her memory, I will look at the Exodus narrative from a feminist perspective. I am indebted to Prof. Alan Boesak (2017) whose ideas I have adopted in interpreting the biblical text, principally from “The riverbank, the seashore and the wilderness, Miriam, liberation, and prophetic witness against the empire”.

The story of Exodus, like other biblical narratives, is written to be read in multiple ways, allowing for multiple interpretations, and so, hinders fundamentalists from weaponising the biblical texts. It also avoids imperialistic designs to impose a single view in this plural world, where we ought to be aware of the other. The Hebrew Bible and feminist scholar Phyllis Trible traces the life of Miriam’s prophetic tradition of faithful resistance against empire to the contest against pharaonic patriarchal power and privilege.

Through Miriam, we see God beginning the act of the exodus with the women. It is to these women of faithfulness, courage, and defiant obedience that the freedom of the people is  first entrusted. The first two chapters of the book of Exodus articulated this fact.  So exodus from Egypt was initiated by women who acted in faith.  A faith anchored in trust,  not sight. There seems to be no expectation that God would intervene. For God is not even mentioned in these two chapters of the exodus story.

We first meet Miriam as a protector of her brother on the riverbank. Then as a prophet and leader after the deliverance at the Red Sea. And finally, as a prophetic challenger to power in the wilderness. It is in comparison to these three scenarios that I hope to speak about the life of Mwalimu Mĩcere Mũgo.

First, Miriam on the riverbank (Exodus 2:1-8)

When Moses is born, Miriam’s mother Jochebed takes a risky but courageous initiative. She weaves a basket, puts the baby boy in it, places it among the reeds close to the riverbank, then tasks the young Miriam to stand guard.

Exodus 2:4 records that Miriam is standing “at a distance” at the river bank. According to the Dutch Hebrew Bible scholar Jopie Siebert-Hommes, the verb translated as “distance” means “far away”, and can also have two other meanings, which are: “to take one’s stand” and “to stand one’s ground”.

So, on the riverbank, Miriam is “standing her ground”, waiting in anticipation. She is aware of her own limitations under the circumstances.

When Pharoah’s daughter appears, for Miriam, there is no rational expectation of a “motherly” response from one seen as a representative of the Egyptian empire.

This passage is crowded with uncertainties. It offers no perspective on Miriam’s frame of mind. What if it had not been Pharaoh’s daughter? I mean, what if it had been men acting in blind obedience to the Pharaoh’s killing instructions? And what if the Pharaoh’s daughter was in one mind with her father?

Despite facing uncertainty, Miriam’s firmness and resolve make her remarkable. Miriam was not sure what would happen to her brother. But what stands out here is her readiness to stand her ground and face a dangerous situation. If something happened to the child, it would not be for lack of courage or action on her part.  And as the opportunity presented for Miriam to act, her quick-witted response to Pharaoh’s daughter suggests not only spiritual maturity, but political savviness as well.

So, Miriam stands firm in the prophetic tradition begun by Siphrah and Puah. It is a prophetic engagement with the empire (patriarchy) no less courageous and faithful than the actions of the midwives.

And as the opportunity presented for Miriam to act, her quick-witted response to Pharaoh’s daughter suggests not only spiritual maturity, but political savviness as well.

Mwalimu Mĩcere’s struggle against colonialism, despotic government and her works advocating for human dignity began early in her life. In the anthology Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo: Making Life Sing in Pursuit of Utu edited by Ndirangu Wachanga, she recalls:

One Saturday afternoon, I was called from my dormitory and told that I had family guests. On going out to meet them, I was elated to find out that it was my mother, Grace Njeri, and her younger sister Tata (Aunty) Joyce, who was a teacher in Gaturi, Mũrang’a.

But their gloomy faces cut down my excitement. After embracing, my mother told me to go back into the dormitory and put on my uniform because they wanted to take me to Boma, the name we knew Embu town by.

It all didn’t make sense, but on the way to Boma, they informed me that my father had been jailed and when they had visited him in jail earlier, he had asked for me. [At the time, my two elder sisters were miles away in Gatigũrũ boarding school, Mũgoiri, Mũrang’a.]

Apparently, my father had been accused of double-dealing with the government and assisting Mau Mau adherents by refusing to torture villagers and their families to force them to confess their linkages to the Mau Mau fighters. He had been sacked as the chief presiding over Mwea Division.

I remember speaking with my father from outside Embu jail, separated by what seemed unending rows of barbed wire. His hands were shackled and there were two guards on either side, plus many more swarming all over the place, all armed to the teeth.

I was scared to death. We had to shout out conversation through the rolls of wire. At first, I was just in shock and tongue-tied, but when the visit ended and the askaris (guards) escorted him back (I suppose to his cell), I simply broke down into tears and cried for so long that my mother and aunt were still begging me to dry my eyes as I waved them goodbye after they took me back to school.

While a young Miriam is plunged into resistance against Pharaoh, 12-year-old Mĩcere encounters the colonial cruelty of the British against the Mau Mau during this visit. From her parents and community she learns a sense of humaneness, Utu, as the antidote to colonial inhumanity.

Mĩcere later articulates her understanding of Utu in the words of her teacher, Prof John Mbiti:

“I am because we are and since we are, therefore, I am,” which is the same as Ubuntu. Yet the sense of community and belonging that Mĩcere advocates is in what it means to be human, deeply rooted in African culture. Prof Mũgo took her stand in pursuit of the Utu philosophy:

I had to remind myself that part of the liberation process was not just to create a better world, but also to create better people of ourselves. [That involved] learning to humanise ourselves and be humane in the way we articulate our thoughts and treat others. I also learnt the difference between systems and institutions, and agents functioning in them. The person who oppresses you as an agent of an oppressive system is being dehumanised. Oppressive systems dehumanise their own agents as much as they seek to dehumanise those who resist oppression.

Mĩcere likened the exclusion of women to the cruelty of colonialism, and so, fought for women to have equal opportunities. This she learnt from her parents, who had no gender partiality. They, the five girls, were sent to school when it was not fashionable to send girls to school. And when they excelled, their father would quip, ‘Well done, my boys!’ Her mother would rebuke men who would ask: Gũtirĩ andũ gũkũ? Are there no people here?

Mĩcere adopted Rhoda Reddick’s definition of feminism articulated thus:

“Being aware of the structures and systems of injustices that held back women, that oppressed women … be they religion, cultural, educational and tradition, be prepared to do something about it, and to disentangle them. The greatest enemies of feminism are the women themselves who are purveyors of patriarchy.”

Mĩcere articulates her position in her poem To Be a Feminist Is:

For me, to be a feminist is

to be the mother of my daughters

it is to be the daughter of my mother,

it is to be more than a survivor,

it is to be a creator,

it is to be a woman.

Nothing explains her vision for women better than her poem: Ta imaaaagini!

Ta imagini that

you and I

and all the women

of this world

stood hand in hand

marched side by side,

crossing

dividing borders

constructing

connecting bridges

shattering

binding chains

creating

delinkable links,

across the nations

across the continents!

So, Mĩcere speaks to us that we must act as feminists. It is clear that her feminist advocacy was undergirded by this Utu philosophy. We are being called to take our stand for a humanised humanity. We become human when we defy the impetus to dehumanise others.

Second, Miriam at the seashore

And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. Exodus 15:20

And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he threw into the sea. Exodus 15:21

This is after the people of Israel walked through the sea ‘on dry land’, leaving the Egyptian armies ‘dead on the seashore’ and the mighty empire defeated (Exodus 14:30). Exodus 15 opens with the song of Moses.

Then in verses 20 and 21, Miriam the prophet took a tambourine in her hand, opened her mouth in song and led the people in a dance of praise. Benno Jacob ranks this song as the oldest text available concerning the exodus. It is the oldest poem in the Hebrew Bible reflecting the mood of an exodus experience.

From her parents and community she learns a sense of humaneness, Utu, as the antidote to colonial inhumanity.

Miriam stamped her position as the people’s prophet. While Moses acted as an individual, Miriam turns her song into a congregational hymn. For on Miriam’s lips, it became a song of praise and celebration for the whole people.

Miriam’s radical inclusion of all the people, not just the women, proved her to be a prophet of God from among the people, guiding them in the glorification and the ownership of the mighty acts of God. Thus, God’s people owned their agency in their liberation.

Analysing Miriam’s action, Prof Allan Boesak observes “ … a radical inclusivity of worship at work here, and a radical overturning of the patriarchal paradigm. It is also a radical embracing of the responsibilities that come with freedom. Miriam is the people’s prophet.”

Mĩcere was a prophet in this Miriamic tradition. As a poet, a playwright and an intellectual, she included outsiders through orature and made knowledge creation a communal affair.

Mĩcere honoured the tradition of “African orature”. A tradition, she said, was about not speaking to yourself but having a conversation and making sure that your audience is following and engaging. In “African orature”, Prof. Mũgo argued, telling an autobiographical story is not about telling “my story” but about telling “our story”. Thus, a “personal” narrative becomes a “public” narrative.

As a poet, a playwright and an intellectual, Mĩcere included outsiders through orature and made knowledge creation a communal affair.

Although she was a professor of literature, Mĩcere realised the limits of written literature in the African context. Oral literature had a similar shortcoming, one of creating elitist academics, detached from their peoples’ lived experience.

Mĩcere often cited James Baldwin. Intellectuals used their power to speak against the challenges in their society. Mĩcere still questions us in her poem…. “Intellectual or Imposter?” Why are our intellectuals so aloof from their communities’ challenges?

Serving as the dean of the Faculty of Arts between 1978 and 1982 required courage as many opposed her election for being a woman. As Mũgo remembers,

We were given to understand that the government ordered the university registrar to nullify the elections immediately, which he did, even though he had been the election’s returning officer and had publicly announced my victory. He issued an official bulletin announcing that he had appointed the defeated candidate to serve as Acting Dean until further notice. The activists issued a counterstatement, with my consent, asserting that I was the elected Dean and would not step down. The CID [Criminal Investigation Department] police swung into action and threatened me with arrest if I did not step down. At times, they would coax me to resign, advising me that my activism was not befitting of a respectable woman.

Going beyond the privileges of office, Mĩcere broadened issues of concern beyond pedagogy, to include culture in development. For her, the ownership of knowledge, its production, dissemination, and custodianship were to be seen through the lens of Utu/Ubuntu.

Such education would be transformative since knowledge and scholarship can either be colonising or conscientizing, alienating or humanising, enslaving or liberating; therefore, creating new human beings with the agency to transform life and the world for the better.

Mĩcere refuted the false myth of dominating, colonising and imperialist cultures to monopolise knowledge, a position that justified the dehumanisation of the conquered, the attempted erasure of other knowledges, heritages and, ultimately, entire cultures.

Third and final, Miriam in the wilderness

The wilderness becomes the place for revelation of Miriam’s prophetic calling. To the people of Israel, the wilderness is more than just a place of wandering; it is the ‘wilds of the wildernesses’.

Phyllis Trible is right to note that uncertainties, complaints, confusions, and conflict make Israel’s wilderness experience wild. The frequent rebellion causes angst among the people. Yet, amidst this muddle, Miriam’s story sparkles.

So, in Numbers 12:2, Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses:

“Has the LORD only spoken to Moses? Has he not spoken also through us?’ Miriam’s question goes to the root of the matter.

First, Moses was increasingly becoming autocratic and unpopular with the people. Miriam’s speaking “against Moses”, Naomi Graetz claims, occurs within the broader context of the people’s rebellion.

Miriam joins those who speak against the Mosaic authority in the recurring and intensifying rebellions narrated in Numbers 11, 12, 14, 16 and 20, beginning with the grumblings about food.

It is clear that Miriam’s act comes as a crucial intervention in the rebellion because she introduces the genuine issues of the people’s participation in their liberation, the quality and integrity of leadership and the questions of shared power and authority. She raises these issues because she had shown leadership before, at the seashore. Her leadership gave legitimacy to the radical inclusion of all God’s people in God’s acts of liberation.

Second, Miriam’s critical question also exposes a basic fault line in the rebellion: The nostalgic yearning for Egypt, the longing for the non-existent kindness of the oppressor, the desire to return to the imagined safety of Egypt instead of facing the hardships that come with freedom.

As a prophet (Exodus 15:20), Miriam is now re-asserting herself in her calling by inserting herself into the rebellion while also correcting the rebellion from its flawed position (romanticising Egypt and anger about bodily comforts) to the fundamental revolutionary transformation of leadership and the theological integrity of the god they worshipped.

Mĩcere, like Miriam, articulated a question raised by all oppressed people: their challenge to the empires, invaders, and colonisers everywhere who seek justification for their imperial designs, if possible, by using the Bible.

As the dream of a prosperous Kenya after independence from the British became a nightmare, beginning in the 1970s with the rule of President Kenyatta and going into the 1980s under the regime of President Moi, the shift from white colonialists to black oligarchy catapulted the prophetic voice of the past back to the scene.

Mĩcere called them out through plays like The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, co-written with Ngugi wa Thiongó and performed at the Kenya National Theatre. Mũgo and Thiong’o spoke truth to power. As a result, they were jailed for inciting people to rebel against their government.

“Has the LORD spoken only to Moses?”

We must understand Miriam’s question to be a prophetic and theological challenge. They were not words uttered out of jealousy, slander, or arrogance, but prophetic truth spoken to power. Miriam questions not only the channel of God’s voice, but also the character of Israel’s god; who is this god Moses claims to be on his side, who gives him sole authority, who punishes and strikes and kills at the slightest sign of challenge and protest?

They were not words uttered out of jealousy, slander, or arrogance, but prophetic truth spoken to power.

This god appears different from the one Miriam had experienced at the riverbank. The one the defiant midwives had trusted. A god who rises in outrage against the violence and death-worshipping power of the empire, the god Miriam had proclaimed at the seashore, in contrast with the God of Moses, a vengeful, frightening mirror image of the gods of Egypt who know only domination, submission and death.

Miriam speaks prophetic truth to power, and it is so serious that Yahweh intervenes directly in defence of Moses. She knew how God showed a fierce partiality for Moses and male leadership in Israel with the brutal suppression of a rebellion over food. And yet, like her foremothers in Egypt, despite the risks, she speaks.

By refusing the privileges of her class, Mĩcere committed class suicide. She recounted when the Moi government offered her properties or positions:

“At one point, the government offered me land up there in Naromoru, about 50 acres. I was actually called to go to [Minister of Lands and Settlement] Mr [Nicholas] Biwott’s office in order to be given this gift from President Moi. While at the office, I told Mr Biwott, ‘Thank you very much. I really appreciate it, but please can you give this piece of land to some of the landless people, especially the former Mau Mau fighters?’

The next thing I knew was that I was being called in for questioning at the police station. ‘Look,’ interrogators yelled, ‘You were offered this piece of land by the president, and you were very rude, and you are now trying to tell him who to give it to. Who do you think you are?’

During the interrogation, if I did not write what they wanted me to, I remember a number of times they would hold my head and bash it on the table. Many times, I would go blank. Later, during hospitalisation in London, I was to discover that a minor strike I had been diagnosed with had come from these bashings. But I recovered sufficiently from the ordeal.”

In choosing a “people’s path” to promote the interests of the masses rather than the elite, Mũgo had become reprehensibly dangerous in the eyes of the elite and the state.

Exiled for speaking, Miriam is banished outside the camp. Although both Aaron and Miriam questioned Moses, only Miriam was punished. Naomi Graetz raises the question, “Why was Miriam punished and not Aaron?”

It is because Miriam takes the initiative, providing leadership, and it is not an easily forgivable sin. Miriam is neither terrorised nor cowed into submission.

Miriam speaks prophetic truth to power, and it is so serious that Yahweh intervenes directly in defence of Moses.

Although Mĩcere had not fully recovered from the minor stroke suffered during her tortures, she fled the country with her two young daughters, eight-year-old Mumbi and six-year-old Njeri, to avoid detention.

Mĩcere still speaks to us in the words of her address to the Riara University students in 2016: “If you have chosen the path of struggle, you must have the courage to build a new home wherever your path leads. Don’t romanticise home; you must have the courage to make new homes and new roots.”

Our sister Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo has now travelled away from this world to her new home. As a priest, for the last ten years we prayed together, shared scriptures, and had spiritual discourse. She often said: “Who am I, to say there is no God.” We came to agree that Utu and the dignity of all humanity are not incompatible with Christ’s characteristics and teaching.

Wade in the waters 

Wade in the water

Wade in the water, children

Wade in the water

God’s gonna trouble the water

An African American Jubilee Spiritual Song (1901)

–

Text adapted from the sermon during the Mĩcere Mũgo memorial service at All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi, 15 August 2023.

“…part of the liberation process was not just to create a better world, but also to create better people of ourselves.” Micere Githae Mugo (Indianapolis, 2014)

We took Micere Mugo to the airport in New York City in 2015. Her daughter, Mumbi wa Mugo, was driving. At the airport, we were served by an incredibly discourteous attendant. So rude was this attendant that Micere almost missed her flight. But as we dashed to the gate, Micere handed me a twenty-dollar note. “Please give these twenty dollars to the airport attendant. It is our tip for his service,” she said as she handed me the dollar bill. Why reward bad behaviour, I wondered. Noting my discomposure, Micere advised: “Our role is to humanise him and not to be like him.” I witnessed the transformation of the erstwhile insolent attendant who now wanted to know how else he could help Micere. Such were Micere’s creative but revolutionary acts, which she performed quietly but powerfully. Micere, who died on June 30, 2023, in Syracuse, New York, embodied this humanising judgment.

As the architect of what she called the “onion structure theory”, Micere used this paradigm to capture a worldview where the existence of the individual, the collective group, and the world around them were inextricably intertwined. The idea that none of these entities could exist without the other was one of the most powerful forces in Micere’s philosophy. It was the core of the utu and ubuntu philosophy, which she embodied. When her daughter, Njeri Kui Mugo, died in 2012, Micere travelled to Kenya for one of Njeri’s memorial services. During her stay in Nairobi, I remember Micere calling one of her students in Syracuse who was defending his post-graduate thesis. Here was a mother who was grieving her daughter, but who still cared about her student’s wellbeing at a moment of personal pain and motherly loss.

Nicknamed “Njurī,” and baptised Madeline, Micere was born in Kariria, Kirinyaga, on 12 December 1942, to an elite Kenyan family. She was born in a world that was contending with the crises and consequences of trisecting national, continental, and global events: The Second World War, colonial expansionism, and the rising resistance against it. When Micere turned ten in 1952, the same year the State of Emergency was declared in Kenya, she witnessed one of the most violent periods in her country’s history and herstory. The Kenya Land and Freedom Army, popularly known as Mau Mau, had intensified its resistance against colonial occupation and brutality. Micere had just joined Embu Intermediate School, which was at the heart of this war. Accounts of her experiences during that period are gut-wrenching:

“When the colonial forces killed Mau Mau fighters, whom they called terrorists, they would line up the corpses for public exhibition and at times we would be taken out of our classroom to go view the dead bodies… And whenever these teachers – most of them were white – took us out there, they would say things like: This is your lesson for today. You see them? If you do not help and assist in telling us which of your uncles and brothers and fathers are terrorists, you are going to go through this every day.”

Micere attended Embu Girls’ School between 1955 and 1957, an interesting period for her family because her father, Richard Karuga Githae, who had worked very closely with Mzee Jomo Kenyatta in organising rallies to conscientize the masses against colonialism, was now a collaborator with the British and was serving as a colonial Senior Chief in Mwea Division.

Between 1957 and 1960, Micere attended Alliance Girls’ High School for her secondary education. Although this was a period when colonialism was coming to an end, the British colonial establishment did not seem convinced that Black Africans were as intellectually endowed as their white counterparts. In order to test this racist logic, Micere was enrolled at Limuru Girls’ High School, an all-white girls’ high school. The other non-white student at the school was Kirpal Singh, an Indian girl who had attended Gloucester School, currently Pangani Girls’ High School. “I didn’t know anyone,” Micere said in our interview in 2014. “I didn’t have friends. It was a very lonely environment and I understood that I was walking into an antagonistic space. Knowing that a lot of students believed I was inferior to them and assumed that I could not perform at their level, made the experience very painful.” It is while at Limuru Girls’ High School that Micere started reading James Baldwin, who later became one of her close friends.

Despite the pain she endured, the loneliness she withstood, and the racism that she bravely confronted, Micere emerged as the best student at Limuru Girls’ High School, earning herself a scholarship to go to Oxford University. To the surprise of many, Micere declined this scholarship, preferring to go to Makerere University, which she joined in 1963. At Makerere she studied under John Mbiti, Okot p’Bitek, and David Cook, among others. While at Makerere, some of her earliest poems were broadcast on the BBC. She was later to become the first female editor of PenPoint, a literary journal in the English department. Graduating from one of the most vibrant intellectual sites in East Africa at the time, Micere was emboldened by the culture of debating and speaking truth to power that thrived at Makerere. She had witnessed the rise of students’ intellectual activism, most of it expressed through the publication of short stories, plays, poems, and debates among peers who confidently challenged their professorial interlocutors.

Emerging from what was seen as the Makerere tradition, Micere enrolled for a postgraduate diploma in education at the University of Nairobi in September 1966. “From its inception, this program, had a progressive vision meant to produce teachers who would decolonise education, professionals who were ingrained in the philosophy of ‘education for liberation,’ very much in line with Paulo Freire’s ideas in Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” she said in one of our conversations.

Graduating from one of the most vibrant intellectual sites in East Africa at the time, Micere was emboldened by the culture of debating and speaking truth to power that thrived at Makerere.

Micere left for Canada in 1969 to pursue higher education at the University of New Brunswick. Here she was introduced to African American and Caribbean writings, and the growing culture of letters in the Black diaspora. This intellectual climate expanded her connections to Black radicals associated with the Black Arts Movement and provided her with the opportunity to connect the struggles of African Americans to those of liberation movements around the world, especially those in southern African countries. A little-known aspect of Micere’s life was her deep involvement with militant movements fighting for the independence of Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. She was also active in the Free Angela Davis campaign, which had spread to several cities in the world in the early ’70s.

Micere returned to Kenya in 1973, with another honour – she was the first person to hold a PhD in literature in East Africa. This education, combined with her eloquence, would instantly turn her into one of the most powerful interpreters of the West to Africa. In September 1973, Micere joined the department of literature at the University of Nairobi as a lecturer and for the next decade she would engage with, train, and influence a generation of students and lecturers including Eddah Gachukia, Willy Mutunga, Martha Karua, Kivutha Kibwana, Wahome Mutahi, and Simon Gikandi, among others. Aware that the post-colony was erasing the contributions of women, Micere traversed the country with some of her students, including Wanjiku Kabira, interviewing former Mau Mau women fighters. She was one of the intellectuals who worked very closely with Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima and Mukami Kimathi. History was incomplete and inaccurate, she argued, if it erased the narratives of women in the liberation struggle.

This education, combined with her eloquence, would instantly turn her into one of the most powerful interpreters of the West to Africa.

Two years after Micere’s return from Canada, JM Kariuki was assassinated. Two other assassinations had already shaken the nation: That of Pio Gama Pinto in 1965, and that of Tom Mboya in 1969. From her office at the University of Nairobi, Micere saw the paradox that was now defining the young nation: Kenya was suffocating under the weight of disillusionment with postcolonial political and economic policies, but it was also being energised by the vibrancy of intellectual debates that imagined the future beyond the failures of independence and the contradiction of the neo-colony.

In 1968, attempts to decolonise the curriculum had started with a proposal to abolish the English Department at the University of Nairobi, an initiative led by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Henry Owour Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong, but many of the actual changes in the teaching of literature at the University were implemented when Micere joined the department in 1973. With a doctorate in literature and a postgraduate diploma in education, Micere could bring her imprimatur to debates on education and curriculum development. In fact, her background in education would lead to other important roles in the changing pedagogical landscape. She was the first African Chief Examiner in literature for the then East African Certificate of Education at both the ordinary and advanced levels. In addition to overseeing the literature examination system in the entire East African region, she trained examiners, supervised and moderated their work, enforced grading standards, and assisted ministries of education in Africanising the curriculum. For Micere, the biggest national educational projects between 1973 and 1982 included “overhauling the up to then colonial secondary school curricula, promoting drama and theatre in schools and colleges, applying individual and collective research to practical community needs”, she wrote in 2012.

Still, Micere’s achievements flourished in an intellectual and political environment dominated by powerful men, and she often worked in hostile environments at the university and at the national level. In 1978, Micere was elected as the first Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nairobi. The same year President Jomo Kenyatta died, to be succeeded by his vice president, Daniel arap Moi. In this period of uncertainty, it quickly became clear that the new government was alarmed by Micere’s radical politics. She became a target of constant harassment, often receiving disparaging and sexually graphic calls at home. Ironically, one of the powerful figures in the Moi government was Jeremiah Kiereini, Micere’s brother-in-law, the secretary to the cabinet in Moi’s government. Despite these family connections, and various efforts by the government to buy her with offers of high positions and material possessions, including fifty acres of land in Naromoru, Micere refused to associate with the regime and for this she was arrested and taken to a police station for interrogation. “I remember several times they would hold my head and bang it on the table. Many times, I would go blank,” she said in an interview in 2014. Two years later, in 2016, the late Charles Njonjo called Micere and apologised for all the harassment she went through in the early 1980s when Njonjo served as one of the most powerful politicians in the Moi government.

The increasing oppressive policies of the Moi government had disrupted teaching at the University of Nairobi. The situation would become even worse in the aftermath of an attempted coup in August 1982. Although the attempted coup was led by disillusioned non-commissioned officers in the military, the Kenyan government shifted much of the blame to radical intellectuals at the University of Nairobi and targeted many of them for detention and, in some cases, assassination. As the government clamped down on activists, including professors and students, Micere hurriedly left the country with Mumbi and Njeri, her two young daughters, to begin what turned out to be four decades of exile.

Ironically, one of the powerful figures in the Moi government was Jeremiah Kiereini, Micere’s brother-in-law, the secretary to the cabinet in Moi’s government.

Micere and her daughters had their first home in exile in Canton in upstate New York. Here, she immersed herself in community activities, including teaching creative writing, courses on African civilisation, and Kiswahili in a Maximum Security Prison. Most of the inmates were Black and Latino and had been removed from their hometowns and incarcerated far away from their families in what Micere considered to be a form of exile in their own country. But the inmates’ exile could not have been worse than what Micere and her family were going through. At school in upstate New York, Mumbi and Njeri, the only two black children in the school, became targets for bullying and racist attacks. Micere, feeling alienated “geographically, historically, and spiritually” wanted to return to Africa. She applied and was offered a position as Chair and Professor of English at the University of Zambia. On her way to Lusaka, she made a stopover in London where, to her surprise, she was informed that she could not be allowed to enter Zambia. Apparently, President Moi had telephoned his Zambian counterpart, President Kaunda, and had pressured the Zambian government to deny Micere entry into the country. Micere was now stranded in London with her two young daughters, and she would have been a stateless person hadn’t Sally Mugabe, the Ghanian-born wife of President Robert Mugabe, whom she had known through her long association with the liberation movements in Southern Africa, asked her to apply for a professorial position at the University of Zimbabwe.

Micere applied for the job, got it, and moved to Zimbabwe where she was to live from 1984 to 1992.

Zimbabwe had won its independence when Micere arrived and had embarked on the production of a progressive indigenous literature for Zimbabwean government schools. It was in this context that Micere began to rethink the project of literature in relation to its audiences. She was particularly interested in orature, and wrote one of her most powerful monographs, African Orature and Human Rights out of her engagement with orality. Looking for new avenues of using literature as a medium of democratisation, Micere started conceiving literature and literary criticism as a mode of performance. Her goal in performing criticism was to give her audience a voice; by giving her interlocutors a voice, Micere’s goal was to offer them an important tool in the production of a culture of democratisation. In Zimbabwe, Micere was thriving intellectually, but the problems of living in exile were not going away. Her passport had filled up. When she sent her passport for replacement at the Kenyan High Commission Offices in Lusaka, it disappeared and efforts to recover it proved fruitless. Micere became a Zimbabwean citizen until 2010 when she “regained” her Kenyan one.

Micere returned to North America as a Visiting Professor at Cornell University in 1992 before moving to Syracuse in 1993 where she taught for 22 years until her retirement in 2015. In Syracuse, Micere’s contributions were as invaluable as they were diverse. She became the first Black professor to be awarded the prestigious Meredith Professorship for Teaching Excellence after submitting a proposal on debating as a method of teaching and learning. But her influence would spread outside the university. As had been the case in Zimbabwe, Micere set out to create communities wherever she lived. Thousands of miles away from home, she created a new home, just as in her poem, My Mother’s poem: wherever/you are/be it/ in the air/in the sea/be it/ in the trees/be it/in the deserts/create new life/create new human beings/out of those/and build/new homes. By building new homes wherever she went, Micere set out to repair the damage the oppressive regime in Kenya had done not only in destroying institutions, but by wrecking families. Micere’s relationship with her daughters would serve as a model of the power of love and unbreakable motherhood.

Apart from her loving daughters, Micere’s life was defined by a global family of scholars and writers. The archive of her life and her family album is full of her encounters with some of the most distinguished Pan-Africanist politicians, writers, and scholars of our time. In this archive, we see her with Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana, Samora Machel and Marcelino dos Santos of Mozambique, Angela Davis and James Baldwin of the United States, Issa Shivji of Tanzania, Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima of Kenya, Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, Nawal El Saadawi of Egypt, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, her Kenyan colleague and collaborator. Micere was a model of an inviolable and incorruptible citizen and the epitome of the ideals of Pan-Africanism.

Serving as Micere’s biographer has been a learning experience for me. When my daughter, Njeri, was born in 2013, Micere visited us a few years later because “I want to see where you live so that I can have a mental picture when meditating for you and your daughter.” She travelled against her doctor’s advice. In 2014, when Prof. Ali Mazrui was hospitalised, Micere would send him floral arrangements and fruit bouquets. Later, Mazrui asked Micere to send him a poem. Micere went ahead and recorded her poems in Pauline’s, Mazrui’s wife, voicemail so that she could play them for Mazrui at the hospital. During Micere’s illness, I would send her a bouquet of flowers. My daughter sent her poems. Micere taught me how to live with dignity, care, honesty, and courage.

The archive of her life and her family album is full of her encounters with some of the most distinguished Pan-Africanist politicians, writers, and scholars of our time.

For the sixteen years that she fought multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, Micere was often worried more about our wellbeing than she was about herself. When we felt pain because of her suffering, she is the one who made our pain bearable.

Last year, in a phone conversation, she likened the symptoms of multiple myeloma to tricksters in our folktales. “These symptoms can trick you, but they are quite cowardly, just like Anansi or the rabbit or the hyena in our tales,” she joked over the phone. “If you bravely scream at them, they run away and hide. So, Ndirangu, please help me to scream at them.” We laughed. I would call her often to remind her that I had even bought a vuvuzela to scare away these “tricksters”. Micere’s resolve to live is captured in Martin Carter, the Guyanese poet, who sang that “death must not find us thinking that we die”. Micere transitioned when she wanted to. In Micere’s case, cancer lost.

Micere’s integrity was of a rare quality in its purity and profundity, especially in its complete lack of calculation. Her generosity was marked by an honest but critical acumen. She was deeply spiritual and often invoked the Almighty, the Ancestors, the Spirit World and the benevolent spirit of the Universe for intervention and guidance. Now she has joined the ancestors. Yet, we all know that all of us are called to be members of this ancestorhood. Still, we know there are those we have lived with in this world that we would not wish to be our ancestors. Even in this adoration of ancestorhood, where we are all called, we know that only a few are chosen. How lucky that we can say with certainty that Micere now resides with other benevolent ancestors, and we are sure she will continue to intervene on our behalf. “Even in the Hereafter, I will continue to be an activist,” she said in 2014.

I have lost a dear friend, teacher, mother, mentor, and what John Lewis called “a good troublemaker”. I already miss her so much.