Decolonial African feminism and the revolutionary lives of three mothers of Kenya.
Left to Right: Mukami Kimathi (Mhadalo Bridging Divides Limited, 2019), Micere Mugo (The Standard, 1995), and Muthoni wa Kirima (Courtesy her family). Used under Fair Use.
This is not an essay; it is not a think piece. It is an inadequate expression of grief and gratitude, an act of remembrance, a memorial to three Chimurenga Maitũ: mothers in liberation.
In 2023, the world lost three legendary Kenyan mothers of liberation (from left to right, in order of their passing): Mũkami Kĩmathi (who passed on May 5, at the age of 101), Professor Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo (June 30, age 80), and Mau Mau Field Marshal Mũthoni wa Kĩrĩma (September 5, age 92). I had the humbling privilege of sharing time and holding space filled with living knowledge and committed affection with each of these remarkable women over the past few years.
Throughout their lives, each of these women were often, or even exclusively, referenced in relation to the towering men they struggled and created alongside: literary luminary Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in the case of Mĩcere, and Dedan Kĩmathi Waciũri, leader of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army during the Mau Mau Rebellion, husband to Mũkami and fellow revolutionary army leader alongside Mũthoni. My search for the archival remains of Dedan Kĩmathi’s life, inspired in no small part by Mĩcere and Ngũgĩ’s seminal play The Trial of Dedan Kĩmathi, led me to these three women, living monuments of the struggle. And yet, to meet these women, to learn from them, and to listen to their stories, even briefly, revealed something far beyond their relational value to powerful men and opened another set of relations: among women, among mothers and their children, among kin and comrades in everyday struggles. For this remembrance, I have chosen to use these women’s first names rather than their honorific titles or last names, not to claim an overly familiar relationality or reduce their hard-earned statuses but to honor how they requested I address them and draw us into a space of communal kinship.
In an email in June 2022, ahead of my first visit to Mũthoni wa Kĩrĩma’s home in Nyeri, Mĩcere asked me to greet the Field Marshal as her Chimurenga Maitũ—her “liberation struggle mother.” The entangled lives of these three women—Mũkami, Mĩcere, and Mũthoni—embodied a liberatory ethic and radically decolonial African feminism, committed to the liberation of their people, their lands, and their bodies and spirits. Sylvia Tamale has called for this decolonial African feminism to deconstruct not just our conceptual notions of coloniality and gender but also our relational understandings of family, the body in its pleasures and pains, and liberation. As Mĩcere hailed, this revolutionary motherhood is both intensely local (Maitũ, the Gῖkũyũ word for “mother”) and Pan-Africanist (Chimurenga, a Shona word—variously translated as “collective struggle,” “uprising,” “revolution”—whose call to liberation has become a vernacular of struggle beyond the illusory borders of tribe or nation), the foremothers of Tamale’s rewriting of histories of Pan-Africanism and Mother Africa.
Revolutionary mothering is neither a new concept nor one limited to African feminist discourses. As I write this, activists, artists, and scholars, mothers all, in Gaza, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Haiti and beyond cry out and carry the burden of martyrdom and loss: of their people, their children, and their land. In the face of such utter dehumanization, mothering itself “becomes a revolutionary force.” As captured by Palestinian journalist Lama Ghosheh: “Mothering is a collective instinctual act, its force knows no bounds, and no prose can adequately describe it. Behind all the exhausted Palestinian mothers, there is the mother who shouldered all our burdens and endured all our pains, in a journey that dates back more than two thousand years. She is the keeper of our memories, and for her sake, our blood has been spilled. She is our great mother, and our land, Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
Building on the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, K’eguro Macharia, Saidiya Hartman, and others, Serawit B. Debele defines revolutionary mothering as a “disruptive practice” capable of “effecting social transformation through nurturing,” of imagining alternative futures, and of performing the “ultimate practice of love that makes possible life for those whose existence has been tampered with by forces such as the state.”
The Kenyan women remembered here liberated motherhood from its biological and gendered preconditions to encompass an ethics of care, homing, and healing as both everyday praxis and radical reordering. In “My Mother’s Poem”, Mĩcere wrote:
Then came
the healing words
words embalmed
with motherly love
words weighted
with orature wisdom
words spoken
the day after
my father
was buried
Daughter, do not
romanticize home
Do not, daughter
For many who are home
have jail
for home
…
The whole land
is crying
for home
…
Do not, daughter
You who have
chosen the path
of people’s struggle
must find the courage
to build new homes
to start new lives
In another verse, Mĩcere wrote that to be a feminist was “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.” “The Woman’s Poem” proclaims the global potentials of revolutionary motherhood:
Ta imagini (just imagine) that
our wombs
issued forth
one populous
global family
of women
combatants
Mĩcere’s creative work and cultural criticism open up intellectual production to a wider community of knowledge producers and practices through the “righting” of African feminist orature: “the creative imaginative art of composition that relies on verbal art for communication and that culminates in performance”—rounded rather than linear, relational rather than extractive. Mĩcere’s creative worlds, intellectual contributions, and political commitments were shot through with an expansive, inclusive, and militant conception of motherhood and mothering. It did not take long after her passing, however, for male “colleagues,” seemingly gleefully to spread rumors, personal attacks, and insinuations about her mental fitness, meant to undermine her immense intellectual and political legacy. Others, however, like Dr. Achola Pala Okeyo, wrote back against such attacks: of her intellectual sisterhood, her revolutionary mothering, her rebellious teachings, and her fearless fortitude in the face of personal, professional, and governmental persecution.
Mũkami Kĩmathi extended revolutionary motherhood into revolutionary widowhood: “I was only twenty-six years old yet I was the most famous widow in Kenya in a country full of widows.” She, alongside countless women and mothers, fought to liberate Kenya during the Mau Mau Rebellion: feeding, caring for, fighting alongside, and suffering in shared struggle with fellow freedom fighters. After the execution of her husband, Field Marshal Dedan Kĩmathi, she honored his request to keep his name alive by empowering all her subsequent children to carry his name. Wanjugu Kĩmathi (born to Mũkami in the 1970s) carries on the legacies of both Dedan and Mũkami through her leadership of the Dedan Kĩmathi Foundation, her unyielding search for the remains of Kĩmathi’s missing body, and her tireless fight for the restoration of land rights for Mau Mau veterans and others displaced by colonial dispossession and postcolonial corporate interests. Working as creative historical consultant on the recently premiered documentary Our Land, Our Freedom with directors Zippy Kimundu and Meena Nanji, I bore witness to Wanjugu’s strength, Mũkami’s resolve and humor, and the interwoven histories of familial struggle and national liberation. At Mũkami’s passing, while Kenyan commentators and academics alike fought over whether she “actually” fought in the forests of Central Kenya as part of the Kenya Land Freedom Army or was just a wife and eventual detainee in the “passive wing” in the villages, I could not help but feel again this legacy being diminished, questioned, and put in its place. In her biography, written in collaborative orature with Wairimũ Nderitũ who grew up calling her “Maitũ wa Kĩmathi,” Mũkami offered her story: of suffering without bending, of mothering generations of those born in the throes of liberatory struggle, of the gendered nature of struggle, and of her role as “wife and mother” to the movement: “Women’s bodies were theatres of war … The Mau Mau women paid heavily for their real and perceived roles in the war.”
Women’s bodies carry archives of liberation. The only woman to reach the highest rank of field marshal in the Kenya Land Freedom Army, Mũthoni’s life both defied gendered expectations and revealed new ways of mothering liberation, though silences, erasures, and manipulations have marred her memorialization, as Mĩcere had predicted. Never captured or surrendering, leaving the forest only once political independence had been wrested from British hands, Mũthoni nonetheless gave her life to the cause of liberation. Alone, she embarked on the perilous journey through the forest to join the rebel camps without her husband or guides, and over those many years she suffered multiple miscarriages. Without biological children, she embraced another way to mother. From her early days delivering intelligence and supplies to Kĩmathi’s troops to becoming one of Kĩmathi’s closest confidants and top generals, Mũthoni earned a special nickname from Kĩmathi: Thonjo, or “the weaverbird,” small birds known for their ingenuity and ability to navigate and endure in harsh environs, building new homes and camouflaging themselves against predators. After a few months, Kĩmathi recognized the limitless horizon of Mũthoni’s leadership, upgrading her nickname to Ng’ina wa Thonjo—“mother of weaverbirds,” invoking her role training a cadre of spies specialized in gathering intelligence, stealthily moving through the forests, and transforming the natural environment into a decolonial landscape. After leaving the forest, she lived the rest of her life surrounded by generations upon generations, whom she invited to consider her their maitũ with both familial and liberatory inflections, a militant motherhood freed from the shackles of biological fictions and patriarchal controls. She was known to say that she had mothered the nation, the mother of the resilient weaverbirds who fought for their survival and the very existence of the nation.
Mũthoni’s signature dreadlocks, uncut since she entered the forest in late 1952, entangled threads “yarning” a history that swept the ground with reverence, were an archive and living monument to the struggle. While Mũthoni told me her dreadlocks were not intended as a political statement but rather a practical consequence of life in the forest, they came to take on political meanings, as they had more broadly in Kenya, Jamaica, and beyond. She said often that she would not cut her dreadlocks until Kenya was truly free. Many were shocked when international headlines blasted the story of the shaving of Mũthoni’s dreadlocks in a public ceremony in 2022 by the mother of the nation, Mama Ngina Kenyatta, wife of the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, and mother of then president Uhuru Kenyatta. Rumors swirled around whether this performative spectacle occurred of her own free will: perhaps some of her children or opportunistic relatives were using the spectacle for financial gain or political leverage; perhaps the shaving of Mũthoni’s waist-length dreadlocks, heavy with the pains of history, would provide a powerful symbol that would shame the state into providing restitution to the family and other Mau Mau veterans; or, most cynically, perhaps the Kenyattas were attempting to bolster their waning political dynasty ahead of a heated election season. Back in 2013, when asked about President Uhuru Kenyatta, Mũthoni responded with reference to a well-known Kikuyu proverb: “Nda imwe yumaga muici na murogi”—translated variously as “The womb produces [gives birth to] a thief and a witch”—but in Mũthoni’s rewording to The Economist, “From the womb comes a warrior, a king, a rich man, a criminal, and a killer.”
Just as the passing of Mĩcere and Mũkami almost immediately brought out those who would question and diminish their legacies, many questioned the shaving of Mũthoni’s dreadlocks almost a year before her passing in an attempt to reduce and rob her of her agency and voice: in this very blog, two scholars, Nicholas Githuku and Lotte Hughes, wrote, “It is tragic that Muthoni may well not know, or remember, the history of the strained relationship between Kenyatta and Mau Mau, and could not object to being used in this way by such a powerful figure.” Further, they questioned “had she [Mama Ngina] met the likes of Field Marshal Muthoni before 2022? Most probably not. Why now?” Having spent time with Mũthoni in 2022, time the previous authors clearly had not, I can attest that she spoke often not only of her fondness for the “mother of the nation” Mama Ngina but also of their decades-long relationship that, while not without contention, was sustained and significant. Even after quoting scholar Margaret Gachihi’s reminder of Mũthoni’s words earlier that year that she felt “the end was nigh” and that shaving her dreadlocks may have provided a symbolic shedding of “her burden to the next generation,” Githuku and Hughes opted to dismiss and diminish Mũthoni’s own agency, historical memory, and deeply personal motivations. Mũthoni’s fortitude, intellect, sacrifice, and continued mothering of the struggle became casualty to this partisan, if not entirely new or unwarranted, argument.
In my conversations with Mũthoni in the months that followed the ceremony, she was clear: the decision to shave her dreadlocks, however painful, and gift them wrapped in the Kenyan flag to her “friend” Mama Ngina, who had helped her secure an ivory license in the early years of independence, was hers alone. She added that the weight of carrying that history within her locks was causing severe physical and psychic pain, barely a year before she joined the ancestors, and that the unfinished work of liberation had now to be taken up by her “children.” Additionally, her dreadlocks were not the only affective and bodily archive Mũthoni maintained: she proudly exhibited her famous jacket worn in the forest, woven from the fur and skins of the thuni—dik-diks found in the Nyandarua forest—and invited me to touch its tattered remains. In a particularly intimate moment, she took my hand and guided it to the hard flesh in her shoulder where a bullet remained lodged after she was shot by colonial forces while barely escaping back into the safety of the forest’s canopy. As Rose Miyonga has argued, many veterans created their own archives, “engendered by the preservation of memories in personal archives and in survivors’ very bodies.” These archives carry both nostalgic memories and a literal “archive of pain” in scars, disabilities, and immeasurable losses. Whatever her motivations, Mũthoni had never been a woman to be used, silenced, or ignorant of the wider political contexts in which her decisions and actions might be interpreted and understood.
The transcendent formulations of both revolutionary and public motherhood that these three Kenyan women embodied drew on long traditions found across the continent. Borrowing the concept from literary scholar Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, scholars Lorelle Semley, Elizabeth Jacob, Nakanyike Musisi, Rhiannon Stephens, and Meghan Healy-Clancy have deployed “public motherhood” in the contexts of West Africa, Uganda, and South Africa to contextualize motherhood as “experience, institution, and discourse” that draws moral authority from both literal and symbolic maternalism and “untangles biologizing connotations of ‘mothering’ from social and political expressions of women’s leadership and power.” In Kenya, the 1992 Mothers of Political Prisoners protest tapped into historical and global movements that make public the symbolic and political power of mothers as caregivers and protectors of the moral life of the nation. Yet, as the life of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela demonstrates, “mothers of the nation” often suffer particular historical burdens and public sanctions—their very wombs becoming a matter of state, as Nakanyike Musisi has so eloquently examined in the life of Baganda Queen Mother Irene Namaganda. The militant, creative, political, and moral interventions of public motherhood link these three Kenyan women in intellectual, affective, and revolutionary kinship that carries forward in the work and struggles of their “children.”
This is not an essay; it is an act of remembrance. I can still feel the warm liquid of their watery blessings as they spit into their hands, held mine, and with their saliva pressed into my palm invited me into their worlds. My personal debt pales in comparison to those who lived alongside these women and learned at their feet in daily communion. To so many, they offered intellectual interventions and affective solidarity with cautious yet overwhelming generosity. The braided histories and immeasurable legacies of these three women persist, and their lives and offerings deserve to be remembered and cited: as singular yet always relational, our Chimurenga Maitũ.
