An Afro-Feminist Decolonial Reading of Mwalimu Micere Githae Mugo

An Afro-Feminist Decolonial Reading of Mwalimu Micere Githae Mugo

A Young Micere Mugo

Born in 1942, Mwalimu Micere grew up in a decade around which the momentum of the resistance was building up across various parts of the colony, Kenya. For women, specifically women from central Kenya, this was the period in which they carried out several and frequent work stoppages, strikes, and other forms of resistance that led up to the declaration of a state of emergency in 1952, and the full-on guerilla war by the forest fighters — the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, popularly known as the Mau Mau.2,3 As a child, Mwalimu Micere would have witnessed or at the very least heard several ‘stories’ of incidents of different women blatantly expressing defiance against colonial authorities. A core component of the women’s resistance was their use of muthirigus (songs), proverbs, metaphors and other forms of orature to express their disapproval of colonial authority as well as communicate their needs.2,4 Historical accounts of the time provided by scholars such as Presley, Nganga and Kanogo reveal the ubiquitous use of various orature practices among Kikuyu women. As a young girl, Mwalimu Micere was immersed in the world of orature, which she first encountered, not as an academic pursuit but as a vital communal institution of expression. It was a medium predominantly used by community members, especially women, to address their own needs and fulfil fundamental tasks within their communities. This introduction began in her childhood home where her mother and other elderly women in the neighbourhood regaled her with beautiful stories, myths, poems and riddles that were skillfully told and performed. The stories not only captivated her imagination, but also left a lasting impression on her young mind, highlighting the exceptional artistry of the mothers, grandmothers, and aunties who were revered as educators in their communities.5 As such, it must have been shocking when she joined the colonial school, to experience how the art she found pleasure in and had a passion for at home was discouraged and devalued in the colonial schools.

Whereas Mwalimu Micere had proudly identified with and aspired to the artistry of older adult women, colonial education sought to ‘civilise’ her into Western art as the only acceptable art form. Mwalimu Micere's encounters with colonial education offer a window into the systematic suppression and erasure of African women's roles and modes of expression. Through colonial processes, these women were marginalised and confined to the private sphere, significantly diminishing their societal influence and visibility.

Mwalimu Micere’s education is important in the history of Kenyan women because she is a woman of many firsts in women’s academic history in Kenya. She was the first black Kenyan girl in an all-white Limuru girls’ high school. Her enrollment in the school was part of an experimental initiative by colonial authorities, who wanted to “assess” the potential and adaptability of black girls in navigating the supposedly complex and profound world of high school.6

This first holds great significance for various reasons, particularly in its role as a momentous occasion that opened doors for girls in Kenya's academic history, marking a step forward in the educational advancement of girls in Kenya. Nonetheless, this first also highlights a costly tradeoff. The nature of academia, as imposed by colonial authorities did not include African women's indigenous sources of knowledge, their roles as educators in their communities, and their practice of orature. African women who had been educators and performers significantly lost their communal spheres of influence in exchange for introduction into the colonial public sphere whose foundation was exclusion, more so the exclusion of women. It should be emphasized that African women did work in the public realm back then, but their involvement and contributions were undervalued and overlooked. Enrolling girls and young women in formal education alone did not ensure the preservation and advancement of African women’s indigenous spheres of influence. These spheres of influence were crucial for perpetuating communal values and asserting and safeguarding the gender-specific interests of the women. Mwalimu Micere attempted to disrupt this erasure of African women’s knowledge and world senses throughout her lifetime. Her efforts still make transformational ripples in feminist anti-colonial pursuits.

Education and Racism
The mistreatment or neglect of oral literature in colonial education is not the sole contradiction young Micere Mugo faced. Being the daughter of a chief and a teacher, she had the advantage of receiving education and other privileges that were scarce for many black children in Kenya during the 1940s and 50s. Her brilliance guaranteed her success in the academic institutions she joined. Yet, attending these institutions made her the target of racist violence in very personal ways.

For instance, white teachers at Embu Intermediate School made students view dead Mau Mau fighters’ bodies to discourage support for the Mau Mau.7 Not even her father, a collaborator who became chief for the colonial masters, escaped arrest and imprisonment for his alleged leniency towards insurgents.8 Even more personal was the racism she faced as the only black student at Limuru Girls (1961–1962).

“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,” Mwalimu Micere shared in a 2014 interview with Wachanga.”7(p3)

As a student, Micere Mugo recognized the precarious and absurd nature of her privileges, especially in light of the racist torment she endured in school. According to her biographer Wachanga,7 it was while at Limuru Girls High School that Mwalimu Micere discovered the works of James Baldwin. Racist hatred and the ensuing loneliness and isolation led her to lean into her love for reading and to find language and solace in writings about Black liberation.

Ndigi,9 a former student of Mwalimu Micere at Alliance Girls, vividly recounted a story that showcased Mwalimu's unwavering commitment to combating racism around the period of Kenya's flag independence. According to Ndigi, upon joining the school as a teacher, Mwalimu Micere wasted no time in openly denouncing and reprimanding teachers who subjected students to racist insults as part of her dedicated efforts to eradicate racism within the school. Before Mwalimu Micere's interventions, students were oblivious to the racist nature of the derogatory remarks made by their hostile teachers who dehumanized Black students, calling them obscene racial slurs. In the colonial education system, Black children recognized the violence of their white teachers but lacked an understanding of its structural nature or the vocabulary with which to express it. Mwalimu Micere, who had personally endured racism at Limuru Girls, had already developed a deep awareness of the systemic nature of the violence and used this awareness to combat it. Racist experiences and political awareness may have also fueled her decision to decline a prestigious scholarship to study at Oxford University and instead choose to enroll at Makerere University. This decision speaks to how she valued being in a predominantly Black learning environment, engaging in anti-colonial and anti-racism activism rather than aspiring towards what colonial education deemed aspirational.

Due to colonial education's suppression of African knowledge systems, Mwalimu Micere's core passion for oral literature did not stem from colonial schools. Instead, it grew from her observations, knowledge acquisition, and admiration for the African women who surrounded her. Not limited by biological motherhood, these women publicly influenced children and entire communities through orature and other forms of communal expression. They also utilized orature to express their interests and desires as women within their communities. According to Oyewumi,10 in African women’s perception of the world, which she refers to as “world sense,” motherhood was not simply a biological role, but rather a public responsibility where women saw themselves as mothers, artists, and educators for the entire community. These women were incredibly effective in these public roles, as evident from their profound impact on young Mwalimu Micere. It is they, who inspired her to become a talented orator and to embrace and affirm African women’s agency, and the significance of their Indigenous knowledge.

Her Life as a Liberated Zone

A common criticism leveled at leftist/socialist activists is the disconnect between their political ideals and daily lives, particularly in embodying anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist values. This is to be expected as contradiction is built into human nature, and leftists/socialists are no exception. Furthermore, most of the world's people born during the era of neocolonialism and globalization are conditioned to be capitalists and pursue capitalist goals. The implication is that many of us do not know how to exist in any other ways and veer away from reorienting our lives towards individual and communal existence outside of capitalism.

Mwalimu Micere intentionally attempted to make her lived reality correspond to her political ideals, offering a window into a flowering pan-africana liberated life. Her life is replete with alternative feminist and anti-capitalist visions of how to be and how to relate in the process of reclaiming our humanity from dehumanization (or ‘thingification’) by capitalist and imperial capture.

Liberated zones are areas where colonized peoples have reclaimed from invaders and repurposed them for their use and benefit.11 According to Mwalimu Micere, creating liberated zones is not limited to specific spheres or realms. She believed that liberated zones are needed to counter all dominating cultures, including psychological enslavement. She urged that equal fervor be put into liberating our minds as decolonizing various institutions, including land, education, media, and the law.11(p31) Mwalimu Micere saw the struggle to liberate all oppressed people as a collective endeavor and an individual initiative. She persistently urged intellectuals to free themselves from the ‘masters’ intellectualism and to ensure consistency between their ideologies and social existence.11,12(p2),13 These aren’t sentiments she reserved for intellectuals alone. On the contrary, she implored everyone committed to dismantling oppression — herself included — and said that the liberation process requires creating a better world and better people.

Mwalimu Micere’s life reflects her conscious commitment to humanizing people and adopting ways of knowing and relating that recognize and affirm the humanity of all oppressed peoples.7 Her life was guided by the principles of Utu/Ubuntu philosophy, for which she both theorized and advocated as a politic. Mwalimu Micere’s articulation of Utu/Ubuntu as a political philosophy calls for individuals to embody love, care, generosity, introspection, and awareness as core principles of social progressivism, connecting the collective to their human essence. By practicing Utu/Ubuntu as a social actor and advocating for it, she takes a distinctly political stance against prevailing structures of oppression.

Her readiness to be present, support, participate, and contribute when called upon is widely acknowledged by peers and the wider public. For example, her biographer Wachanga7 is understandably surprised that, despite her overwhelming grief and sorrow over losing her daughter, she found it necessary to check in on her student, who was about to defend his thesis. This highlights her commitment to communality and solidarity, especially to dismantle hierarchies of oppression and struggles. Pan-Africanist Scholar Manji14 speaks of her phenomenal generosity of spirit and willingness to have time for people, especially young people. Another scholar, Gathogo14 speaks of the invincible weapon of love that informed every aspect of Mwalimu Micere’s life. Author and researcher Carole Davies,15(p2) adds to the numerous voices highlighting Mwalimu Micere’s capacity for “creating community, being readily available when called upon to share knowledge, maintaining her national and international presence and commitment to Pan-African politics.”

Also crucially, when President Moi, through his stooge and then Minister of Lands, Nicholas Biwott offered Mwalimu Micere 50 acres of land as a ‘gift,’ she rejected it, urging, “… please can you give this piece of land to some of the landless people, especially the former Mau Mau fighters?”8(p11) She rejected the pursuit of wealth through capitalist means and instead advocated for the fair redistribution of resources among those deprived of their land. Mwalimu Micere’s embodiment of Utu/Ubuntu philosophies was her way of reclaiming her humanity as a black African woman affected by colonial subjugation and acknowledging the humanity of the individuals she engaged with in the fight for liberation.

It would, however, be incorrect to see the Utu/Ubuntu philosophies that Mwalimu Micere embodied as her sole individual characteristics or as her ‘lifestyle.’ Love, compassion, care, and introspection are relegated to individual qualities under capitalism, exempting the state and ‘capitalistic communities’ from promoting and nurturing meaningful connections between individuals. Thereby making it possible for capital to capture, commodify, and disregard the emotional labor involved in its operations. When her embodiment of Utu/Ubuntu philosophies is understood as her sole individual characteristics or as her ‘lifestyle,’ she also becomes a victim of the capitalist patriarchal capture of women’s labor.

Individuals acquainted with Mwalimu Micere through academia or anti-colonial and Black liberation movements have sentimentally described her as their “mother, friend, sister, among others.7,13,15,16 Regardless of their professional or personal connections as colleagues, friends, comrades, etc., many developed special and cherished bonds with her. Thus, it can be argued that Mwalimu Micere played a crucial role in addressing the emotional needs of individuals, which are often neglected in capitalist institutions. Above all, it represents her contribution to the struggle for liberation within movement/organizing spaces. Through embodying utu-ism, she transformed movements into loving, relatable, informative, and even therapeutic spaces for many. This is often the case with many African women who more readily assume the responsibility of providing care, emotional labor, and relationship building in movement spaces, as does Mwalimu Micere. Mwalimu fondly assigned these affectionate relational labels to individuals based on the African world sense and the concept of motherhood. However, capitalist systems tend to devalue this emotional labor, unlike in Indigenous communities where such contributions enjoy some degree of recognition and value. When this care work is acknowledged (which rarely happens), it is portrayed as exceptional rather than politically revolutionary. Understanding Mwalimu Micere within the framework of a revolutionary struggle, as she saw herself, also involves recognizing the care and emotional labor she contributed to Africana scholarship and black liberation movements as empowering and humanizing contributions. To attribute her embodiment of the Utu/Ubuntu philosophy to individual exceptionalism would distort and depoliticize her battle against colonialist and imperialist forces. Contextualizing Mwalimu Micere’s politics, life, and work lets us recognize that she truly practiced what she preached: weaponizing, not sacrificing, her life, work, and political ideals against all forms of domination and oppression. ‘A bold attempt’11 at creating a liberated political existence.

Repairing African Disconnections

Mwalimu Micere dedicated her life’s work to the struggle against colonial and imperial violence alongside all forms of oppression. Like many other African women of the time, she shattered the stereotype of African women as passive. African women openly opposed the brutal colonial policies and joined in the resistance. Mwalimu Micere realized early in her career that political activism was crucial to liberating Black/African individuals. She got involved in politics and ran for elective positions in both student and professional spheres.5,7,13 rising to prominence in the Black Student Union, even though her Commonwealth scholarship at the University of New Brunswick strictly forbade any involvement in political activities.5

As a result, she appears prominently in anti-colonial struggles during what may be the only historical period (1970s-1980s) when Kenya's intellectual institutions were most vehemently opposed to neocolonialism. For her, academia was crucial in raising positive political consciousness and preparing students to comprehend, participate in, and contribute to decolonization. From her former student, Ndigi’s reflections,9 Mwalimu Micere intentionally exposed students to politically themed fictional works, such as Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest and Francis Imbuga’s Betrayal in the City to ensure that they understood the political implications of their socio-cultural and economic realities.

Many scholars and former students have testified to her influence in the struggle waged by students and lecturers alike against President Moi’s neocolonial state.7,13 This direct involvement in the campaign against neocolonial practices culminated in her detention, torture, and persistent intimidation by the state, forcing her to flee into exile in 1982 and finally being denied citizenship.7,8,14,17,18 Thus, Mwalimu Micere was a key contributor to the struggle against neocolonialism in Kenya. More so, her contributions to anti-colonial struggles transcended borders. While in exile, Mwalimu Micere maintained participation in freedom struggles, contributing to the independence struggles of many African nations. Ngugi wa Thing’o explains that ‘wherever there was a people’s struggle, like the armed struggle in Zimbabwe, Mĩcere was there.’’19(p3) She organized for clothes and money to be sent to Zimbabwean freedom fighters in Zimbabwe and was equally resourceful in South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and the USA.7,17,19 In this regard, she is similar to the many women who contributed to Kenya's independence movement in ways other than combat, such as delivering food and intelligence.

Furthermore, Mwalimu Micere’s work outside of Kenya clearly expresses her opposition to colonial borders, be they physical or symbolic. Colonial powers have historically coerced and controlled the behaviors of black/African people across borders. Mwalimu Micere’s exile was a product of such coercive influence and the fact that she spent more than two decades teaching at Syracuse University highlights how neocolonialism and neoliberal policies continue to undermine social relations of production for the benefit of Western powers.

However, by refusing to forsake the fight against colonialism while in exile, she refused to allow colonialists to suppress the actions she undertook. Her support and solidarity with other colonized territories were Pan-Africanist undertakings aimed at repairing various kinds of ‘African people’s disconnection’20(p64) that are occasioned by colonial borders. Her commitment to repairing border-imposed disconnection can also be seen in her engagement with prison programs designed to conscientize black prisoners in the USA, and her insistence that her students engage in similar initiatives. 12,21

Breaking free from neocolonial notions of ‘home’
“I am a child of the Universe, I have lived in almost all continents,” Mwalimu Micere22 .

“If you have chosen the path of struggle, you must have the courage to build a new home wherever your path leads. Don’t romanticize home; you must have the courage to make new homes and new roots,” Mwalimu Micere.”8,23

Mwalimu Micere’s remonstration of colonist borders prompted her to see home in what could be considered a true Pan-Africanist sense. She challenged imperial capitalism's proclivity to exterminate black/African peoples through alienation or what she referred to as "disconnections." She embraced all her residences as home, using them as a foundation to forge new Pan-African connections. By positioning herself as a child of ‘everywhere,’ she established and nurtured Pan-African connections with black/African people, no matter where she was and where they were. She also understood that the black/African struggle for liberation is unified by its resistance against oppressive systems, irrespective of physical location. Mwalimu Micere’s conception of home broke free from neocolonial notions that understand home as our 'passport' homes, granting herself permission to engage in and contribute to Pan-Africanist visions around the world. Positioning herself as a child of ‘everywhere’ made her a guerilla intellectual who reinvented and continues to reinvent what ‘home’ means in the resistance for the liberation of all black/African people.


Pan-Africanist Undertakings
Mwalimu Micere is referred to as a Pan-Africanist because Pan Africanist aspirations can be found in her writings and speeches, as well as in the strategies she used as an agitator, mobiliser, organiser, and oraturist. Feminism, decolonization, and other anti-oppression causes are recurring motifs in her publications, speeches, writings, and poems. For example, the play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, which she co-authored with Ngugi wa Thing’o, sought to affirm the agency of armed peasants in the Mau Mau. It sought to recognize armed peasants as political agents capable of articulating and changing their history.24 The play is a brilliant example of decolonized artistic literature, given that it divested Mau Mau protagonists of the colonial tag of ‘terrorists’ and rightfully portrayed them using their community’s world sense —as liberators (mashujaa) of their people. Furthermore, the book 'writes women back' into the Mau Mau struggle, in protest of the disproportionate visibility of revolutionary women in Kenya's Independence literature, thus challenging the masculinist historicization prevalent in post-independence Kenya, which excluded women's participation in the struggle for independence.

Other examples of Mwalimu Micere’s Pan-African frameworks are present in her speeches. The speeches, The Battle of the Mind: A Matter of Life or Death (1980),’ and Transcending Colonial and Neo-Colonial Pathological Hangovers to Unleash Creativity (2003),’ for example, not only illuminate Black/African peoples' histories but also offer critical reminders against complicity in oppressive systems and propositions for combating neocolonialism. Most importantly, her speeches were dialogical artistic performances in and of themselves. Mwalimu Micere’s speeches are dialogical artistic performances because they blended liberatory scholarship, African orature traditions, and creative writing. Mwalimu Micere demonstrates an alternative Afro-feminist and Pan-Africana vision of a pedagogical framework based on indigeneity, the communality of art, and collective learning by punctuating these speeches with traditional orature elements such as call and response, rhetorical questions, anecdotes, and humor. Presumably, she saw herself in the image of the African women she grew up learning from. Those powerful educators and performers. From an African feminist standpoint, she revived the colonially erased public office of motherhood, transforming the colonial 'classroom' into a "beautiful orature scene [traditionally a kitchen, compound, or village square] of an elder with her younger sisters/"daughters" sitting at her feet, feeding on her wisdom."5(p9))

In this alternative, African motherhood is honored and recognized as a positively authoritative and empowering public institution unadulterated by Western capitalist patriarchal meanings and conceptions that reduce motherhood to biological relations and subordinate to fatherhood.25 Mwalimu Micere offers a model we can expand upon and personalize to suit our unique circumstances. By infusing our creativity and cultural heritages, we can make our discussions, debates, public events, and, above all, our collective dialogues more human-centered rather than simply replicating the alienating capitalist modes of discourse

Utu/Ubuntu in Africana Scholarship

The Utu/Ubuntu Africana scholarship, as conceptualized by Mwalimu Micere, is a deliberate initiative to decolonize academia. This political ideology goes beyond mere recognition of our identities as part of a larger society (and the universe), and seeks to transform our socioeconomic, cultural, and political perspectives to truly reflect our shared human essence. When Manji17 calls it a ‘becoming’ he is referring to a political process through which we can overcome dominant oppressive systems by ‘creating new human beings with the agency to transform the world for the better,’26(p3) or emancipated humans. Mwalimu Micere almost incessantly invoked Cesaire, Fanon, and Cabral to emphasize that in a hegemonic patriarchal capitalist world, we are all dehumanized, or, to use her beloved Cesaire phrase, 'thingified.'

Her formulation of Utu/Ubuntu theorization adopts Fanon's articulation of violence as a fact of everyday existence under patriarchal capitalism. It builds on it as a means of weaning away from this violence. Like Fanon, Cabral, Raya, Luxemburg, and others, she saw alienation inherent in a capitalist patriarchal society. Implying that when we talk about achieving liberation, it means going beyond just the redistribution of resources; it also involves dismantling the various ways capital alienates us from one another and other beings/objects in the universe. In this case, the individual embodiment of utu/Ubuntu is co-constitutive of a Pan-Africana political framework for emancipatory humanism. Therefore, utu/Ubuntu focuses on developing systems and relationships that foster connectedness rather than estrangement. The utu notion, ‘I am because you are and since you are, therefore I am,’26(p4) serves as both a premise, an action, and an aspiration. The premise acknowledges that under capitalism, personhood is deprived of the attribute of being humane. The action is expressed via an anti-oppression struggle. It is the process of humanizing colonized peoples (and the entire world), leading us to the collective aspiration which is emancipatory humanism, in which our personhood is fundamentally connected to the attribute of being humane, and that also connects us all (including other beings/objects in the universe).

In the speech, ‘The Imperative of Utu/Ubuntu in Africana scholarship (2021)’ Mwalimu Micere situated utu-ism within the context of Africana scholarship. She observed that, ‘knowledge and scholarship can either be colonizing, alienating and enslaving; or alternatively, they can be conscientizing, humanising and liberating,’26(p3). To illustrate the latter, she offered the example of greetings in several African civilizations to show how greetings encouraged conscientizing connections. She explained as follows,

The originator of the greeting: “How are you? Are you well?”
The respondent: “I am only well, if you too are well.”
In other words, the welfare of one person is tied to the wellbeing of the other. Moreover, as the prolonged greeting unfolds, it becomes evident that the wellness of the individuals who are exchanging the greetings equally depend upon the wellness of their families, their extended families and their entire communities. In some African societies, the greetings become so elaborate and elongated that the enquiries even seek to know how the farms, crops, cows, goats, chickens, etc. are doing! Trust me, this is not a part of my oracy hyperbole technique. It happens in real life and in real time. So, what is the “moral of the story?” Africana scholars need to find out how to incorporate this collective and connective perception of life into their scholarship.26(p4)

Mwalimu Micere asserted that individuals in African communities considered themselves as intrinsically tied to one another, their community, and all other beings/objects in the universe. Consequently, individual wellness depends on the well-being of the collective and/or other beings/objects in their society. There was a fundamental sense of connectivity between individuals and the world around them. A sense of connectivity that was not only understood to be inherent but also actively fostered amongst individuals and within the community at large. Mwalimu Micere urged Africana scholars to ‘find out how’ to incorporate this collective and connective perception of life into their scholarship.’ The ‘find out how’ comprises the struggle or process of humanizing, which is simultaneously the process of defeating colonization, alienation, and enslavement.

Utu-ism also demands demolishing the metaphorical ivory tower that alienates ‘scholars’ from the people. A Gender and Utu scholar, Muhonja27, has already observed that utu-ism expands the label of the scholar to include community members. For Mwalimu Micere, Africana scholarship ought to situate itself within the communities in which it exists and then proactively cultivate the connections necessary for the collective co-creation of humanizing knowledge. These connections are best explained through what Mwalimu Micere described as the ‘onion structure theory.’

Based on this theory, Africana scholarship is expected to mend, create, and sustain layers of interrelatedness, interdependence, and connectedness with the people. It cannot be removed or isolated from the people. She reminded scholars (extended version) to focus on emancipatory humanism rather than individualist, alienating, exploitative agendas. While celebrating the inception of black/Africana studies, she underscored the significance of diligence and perseverance. Individualist and capitalist interests are always looming, poised to impede the pursuit of knowledge that humanizes, making any progress vulnerable to quick reversals. Africana scholarship must humanize the writing and analysis of colonized people’s history, experiences, and challenges. It must also establish lasting connections with the colonized people to avoid their alienation from humanizing knowledge and its creation. In her formulation of utu-ism, she employed rhetorical inquiries to encourage a collaborative structure and evolution in academia and practice. It is the responsibility of colonized peoples to construct these frameworks. Africana scholarship ought to include communities in connecting their histories, present, and future and facilitating resistance against repressive systems. This is the way to humanize them. To borrow from Vijay Prashad, ‘the struggle makes us human.’28

Notably, Mwalimu Micere did not limit utu-ism to Africana scholarship. Transcending oppressive systems requires acknowledging and addressing the hierarchies that alienate colonized people from each other and from the natural world. To truly ‘restore the soul’26(p12) of humanity, humanizing processes cannot ignore, or downplay all forms of oppression that ‘trap black/African bodies in overlapping prisons of objectification.’29 That is white supremacy, patriarchy, misogynoir, trans misogynoir, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, ableism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. In truth, humanizing processes are inextricably linked to eliminating all of these forms of oppression. Mwalimu Micere was expectedly a self-professed feminist and a renowned feminist intellectual and organizer.30(p36),31 Notice how connections work. Utu-ism doesn’t necessarily lead Mwalimu Micere to embrace feminism. Her experiences of being a woman, the experiences of the women around her, and years of community and intellectual work all contribute to her self-identification as a feminist.31

Speaking with Wachanga, she recalled being acutely aware of the rarity of girls attending school in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite her comparatively fortunate background, she acknowledged her parents' sense of gender justice in not depriving their daughters of the opportunity to attend school. They instilled a sense of equality among all children in the home through equitable chore distribution, discipline, and encouragement. Nonetheless, she couldn't help but recognize the irony in her father's sense of pride when he labeled the girls 'his boys' due to their excellent performance in school.31 Upon joining the employment world, we learn too soon that Mwalimu Micere was not exempted from sexist violence in the workplace. Mutunga13 reveals that Mwalimu Micere chronicled her experiences with sexism at the University of Nairobi. In a chapter titled 'The Fight Against Patriarchy,' she narrated how male leaders in the institution subjected her to sexual harassment, intimidation, violence, discrimination, and other forms of abuse following her decision to vie for the office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts.13 But perhaps Mutunga’s short story about the prevailing gendered conditions of the Senior Common Room of the university is most illuminating of Mwalimu Micere’s persistence in calling out injustice, whenever, wherever. He says;

…surrounded almost entirely by male colleagues, old and young, [Mwalimu Micere] posed the following fundamental questions: Do you men cook? Do you wash your underwear? Do you make up your beds? Do you clean your beddings? Do you change your baby’s nappies? Do you agree to be driven by your girlfriends and spouses? How do you treat your maids in their terms and conditions of service?13

It is impossible to explain what prompted her to ask these questions in a room full of the crème de la crème of male intellectuals, young and old from the short story, but it is fair to assume that the milieu was sexist, to say the least. Nonetheless, as she had done for black students at Alliance Girls High School, Mwalimu Micere once again rose above to speak up and challenge the men in the room for the role that they play in propagating sexist behavior at work and in their personal lives. The feminist struggle was something that she identified with passionately and for which she dedicated her publications.

Loneliness and isolation are recurring traumas in Mwalimu Micere’s life. She experienced anger, sadness, and isolation because of racist violence at Limuru Girls’ High School. Later, as a young, successful professional at the University of Nairobi, she still endured sexism and experienced a similar emotional toll. Then, upon fleeing into exile and ending up in Canton in upstate New York, it is the experience of loneliness and alienation occasioned by racist attacks on her two girls and herself that motivated her to seek employment back in Africa.7,23 This is even though she was already immersed in the anti-capitalist struggles of the Black community in the USA. She found herself stranded in London, an African woman and her children, having been denied entry into her prospective host country, Zambia. It is the other women in the anti-colonial struggle who largely came to her aid. Women like Sally Mugabe and Ama Ata Aidoo.

Wherever they are, African women revolutionaries continue to bear the primary responsibility of ensuring the subsistence survival of their families in organizing/movement spaces. By doing so, they defy the artificial capitalist private/public divide. While the artificial private/public divide ascribes domesticity to (African) women’s labor and their bodies, within anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles, African women blur these lines. For them, the struggle against hegemonic capitalist patriarchy comprises care work, intellectual work, combat work, and all other forms of work. These women demonstrate the prerogative that those interested in creating a humanized world must create systems that accommodate the subsistence needs of all those involved and seek to lessen the unfair labor burden on women within the struggle.

Institution of Motherhood

Mwalimu Micere consistently reclaimed motherhood as a source of agency, power and influence for African women throughout her poetry and creative writing.10 In her poem ‘We Salute You,’ in which she praises gallant anti-colonial fighters, Afrika is mother. ‘Child of mother Afrika’30(p58) is a source of pride, and both the warrior and the singer understand that gallantry stems from being a child of mother Afrika. In ‘Mother Afrika’s Matriots,’ she regards African women as the toughest, relentless nurturers, fighters, and champions of Afrika, the land, and the people. It protests against the erasure and marginalization of African women's contributions to Pan-Africanism. Here, as she proclaimed in Visions for Africa, she employs creative writing as a form of protest.32(p98) The poem proceeds to engage in African women’s practice of naming.33 Proclaiming their names, and reveling in their accomplishments. For example, Queen Nzinga, the abolitionist supreme, and the Aba Women, the earth-shakers. It is a rewriting that engraves and honors the African women’s contributions in defiance of their erasure within the Pan-African movement. The poem also serves as a stinging rebuke to the Pan African movement's widespread shortcomings in addressing patriarchal attitudes and behaviors.

Feminist scholar Oyewumi explains that within African cultures, motherhood is not constructed in relation to fatherhood as is the case with Western patriarchy. Mothers practice ‘co-mothering’ as a communal ideal and social practice.’10(p13) This co-mothering transcends biological motherhood and children typically experience many mothers.10,34 Micere, in her own words, says,

I am reminded that
another woman’s son
is my child
that my sister’s baby
is my baby
that my daughter
is your child
that all the world’s children
are my children
___our children.30(p19)

In this context, motherhood confers supportive and symbolic roles that the women use to assert and exert influence within their communities. In addition, the poem reveals the scope of motherhood from the perspective of African women, as a communal responsibility not limited to biological confines or public/private distinctions. In her poetry, Mwalimu Micere emphasized the broad spectrum and fluidity of mothering as a source of political engagement for women and as inherently political. Mothers are combatants, healers, nurturers, feminists, sisters, revolutionaries, daughters, teachers, leaders, intellectuals, fighters, artists, performers, and others. Their defiance against repressive gendered spheres and other forms of patriarchal capitalist confinements makes them ardent Pan-Africanists. They defy borders, embracing both motherhood and sisterhood to cultivate solidarity.

The woman’s poem crosses borders, seeking solidarity in the fight against oppressive systems.30(p43) To be a feminist is to embrace the humanizing processes of all women (and all people) in whatever shape, form, state, sexual orientation, work, etc., in the fight against oppressive systems.30(p36) To be Pan- Pan-Africanist is to be a feminist, to be a woman, to be a ‘child of mother Afrika,’ and to actively contribute to ‘Pan-African connections.’30(p48)

Pan-Africana Orature
Mwalimu Micere was highly committed to the orature technique of tale-telling taught by African women. She insisted on releasing a book about Muthoni Kirima—the revolutionary freedom fighter—based on its principles, observing that,

At any rate, my work follows the orature method of storytelling, with Field Marshall Mũthoni wa Kῖrῖma narrating her story in Gῖkũyũ (which is actually my first language) to her younger sister and me. It is a beautiful orature piece of an elder with her younger sisters/ “daughters” sitting at her feet, feeding on her wisdom…… As orate women in my “Prosaic Poem,” My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs would argue, … “We too have tongues, you know!” So, I am delighted that this highly skilled orate woman will tell her story in her tongue and her own voice, not mine.5

As an African woman teacher committed to liberatory praxis, Mwalimu Micere found it significant to incorporate indigenous African women’s institutions (historical and contemporary) into academia because African women’s knowledge systems recognize African women’s agency and communicate African women’s experiences and the meanings they attach to their experiences with the capacious lenses that come with situated knowledge. More specifically, in alluding to that image of 'a daughter sitting at the feet of elders', she deemed orature a viable and more humanizing methodology for research, documentation, and analysis of African women's experiences and challenges. This supports what Lanoi35 and other African feminist researchers have proposed regarding considering orature as a practice towards decolonizing research.

Furthermore, her insistence on having the book on Field Marshall Muthoni Kirima told in Muthoni Kirima's voice rather than Micere's demonstrates her respect for the dignity and voice of other African women despite their marginalization. Likewise, it demonstrates a commitment to feminist ethics of acknowledging and valuing African women's agency and wisdom. Her refusal to speak for another woman, even as she devoted her labor, time, skills, and other energies to the documentation of the woman's story, highlights once again utu-ism's humanizing processes, and her embodiment of feminist consciousness when it comes to reading and listening to women's voices and their multiplicity..36

Language in Pan-Africana Connections
As a passionate Pan-Africanist, Mwalimu Micere used language to advance the Pan-Africana cause. She intentionally understood the ‘world senses’ of many African indigenous tribes to validate their agency and wisdom. She learned the indigenous languages of most communities with which she interacted and lived. Her poetry, speeches, and performances show her purposeful relationship with African languages. She draws on orature to sustain and advance African women’s practices of creating, singing, and performing poetry and songs in their communities as was the case of Muthirigus among the Kikuyu. Mwalimu Micere’s consistent use of and mixing of various African Languages in her poetry speaks to her protest against colonial borders and instrumental ethnicity. She illustrates the concrete possibility of an Africa united in its language diversity. The very real possibility of understanding each other even when we speak different languages refutes and challenges the idea that perhaps Africa needs to resort to some common language to achieve a Pan-African vision.

She taught her audience new words from various African languages in many speeches. She also taught them the meanings of these words and the context within which they were often used. Doing this allowed her to converse with her audience in many languages without losing the audience throughout her delivery. For example, during the delivery of her speech, ‘Transcending Colonial and Neo-Colonial Pathological Hangovers to Unleash Creativity,’ she began as follows:

In orature style, when I speak, I don’t take the audience for granted. I like having them accompany me on our joint conversational journey. So I am going to give you a cue, indicating where you are supposed to come in. The one I am going to use employs a South African term, “abantu”, which simply means “people”. When I call upon you: “Abantu!”, you are going to respond, “Ii!”, [Gikuyu term for “yes”] telling me you are there. Then I will ask you, “Shall I go on?”, “Shall I proceed?”, “Shall I speak? … and/or other such variations. You will respond: “Ii!” or “Yes!”. However, if you say “No!” I will stop. So, any minute really that you feel tired, you know what to do. But please don’t stop me too soon: let me speak for a few minutes at least.
“Abantu!”
“Ii!”
“Shall I begin?”
“Ii!”37
From above, Mwalimu Micere demonstrates that it is possible for Africans not only to have conversations in many languages but also to completely understand each other when they do so, and from their indigenous world senses. When she calls the audience, ‘abantu’ they respond yes because they understand that they are the people in the Zulu world sense. They also understand that they are not limited to responding in Zulu but are free to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in Zulu, Gikuyu, Swahili, English, etc. Racial capitalist narratives impose language singularities that limit our ability to learn and connect with each other. Mwalimu Micere’s oratorial practice sheds light on a kind of cross-cultural dialogue that — like utu — is not bordered or alienating but connects us. Her practice speaks to how languages are allowed to interact with each other and evolve in the process. By learning and communicating in several African languages and subsequently incorporating this Pan-Africanist language model into her life’s work and advocacy, we see that Mwalimu Micere both embodied and agitated for a realizable, humanizing Pan-African future.



Utu-ism; A political Ideology
Utu-ism, as envisaged by Mwalimu Micere, cannot be seen as just one person’s ‘belief’ or ‘passion’ or ‘way of doing something’. It is about destroying the violence of oppressive systems. It is about prevailing over the alienation that sustains oppressive systems and keeps us from sustaining resistance against colonial, imperial, and patriarchal struggles. It is about establishing and fostering humane connections that will deliver liberation and flourish in a humanized world. Finally, it is the product of participation, contribution, and engagement in academic and guerilla intellectualism within the context of the black/African liberation struggle. Thus, Mwalimu Micere’s vision for all oppressed people, “a system where all the oppressive institutions are dismantled – politically, socially, for the sake of men and women,”15 communicated the imperative for holistic approaches to dismantling oppressive systems as opposed to systemic hierarchies and the fragmentation of struggles.

The wholehearted championing for a ‘return to the source’ as envisioned by Amilcar Cabral is to reinforce the fact that a comprehensive reexamination of our historical and contemporary material realities will provide a much-needed opportunity to take the plight of, participation, and contributions of African women and other marginalized groups of people seriously. Cabral’s ‘Return to the Source’ in relation to African women means situating them within their specific historical and contemporary material realities. Thus, black/African women, gender non-binary people, trans and queer persons, people living with disabilities, Indigenous communities, low-income communities, and all other groups facing oppression must be taken seriously as leaders and contributors to humanizing processes wherever they may be.







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