In the garden of her home, Mwalimu found a mirror to her own life, where tending to growth required patience, determination, and the willingness to embrace, metaphorically and physically, both sunlight and storms.
Was it during her years at Limuru Girls School that Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo developed a lifelong passion for “creating liberated zones” in educational institutions?
Professor Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo made the case for African Orature and Literature, performing these in ways that legitimised indigenous languages and knowledges, and inspiring us to claim our ethnic, Kenyan, African social identities which they fleshed out and encouraged us to research, explore, enrich.
Faced with the despotic rule that replaced the colonial cruelty of her youth, Prof. Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo took her stand and stood her ground and, like the biblical Miriam, spoke truth to power.
Professor Micere Githae Mugo’s biographer recalls a life lived with dignity, care, honesty, and courage.
Professor Micere Githae Mugo conceptualised Utu-centric scholarship as humanising, liberative, inclusive, reciprocal and decolonising.
Carole Boyce Davies looks at Micere Githae Mugo’s contribution to the topic of Black women’s leadership across the African world.
David Mwambari shares the key lessons he learned from Mwalimu Mugo as her teaching assistant at Syracuse University that have transformed his personal and professional life.
Tortured by the police and driven into exile, Professor Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo never gave up her struggles for social justice and her belief in Utu: I am because you are.
Armed with boldness and courage, Micere Githae Mugo put an end to the racist insults by white teaching staff that students at the prestigious school had continued to endure even after independence.
Our heroes and heroines deserve to be given the accolades that they rightly deserve. But we should eschew their deification and instead debate and contest their intellectual and creative output to generate new knowledge and enrich our overall cultural production.
For Micere Githae Mugo, the philosophy of utu/ubuntu was not so much an expression of a state of being as of becoming.