The world will miss "fiery, intelligent" Prof Micere Mugo

The late Prof Micere Githae Mugo was one tough cookie. She gave the KANU government so much grief that when she escaped into exile, in 1982, the government stripped her of Kenyan citizenship.

Before that she had been imprisoned and tortured. In Zimbabwe, where she first ran to, the late Robert Mugabe, then a progressive leader, offered her citizenship, for which she remained eternally grateful. Whenever she got an opportunity to introduce herself, she never forgot to state the fact that she was Zimbabwean, before adding that she was also a citizen of the world.

Well, traits of her rebellious nature became evident when she teamed up with firebrand Ngugi wa Thiong'o, with whom she taught together at the University of Nairobi, to write The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, which was published in 1976. The writing of this book was always going to be fraught with danger as remnants of the colonial order were still entrenched within systems of government. Here was a play that was celebrating Mau Mau hero Kimathi, who had been executed by the colonial government. In fact, Ngugi in his book Writers in Politics, recalls that their play had almost been denied space to be staged at the Kenya National Theatre.

"It is interesting, for instance, that the National Theatre was opened in 1952 under a colonial management," writes Ngugi.

"Many of the plays they performed between 1952 and 1958, served to entertain the British soldiers who came to Kenya to fight against Mau Mau guerrillas and to suppress the Kenyan people. Such colonial theatre was meant to boost the morale of the British soldiers... Over the same period, the Mau Mau guerrillas led by Dedan Kimathi and others, put up one of the most heroic armed struggles against imperialism in this century," he adds.

He adds that The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, at the time, tried to recapture "the heroism and the determination of the people, in this glorious moment of Kenya's history." Not only did Micere write that play, she also acted as Woman and was in the original cast that performed the play FESTAC 77 in Lagos Nigeria. It was staged alongside Francis Imbuga's evergreen play, Betrayal in the City.

Ngugi has always regarded Micere highly. "Prof Micere Mugo has a capacity of firing my imagination in different directions and I looked forward particularly, in the years from 1974 to 1976, to our almost daily morning sessions of discussions and review of events in the corridors of the Literature Department, sessions which resulted in the joint authorship of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, itself an act of literary and political intervention," writes Ngugi in his book Decolonising the Mind.

Micere later made a name for herself in the field of African Orature. "Since the written word was known as 'Litera-ture', the spoken word should henceforth be referred to as 'ora-ture'," she wrote in an epic titled African Orature: Back to the Roots.

Such a feisty and liberated intellectual.