Micere Mugo has passed away

Kenyan playwright, academic, and poet Micere Mugo passed away in the United States on Friday, June 30, 2023.

Micere Githae Mugo was born in Kenya to two progressive teacher parents in 1942. After an education that included Makerere University, the University of New Brunswick, and University of Toronto, she started lecturing at the University of Nairobi in 1973. She went on to become Dean of the Faculty of Arts, making her the first female faculty dean in Kenya. While in this role, she co-wrote the play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

In the early 1980s, she was targeted by President Daniel Arap Moi for her political activism. When there was an attempted coup in 1982, she and her two young daughters had to flee the country and she ended up in Zimbabwe. She taught at the University of Zimbabwe before moving abroad and ending up at Syracuse University where she retired in 2015.

She had a formidable body of work starting with the plays The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti (1976) and The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976). Her poetry included Daughter of My People, Sing! (1976) and My Mother’s Song and Other Poems (1994). Her literary criticism came in the form of Visions of Africa: The Fiction of Chinua Achebe, Margaret Laurence, Elspeth Huxley, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1978), African Orature and Human Rights (1991), as well as The imperative of Utu / Ubuntu in Africana scholarship (2021). In 2012, she wrote the story of her life in the autobiography Writing & Speaking from the Heart of My Mind.

She was last seen on Kenyan soil when she received a Human Rights Defenders Award in Nairobi in January. That award is given to men and women who have demonstrated courage and impact in the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Rest in Peace, Micere Mugo.

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