Micere Githae Mugo was born with a creative and unrestrained mind that often brought fortune her way and a good measure of trouble.
In past interviews, she constantly recounted that her “unrestrained mind has given me losses at times, but countless times victories”.
When she was the dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences at the University of Nairobi in 1982, a play she co-authored with Prof Ngugi wa Thiong'o landed her in trouble.
The play, titled 'The trial of Dedan Kimathi', was among her works that riled then President Daniel Moi’s administration, leading to her forced exile.
She was stripped of her Kenyan citizenship by the government. This was despite being born in Baricho, Ndia constituency, in Kirinyaga county.
Leaving the country at the time, she once said in an interview, was a painful experience though a part of her welcomed the move.
“It was painful for me to leave a country I’m deeply connected with. At the time, I was sick and had two little children, five and six and half years old,” she said.
She taught at the university of Zimbabwe in Harare, becoming a citizen of the South African country. She later became a citizen of Nigeria and later of the United States.
She regained her Kenyan citizenship in 2009.
“I’m a border crosser, defying geographical containments, above labels and beyond definitions. [I] have far too many identities to bow to [any form of] containment,” she said in another interview appearance.
Mugo’s literary and activism philosophy perfected the Africanist principle of Utu and Ubuntu, at one point saying that what intrigued her in Zimbabwe was the Shona tribe greeting that embodied the principle.
“You ask me ‘how are you?’ and I answer you ‘I am well if you are well’,” she said.
In the US, she taught for a long time at the Syracuse university in New York where her literary footprints live on.
In a 2015 TV interview, she described how the play, which had been condemned in Kenya, was acclaimed globally and got re-enacted numerous times in various countries by non-Kenyans.
She retired from Syracuse in 2015 and the university hosted an event in which then Chief Justice Willy Mutunga and then Senator Anyang' Nyongó gave key note addresses at various symposia in her honour.
She also did collaborative work with Ngugi Wa Thiongó in the country who was also a professor at Irvine University in California, US West Coast.
The playwright, essayist, poet and novelist died on Friday, June 30, aged 81.
She was a mother of two, Mumbi and Njeri. However, Njeri died in 2012.
On her name Micere, what does it mean?
She would answer the question without taking offense, explaining that “I’m Micere, not that of rice, but one connected to Njeri, one of the nine daughters of Mumbi.”
“I’m a mother of Mumbi and the late Njeri, daughter of the Githae family and by former marriage, from the Mugo family.”
“I’m an internationalist, a global citizen and have no less than eight children named after me all over the world, and so I have been reborn many times,” she would proudly say.
She disclosed that she was a two-time cancer survivor. For a long time, she battled cancer of the bone marrow.
Micere straddled the academic like a colossus, earning countless accolades in her wake.
Among them include the title of Distinguished Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Lecturer, a title reserved for intellectuals who have contributed to social justice.
She was awarded the accolade in 2012 and gave a public lecture in Tanzania attended by former president Benjamin Mkapa, among others dignitaries.
Kisumu Governor Anyang’ Nyong’o said on Sunday that he had spoken with Dr Ibbo Mandaza, the executive director the Southern African Political Economy series in Harare and Godwin Murunga of the Council for Development of Social Sciences in Africa, to rally Micere’s long time allies to pull together a symposium in her honour.
Micere's husband Dr John Mugo passed on in February 2020.