"And I say, that we expect dominating cultures and empire cultures to try and silence us. But when we silence our own cultural foundation, it is really sad. And this is why orature is so important. And this is why we must celebrate this occasion where at this festival we are being asked to remember. We are being told: we must not forget. We are being told that what we know is important and we need to have a conversation about it. We are fighting against internal colonial socialization of amnesia. We are daring to remember … we must never repress our psyche, our memories. This is the worst abuse to ourselves. Wole Soyinka once called it, ‘the sin against the holy ghost.’
"So please let us remember, let us insist on remembering, but when we remember we also have to know it comes with a price—because remembering also insists that we act somehow, that we either continue in paralysis because we can’t continue against our anger, or we recreate the situation … because we want to move ahead, because we want to embrace ourselves, because we want to embrace others and move on. We want to affirm that the negation of history can be changed around. Remembering has to be purposeful, it has to be a reassembling of ourselves and our fractured psyche. It has to be a way of healing and creating visionary futures that are there for us."
-- Micere Githae Mugo, speaking at the 2010 Kwani LitFest
Micere Githae Mugo is the author of plays, poems, stories, and performances. She was born in Baricho, Kenya in 1942 and attended school under colonial rule, when she was the first black Kenyan enrolled in schools dominated by white British people during experiments in integration. She later attended Makerere University in Uganda, and, in Canada, the University of New Brunswick and the University of Toronto, where she earned her PhD. She returned to East Africa in the late seventies and became the first female dean at the Unviersity of Nairobi. Kenya was then under the rule of Daniel arap Moi. Mugo's human rights activism led to her arrests, interrogations, and later exile. She became a citizen of Zimbabwe in 1984, and has taught and spoken around the world in the decades since. She is particularly a celebrant of the art of orature.
Mugo is a speaker for Amnesty International. She's also past chair of the board of SARIPS, the Southern Africa Regional Institute for Policy Studies, in Harare. See her speak at Kwani's Litfest in December 2010 here. I'm working on editing the transcripts from the events right now, from which the above quote comes, and they will be publicly available soon.
Among the books authored and co-authored by Micere Mugo:
- My Mother's Song and Other Poems
- The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti
- The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o)
- Daughter of My People, Sing!
- Visions of Africa: The Fiction of Chinua Achebe, Margaret Laurence, Elspath Huxley, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
- African Orature and Human Rights
Image Credits: Syracuse University, Meredith Professorship
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