Muthoni wa Kirima

Muthoni wa Kirima was born around 1930 in Nairutia village, in Nyeri County, in the cool green highlands of central Kenya — the heartland of the Kikuyu people. As a child she laboured on a white settler's farm, where she witnessed the cruelty and the land dispossession that lay at the root of the coming war. That memory became her resolve: when the Mau Mau movement rose against British colonial rule, she said simply, 'I said yes because freedom is priceless.'

She took the Mau Mau oath in 1952, at the start of the Kenya 'Emergency'. The movement's name in spirit was ithaka na wĩyathi — land and freedom — for Kikuyu, Embu and Meru Kenyans whose land had been seized by settlers. Muthoni began as a trader, slipping intelligence, food and weapons to the fighters hidden in the forest, and administering oaths. Then she went into the forest herself. For roughly eleven years she lived in the bamboo thickets of the Aberdares and Mount Kenya as a fighter, a medic and a quartermaster, rising through the ranks until she became the only woman ever to hold the rank of Field Marshal — one of just four in the entire movement.

The colonial response was harsh: mass detention, forced 'villagisation' and torture. Muthoni herself was beaten and carried a bullet in her body for the rest of her life. When independence came in 1963, the freedom she had fought for felt incomplete, so she made a vow — she would not cut her matted, locked hair until 'the fruits of independence' reached the people who had sacrificed the most. She kept that promise for about seventy years. Having lost a child in the forest and borne none after, she said her country itself was her only child. Kenya honoured her late in life — a distinguished-service medal in 1998 and a Head of State Commendation in 2014 — and she died on 4 September 2023, aged about 92.