Micere Mugo (Micere Githae Mugo) Biography

Kenyan poet, critic, and playwright, born in Baricho in the Kiriyaga District of Kenya; she was educated at Makerere University, Uganda, and at the Canadian universities of New Brunswick and Toronto. Her Ph.D. thesis formed the basis of Visions of Africa (1978), her best-known critical work, which considers treatments of Africa in the writings of several women novelists. Having been Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nairobi, she was exiled for political reasons and became Professor of Literature at the University of Zimbabwe in 1982. Her plays include The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kit, a treatment of political and cultural disunity among the Kenyan people, and Disillusioned, dealing with racist hypocrisy in religion, which were published together in 1976. Daughter of My People, Sing (1976), the principal collection of her verse, is strongly informed by her Marxist and feminist views in its imaginative articulation of her passionate concern with the future of post-colonial Africa.