Wambui Otieno-Mbugua: A tribute
‘Whether we are aware of it or not, in our daily negotiations with modernity and tradition, with selfhood and community, with partnership, family, society and state, we swim in waters changed forever by the battles she fought, writes Shailja Patel.
‘Well-behaved women seldom make history’ - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
Few lives demonstrate this saying so powerfully as that of Virginia Wambui Otieno-Mbugua. Her global impact is best assessed by entering her name on any online archive of academic research - dozens of books and articles return, published over 20 years from a range of disciplines. Scholars across the world will continue to delve into Wambui Otieno’s legacy for decades to come. Cambridge University’s John Lonsdale hailed her autobiography, ‘Mau Mau’s Daughter’ (Lynne Rienner Publishing, 1998) as groundbreaking: ‘the narrative of Nairobi's `legitimate' political militancy in the late 1950s and early 1960s is the first we have had from below.’
Her influence in Africa is more personally felt. When the news of her death went out, activists from the Cape to Cairo mourned publicly and loudly, on Facebook and Twitter. They eulogized her taboo-busting life, her rearranging of gender and power, her ‘routine destabilizing of hegemonic masculinity and the meanings of class.’ (Grace Musila).
And of course, within Kenya, the reach and intimate power of Wambui Otieno’s life cannot be overstated. Whether we are aware of it or not, in our daily negotiations with modernity and tradition, with selfhood and community, with partnership, family, society and state, we swim in waters changed forever by the battles she fought in the public sphere.
When I consider the meanings of Wambui Otieno’s life, I think about space: the taking up of. The speaking in. The taboo breaking. The contestation of. She showed generations of Kenyans that we could redefine spaces - legal, political, communal - with our bodies. With our voices. That we could rewrite narratives of cultural heritage and patriarchal society in ways that liberate us all.
What Wambui Otieno modelled for us was a life based on the truth of struggle openly disclosed. A life that was the opposite of the enclosure she could have opted for, as a daughter of a wealthy and prominent family. From a young age, she chose self-definition, full engagement in the historic moment, over passive acceptance of chattel status. This choice came with risks and costs. We watched her face painful defeats in the full glare of public scrutiny, take the blows and continue to make transgressive choices.
Lives of disclosure, risk and honest struggle are necessarily messy. The stakes are high when a woman demands, on the national stage, the full space due to her humanity. The falls are spectacular. The meaning of her life lived out loud changes the story for all of us.
Blogger Kenne Mwikya asks: ‘what is the meaning of the deep scrutiny of Wambui, pre- and posthumous? What does it bring the whole nation to, in knowing and searching within itself for the imprint of Wambui Otieno?’
Literary critic and academic Keguro Macharia writes on his Gukira blog: ‘without Wambui, I would not have been able to come to feminism as I did. I would not have been able to understand the gendering of testimony, the acoustics of gender, the importance of bodies as they matter and mutter. Without Wambui, I would not have been able to appreciate how nations feel and act on their feeling.’
The meanings of Wambui Otieno, and the feelings they engender, like the woman herself, will not be contained or constrained. Her legacy is to enlarge the spaces for every form of disclosure in Kenya - and to inspire us with the courage to transgress, to matter in the history of our nation.
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* Shailja Patel is an award-winning Kenyan poet, playwright and activist. Her website is www.shailja.com
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