The passing of a revolutionary

‘You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. It comes through nonconformity: the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future.’ Thomas Sankara

This quote by the progressive former president of Burkina Faso sums up the person Wambui Otieno was in my opinion. Africa and the world at large were shocked to learn about Wambui’s demise on 30 August 2011. The glowing tributes in the social media prove Wambui’s role in shaping the legal and social discourse in colonial and post-colonial Kenya and internationally, especially in Africa.

My introduction to Wambui came when I studied customary law for an accountancy course in the famous case of Wambui Otieno vs Umira Kager clan. In that case Wambui waged a five-month court battle with her late husband’s clan over the burial location. The clan insisted that the prominent advocate Silvano Melea Otieno be buried in Siaya according to Luo customs, but Wambui contested this in court demanding that Otieno be buried in their Upper Matasia Home in Ngong according to his wishes.

Even though she lost thanks to a patriarchal bench, the case was groundbreaking for Kenyan women and indeed many African women who were treated as chattels when their husbands died; their opinions were disregarded. Because of Wambui’s audacity, the case raised important issues on the legal rights of women while also encouraging women to break the silence on inheritance among other rights.

But Wambui’s revolutionary history had started earlier. She was born Virginia Wambui Waiyaki in 1936 in a family that had a long history of anti-colonial resistance from her grandfather Waiyaki wa Hinga who was killed by the British in 1892. In her autobiography, ‘Mau Mau’s daughter: The life history of Wambui Waiyaki Otieno’, she exposed the complex family traditions she inherited of mixed ethnicity, resistance and later Christianity and how they shaped her.

In her nonconformist nature, Wambui left home aged 16 and joined the Mau Mau in Nairobi during the emergency period, igniting her lifelong career as an activist. True to her revolutionary self, she crossed class and gender borders to join the movement despite not being the typical Mau Mau recruit who joined due to social-economic grievances since she came from a privileged Christian family. Her father was the first African inspector of police. In the Mau Mau movement, Wambui served mainly as an intelligence agent by spying, scouting, liaising with the movement and procuring arms. She was later arrested and detained in Lamu where she was tortured for being a Mau Mau.

Her memoir was the first narrative by a woman to detail the intimate roles played by women in the Mau Mau resistance. In her book she details the roles women played as couriers, intelligence gatherers and weapon procurers. Through her work Wambui exposed the critical role of women in the history of resistance in Kenya, who had largely been silenced by colonial and post-colonial historians. Other female voices include Charity Waciuma, Tabitha Kanogo, Muthoni Likimani and Ann Presley. Through this book Wambui left a legacy in the academy by engendering the colonial resistance narrative, which was largely male-centered and exposing the history of women’s nationalism in Kenya.

Her legacy in politics in post-colonial Kenya is also significant. In the early 1960s, she joined the Tom Mboya-led Nairobi People's Convention Party (NPCP) as the leader of the women’s wing and later the Kenya Africa National Union (KANU). She was also involved with Kiama Kia Muingi (KKM), a Mau Mau successor organization. She ran for office as a KANU candidate and served as an official of Maendeleo ya Wanawake and the National Council of Women of Kenya where she partnered with women across the globe working on similar ideals of advancing women.

In 1985, frustrated by Moi’s manipulation of elections and lack of internal party democracy Wambui left KANU and joined Jaramogi Oginga in the Forum for Restoration of Democracy (FORD) in 1987 in efforts to introduce multiparty politics in Kenya. In 1997, she unsuccessfully vied for Kamukunji constituency parliamentary seat on an NDP ticket and in 2007 she established the Kenya People’s Conventional Party on which she unsuccessfully contested the Kajiado’s North seat.

Socially, Wambui was a trendsetter who never shied away from controversy. In 1961, despite opposition from her family she married S. M Otieno, a Luo. More recently, in 2003 Wambui pushed the social boundaries further and generated a national debate after her marriage to her second husband Peter Mbugua, 42 years her junior. True to the revolutionary Wambui, she announced the she had set the pace for other women who were imprisoned by culture and traditions. Wambui had done it again. Her marriage generated debate mainly because she had threatened the patriarchal order that defines the Kenyan society, where a man of whatever age has the right to marry any woman regardless of age. Wambui questioned why this privilege was unique to men and went ahead to solemnise her marriage in church forcing Kenyans to rethink longheld stereotypes on age and class in marriage.

Wambui’s tensions, dilemmas and challenges are a true representative of colonial and post-colonial Kenya and when Kenya’s history is written she will grace many chapters. Through Wambui’s ‘madness’ and courage to turn her back on the old formulas, she reinvented the future albeit in a small way, as Sankara had advised. The Kenya she leaves in 2011 has benefited legally, politically, academically and socially from the legacies she has left us. Because of her, we have come this far. Kenya will miss Wambui.

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* Njoki Wamai is a peace and security scholar at the African Leadership Centre (ALC) in King’s College London. This article was first published by the Sunday Nation.