Poetry
Daughter of My People, Sing!
Micere Githae Mugo · 1976
Synopsis
The author's first collection, these poems address the women of her people and invite them to sing, to speak out. They celebrate their strength and the hope of development promised by independence, but also cast a stern eye on the race for consumption and the competition spreading through the Kenya of the seventies. Informed by a feminist consciousness, they mingle tribute and social criticism, confidence in the future and a warning about what the promises of liberation become.
Context
Published in 1976, as was a play by the author and the drama she wrote with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on the insurgent leader Dedan Kimathi, the collection is regarded as a landmark work, in which the feminist and pan-African vein of her later poems is already taking shape. The author has made orality the subject of her teaching, and the East African Standard ranked her in 2002 among the hundred most influential figures in Kenya in the twentieth century.
Who it is for
For readers who like committed poetry, written to be spoken, which celebrates women while judging its own time.
Prizes and reception
The first collection by a major figure of Kenyan letters and activism, it is cited as her founding work.