Muthoni Kirima

Field-Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima (1931 – 4 September 2023) was a top-ranking female fighter in Mau Mau's 1950s rebellion against British colonialism.

Few Mau Mau women became active fighters, and Muthoni was the only woman to have attained the Mau Mau rank of field-marshal.

Muthoni Kirima was born in Nairutia village, Nyeri County, Kenya, in 1931.

She was born with the name Muthoni Whihuini from her grandfather.

When Muthoni was very little, her family moved to Karing’u for a better life.

She remembered this journey as long and hard for her as a young girl.

They had to travel 15km, half on a small donkey with no saddle, and the other half she had to walk herself.

During her time in Karing’u, Muthoni first learned about Christianity and became infatuated with it.

As a child, she went into the missionaries’ tent with other children to learn about Christianity.

By the time she was eight years old, she started her long-standing devotion to the church.

Her experience of racial violence between Kenyan settlers and the Kikuyu came when she was doing child labor at the farm of a white settler.

During this period of her life, she saw verbal and emotional abuse, physical violence toward Kikuyu men, and sexual violence toward Kikuyu women.

This is said to have drove her resolve to fight for independence to free her people and her country.

In 1948, she met her husband Mutungi Gichuhi, who was a young cook working at the same settler farm as she did.

After their wedding, the couple moved to the edge of Nyeri town and started their own life.

Muthoni became a trader and her husband became a cook.

Muthoni Kirima first took the Mau Mau oath in 1952.

From then on, she had to balance being part of the revolution with family responsibilities.

She started out by using her connections as a trader to get information and events that were happening to the Mau Mau that were in the forest.

She also organized the oaths of other people.

This was extremely hard on her because at this time her husband didn’t take the oath and she felt guilty lying to him.

This changed in 1953 when her husband Mutungi Gichuhi finally decided that he wanted to take the oath and join the Mau Mau.

That same day, Muthoni Kirima took him and a goat to her father in law’s home in the Kinaini forest where he swore his oath to the Mau Mau fighters.

That was the last time that she would see her husband for 11 years, as he lived in the forest until 1963.

The next day, Chief Muhoya, who was an African colonial chief in Kenya, sent soldiers to Muthoni Kirima’s house to check on her husband, as he was a candidate to be a member of the Kamatimu, a loyalist group under Chief Muhoya.

When they questioned her, she told them that he went to get eggs and had not returned, so they eventually left.

Three days later, they came back with the suspicion that he joined the Mau Mau fighters.

To get the information that they needed, they beat her relentlessly.

In an interview, she describes this by saying, “I was beaten up.

They kicked me with their boots until I could hardly move.

Blood oozed from my nostrils.

They left me unconscious.” She credits this moment as the turning point that made her want to not just be in the village helping the Mau Mau fighters but to be a forest fighter.

This was when she took off to the forest and after a week by herself, she found the Mau Mau fighters.

Kirima started her time in the forest as a non-combatant; like most of the other women, she just cooked and looked after the soldiers while getting them ammunition and grenades from the market.

But she quickly impressed her fellow soldiers with her shooting skills and quick thinking.

Before long, she was leading her own platoons and helped break the gender norms of the Mau Mau fighters.

In an interview in 2015, a woman veteran soldier says, “There was one woman called Muthoni, I was with her.

She feared nothing.

She used to go to war with men because she did not fear.

She was a dangerous woman; even men feared her.” Muthoni was one of the female leaders of the movement and she rose up the ranks quickly.