MUTHONI wa KIRIMA (born 1931)

Born in 1931 in Kenya's central region. Muthoni's journey as a revolutionary started when she was a girl, saving money to have Jomo Kenyatta travel abroad to bring freedom. Although her parents worked on a European farm, after her marriage to Gen Mutungi, she moved to a village reserve for Africans in Nyeri,Kenya before joining the Mau Mau freedom fighters at Nyandarua Forest,Kenya.In her 20s, she first worked as a spy for Mau Mau fighters who had camped in the forest when war broke out in 1952.Muthoni was one of the very few women to become active fighters in the liberation movement, most other women only worked as carriers of information or suppliers as she did begun with, but Muthoni became the only woman to have been bestowed the Mau Mau rank of field-marshal, rising to such a position wasn't an easy task.Muthoni wa Kirima showed great courage even as a young girl when she killed a rhinoceros to save her father’s goats.when death stared at the fighters, she found a humorous and satirical way to keep their spirits high.During the war, Muthoni was wounded on two occasions but never caught. While living in the forest, she suffered a bad miscarriage that left her unable to conceive.she was nicknamed "Weaver Bird" because of her ability to weave brilliant strategies in the struggle for Kenya’s independence.She had been in the forest since the start of the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonial authority(eleven years in the forest) and no one had told her or her handful of ragged comrades that the fight was over.On December 12, 1963, Jomo Kenyatta sent a vehicle to pick up Mau Mau fighters from the forest to take part in a ceremony where freedom fighters would lay down their weapons.Muthoni refused, not convinced the war was over and demanded instead to first see the Kenyan flag.Kenyatta had a lot of convincing to do before she agreed to lead other fighters in the ceremony marking Kenya’s full independence at Nyeri’s Ruringu Stadium.She then met Jomo Kenyatta(Kenya’s first post-independence leader), at first he thought Muthoni was joking when she said she had been in the forest all that time but she convinced Kenyatta by unfurling her dreadlocks that had been left to grow throughout her time in hiding.Field Marshal Muthoni got a licence to trade in ivory in 1966,saying she used to kill elephants for food and hide the ivory, and knew where they had buried tusks during their life in the forest.Her permission to collect and sell "wild" ivory ended in 1976 when trade in ivory was banned.In 1990, Muthoni served as a nominated councilor in Nyeri County Council, central Kenya. In 1998, President Daniel Arap Moi awarded her a medal for distinguished service and helped her set up a security firm in Nyeri that she runs up to today. In 2014, President Uhuru Kenyatta awarded her the Head of State Commendation.Currently, Muthoni wa Kirima lives in a Nyeri suburb. She still has the long dreads that she grown whilst hiding from the British. She is unimpressed by new governments and has said that she will not cut her hair until she sees the benefit of the independence. “I know neither English nor good Kiswahili because when others were in school, I was in the forest fighting,”by Muthoni wa Kirima.