By JOE KIARIE

As the nation once again celebrates heroes who selflessly put their lives on the line to liberate the country from the shackles of colonialism, one thing will be certain. The fete is once again set to revolve around male fighters who took to forests to engage Britons in guerilla war.

But often overlooked is the critical role that women played to sustain the bloody combat, not to mention the ordeals they had to endure in the process.

Mau Mau veteran Elizabeth Waruguru, aged 107 years, is among the few women lucky to be still alive to share their tribulations.

When we paid her a visit at her residence in Nairobi’s Dagoretti suburb, she gamely dives into the past, exploiting her remarkably sharp memory to dissect Kenya’s liberation struggle.

Amid the chat, the visually impaired granny wildly grins as her grandson hands her hands her a glittery object. As we later learn, it is this exotic item that brought Ms Waruguru seconds away from what would have bean a brutal execution by colonial administrators 57 years ago.

Having been part of the Mau Mau rebellion from the onset, and believed to be hiding Imaramari (fighters) in her house, she recounts how one colonial chief and some home guards stormed and searched her house at the height of the war in 1955. By then, her husband, Mr Mbugua Muuru, was out in the battlefront.

The administrator, she notes, found no fighters or guns but discovered an item he believed would validate the death of yet another woman covertly supporting the rebellion.

“They said it was a grenade that was to be used to bomb the whites. I was not sure what it was, having received it from my son who got it from a white teacher in school,” Waruguru recounts.

She explains that once the ‘grenade’ was handed over to white rulers, she was summoned, detained at the Dagoretti detention camp and sentenced to execution by shooting.

She says a firing squad was swiftly assembled and she was tied to a tree at the rear end of the camp as hundreds of home guards, whites and villagers scrambled to witness her death. But a miraculous intervention was on the cards. “As the officers were aiming with their firearms ready to shoot me, one of the white administrators demanded he sees the grenade that I was accused of possessing.

“He looked at it, smiled and dropped it on the ground a few metres away. The crowd recoiled in fear expecting a massive explosion, but the device just spun on the ground and came to a sudden halt, attracting deafening silence from the crowd,” Waruguru recalls.

She says the administrator furiously chased away the firing squad, calling them all sort of names.

“Mzungu aliuliza, wapumbavu nyinyi, mnataka kuua mama bure? Polisi wengine nao walilia wakisema ‘maitu angiakua tuhu’ (The white asked, you stupid people want to kill this woman for no reason. Some police officers also cried saying I would have died without a reason),” she recounts, saying those who wanted her dead shamefully walked away with their heads down.

Grippingly, the object was a harmless glass paperweight, which the administrator handed back to her once she was untied.

Albeit hair-raising, the shocking event only marks a fraction of the price Waruguru had to pay for aiding Mau Mau activities, including coordinating the provision of critical supplies that helped sustain the war.

Born in Kiambu District on March 2, 1905, she was already in her mid forties as revolt started in 1950. With her husband among those administering oaths to Mau Mau fighters, not much bypassed her.

She notes that once the men went to the forests to fight, the women had no option but to join hands and supply fighters with crucial supplies such as food, clothes, medicine, information and even weapons.

“We started by taking secret oaths to fight the whites and not give away Mau Mau secrets to colonialists. In the early 1950s, I was in a group assigned to feed fighters in Renguti, Muguga, Ndeiya and Karen,” Waruguru recalls.

But she says the colonial administrators soon learnt of their undercover activities, attracting a reaction she terms beastly.

“One night, they raided our village, burning all houses and granaries and harvesting all crops in my half-acre shamba. I was put in detention at Kawangware and later locked up at the Dagoretti Chief’s Camp where I, together with my three children, went without food and water for four days,” she pensively narrates.

“At the camp, men brought in after being captured in warfare were being publicly castrated like goats while women had bottles shoved into their private parts as punishment,” recounts Waruguru.

Upon her release, she says serving the Mau Mau and this would earn her another detention stint at Kamiti Prison, where she says female prisoners were subjected to unspeakable acts.

But she says every punitive act by the Britons only psyched up the women, who would plot more complicated ways to outfox colonial rulers.

“We started coordinating activities among villages and informing the fighters where the whites had set posts. We would then hide them in homes next to the posts and they would attack the British patrols once they fell asleep at night, killing them and taking their guns,” she recounts.

Waruguru, who coordinated such activities in Dagoretti and Thigio areas, says this was nonetheless a perilous affair as any woman found hiding or helping fighters would be shot dead or detained.

With home guards by then also closely scanning any woman carrying luggage, the granny says young girls, including her battle-hardened teenage daughter Mary Wambui, became critical in coordination.

Then aged 15, Ms Wambui narrates how she embarked on a perilous mission once a group of fighters, including her father, fell sick and took refuge in a home in Karen to access medication.

“At this point, I took oath and started supplying them with food, clothing and spy reports. As a young girl, no one would suspect me despite the heavy luggage on my back,” she narrates.

Now 72, she says the fighters would explain their ailments to her and she would take the information to her mother, who coordinated access to medical information and drugs.

“In liaison with other women, we would get medicine from the Kenyatta National Hospital. The drugs were stolen and smuggled out of the hospital by nurses and other workers who were all under oath,” Waruguru explains.

Wambui would then take the medicine to the fighters, who returned to the battlefront upon recovery. The medicine did not, however, help her father in his hour of need.

He was captured while wounded at Karura Forest in 1955, detained at Kikuyu Police Post and later died at Kiambu Hospital. “We still do not know where the Government buried his body,” she notes.

To illustrate the hardheartedness of those involved in the rebellion, Wambui says she felt nothing when her mother was about to face the firing squad for possessing a ‘grenade’.

“Convinced she was going to die, she just bid us goodbye, urging us to fight hard and inform her mother about her fate. I just looked at her helplessly but did not go down with emotions.