In her book, Kimathi's widow recalls how prison warders would update her on the progress of the trial. And they would tell her that he will be convicted because everyone in the court apart from Kimathi himself was a colonialist or a sympathiser.
A day before he was executed, Mukami was taken to see him. Upon seeing her, his face lit up and he jumped and hugged her, she wrote.
"Kimathi had a finger on his left hand that had been partly cut while he was grinding grass for cattle. This happened while we were living in Ol Kalou. Many white people had checked his finger as proof that they had captured the right man," Mukami says in her book.
The British colonialists had promised Kimathi acres of land if he disowned the Mau Mau. He defied. After all, that is what hey were fighting for; ithaka na wiyathi (land and freedom).
"He had two regrets," Mukami wrote, "that he would not live long enough to see his children grow and that he would not live to see a black man raise a Kenyan flag."
Kimathi requested his wife not to let the name Kimathi Waciuri die, even if she was to remarry.
It is an honour that Mukami kept.
Unfulfilled dream
She was told to bring the children to see their father for the last time. Little did she know that that was part of the psychological torture that the colonialists used. The children were never to see their father; he was executed at dawn the following day.
Before she died last month, Kimathi's widow expressed one wish; to bury her husband.
For 66 years she had wanted the government to give her husband a heroe's burial. During an interview early last year, aged about 93, she said her time was running out and she feared that she may go without seeing her lifelong wish come through.
"The first time she asked for the remains of our father was in 1963, just after (Prime Minister Jomo) Kenyatta was sworn in," says Mukami's last born daughter Evelyn Wanjugu, the chief executive of the Dedan Kimathi Foundation.
"Unfortunately, she left this world without giving her husband a decent burial."
Her brother, Simon Maina Kimathi describes their mother "a hardcore Mau Mau" who never gave up. "Her only wish was to bury her husband. She had so much stress that he health deteriorated."
Kimathi's children recall their childhood as one that was influenced by parents who were traumatised by the past.
"Our mother kept asking us if they made a mistake going to the forest to fight for the nation. She kept telling us that it is like being on the field playing football but the trophy is given to the ones cheering," says Wanjugu.