Muthoni Likimani: 100-year-old Mau Mau veteran still going strong
Macharia Munene
By
Macharia Munene
| Oct 27, 2025
The 2025 Mashujaa Day was different from previous Mashujaa/Kenyatta days in tone as well as significance. It came as Kenyans mourned Raila Amolo Odinga whose death and subsequent funeral events defied logic, expectation, and order. President William Ruto decided to treat Raila as co-president by giving him a State funeral and the presidential CGH award. With supporters disrupting official arrangements, it also marked a generational transition with one name, Babu Owino, attracting attention in gatherings at Parliament, Kasarani, Nyayo, and Bondo.
On the Mashujaa Day itself as the official ceremony was being held in Kitui, there were other venues for ‘shujaa’ ceremonies. First, Kenya’s fourth president Uhuru Kenyatta remained in Bondo and visited Raila’s grave accompanied by Ida and Oburu Odinga.
Second, Kenya’s fourth First Lady Margaret Kenyatta celebrated Mashujaa Day with matriarch shujaa Muthoni Likimani who clocked 100 years on earth and still had her original teeth and cognitive faculty intact. Margaret delivered greetings from Uhuru and Mama Ngina. There was also Rachel Gatabaki joking about Murang’a being the most ideal place for men to get wives.
That comment about Murang’a women being the most ideal, responded the Iron Lady of Kenyan politics Martha Karua to Rachel, is a debate for another day as she focused on the shujaa matriarch. The provost of St Stephens Cathedral had suggested that God should add the matriarch another 20 years so that she could live for at least 120 years like the biblical Moses.
On her part, Karua took the idea of God adding years a step further and said she would ask God for more time so that she can live for as long as, or even more than, Muthoni with all her teeth and mental faculties intact. Karua also turned to what she argued was the proper title for Margaret Kenyatta and corrected those who referred to her as ‘former First Lady’. She insisted that the proper title for Margaret was ‘The Fourth First Lady’ and not ‘the former’, and so it is.
Examining Muthoni’s life was like taking a memory walk down Kenyan history, starting in 1925 when CMS Reverend Levi Gachanja at Kahuhia welcomed her to earth. She arrived roughly three years after another ‘Muthoni’, Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, from the same Weithaga-Kahuhia neighbourhood, demanded that men surrender their pants to women in order to free Harry Thuku from the police station. The police killed her and she thereafter became a martyr and a point of reference in anti-colonial narratives. One year before her birth, 1924, Kahuhia had become the birth place of the Kikuyu Central Association which would spearhead anti-colonial struggles. She attended school at Kahuhia and was thus a pioneer in women going to school.
As a young lady, Muthoni must have been a ‘knocker’ and even became a beauty queen before embarking on educating people. She married Jason Clement Likimani, a Makerere trained Maasai medic who happened to be her brother Ngumba’s friend. Being the only African medic allowed to visit detention camps, she found herself accompanying Jason and ended up facilitating Mau Mau activities.
She smuggled letters and discouraged Maasai youth from joining the British against Mau Mau fighters. “I was instrumental,” she told a university audience in 2013, “in sabotaging the colonial strategy of recruiting Maasai morans to fight along the colonialists.”
Muthoni accomplished many other things in post-colonial Kenya. She served as a writer, producer, presenter, councilor and publisher. Her presentation of the Mau Mau times in her ‘Passbook Number F.47927: Women and Mau Mau in Kenya’ has become a focus of graduate study in universities.
She talks authoritatively about the role of women in the Mau Mau War. She is happy that, being 100 years old, her teeth which she gladly shows, are still so strong that she continues to “chew maize and meat.” She comes across as a real shujaa.