What My Life Has Taught Me About Knowledge, Resilience, and Courage
From Coffee Farm to Influential Platform: A Journey of Resilience, Truth-Telling, and Reclaiming Our Stories
When I speak about my work, I cannot separate it from my life. My scholarship did not begin in a library or a lecture hall. It started on a coffee and tea farm, long before I ever imagined standing on an influential women’s platform.
While others stayed awake with coffee to write their theories, I stayed awake picking the very beans that kept them alert. I remember the soil under my nails, the cold mornings, the weight of the baskets, and the scars on my feet—scars that still speak, even when I choose silence.
Coffee travels the world without acknowledging its origins. I know that feeling intimately. I, too, have moved through spaces where my origins were invisible—where my labor was consumed, but my story was not welcomed.
My life has been shaped by contradictions like this—contradictions that pushed me to ask more complex questions about knowledge, resilience, and who gets to be heard.
I have lived through seasons where survival itself felt like a full-time job. I could not raise enough money to buy a home in a safe neighborhood. When rent became unbearable, I moved into an incomplete house—no ceiling, no paint, no proper doors or windows—but it was mine, and it was shelter.
I have lived through violence that tried to break me. I have lived through moments I do not speak of easily—moments of attack, violation, and fear that settled into my bones. These experiences did not make me stronger; they made me honest. Honest about what it means to be a woman navigating systems that were never built for her safety.
Academia brought its own wounds—rejection after rejection at seminars in Machakos, Maastricht, and Ethiopia. I failed the professorship interview. There was the application where I was not even shortlisted. Publisher rejections. Journal rejections.
Each “no” felt personal, because it was. It was my work, my voice, my lived experience being dismissed. But each “no” also sharpened my clarity: I was not fighting for acceptance. I was fighting for truth.
Politics taught me another kind of heartbreak. The failed Jubilee Party primary election of 2017 revealed a painful rift—the distance between Wanjiku, ordinary women, and the elite women who claimed to speak for her. I saw clearly that representation without connection is just performance. That realization changed me.
But I was never alone.
When institutions shut their doors, women opened theirs. The Nyahururu Taveta Women’s Association held me with a kind of solidarity that cannot be taught in any classroom.
My mother’s voice still guides me: daily accountability. Mwatinda mugika atia. What did you do today to honor your purpose? My mother’s teachings, my brother’s steady presence, my sisters’ laughter, my aunts’ wisdom, my friends’ unwavering belief in me—these became my foundation.
Even strangers became teachers. A taxi driver once told me, Ndiguaga haria Ikagio—it does not always land where you throw it. Life does not always fall where you expect. But it still lands. And you learn to stand where you are.
Through all of this, my Rosary and the quiet of Mass kept me anchored. My Catholic faith did not erase my pain, but it gave me language for endurance, for forgiveness, for beginning again.
Today, my work is not just academic. It is personal. It is spiritual. It is ancestral.
I am committed to:
- Reclaiming what was taken—stories, dignity, agency
- Remembering the people whose labor built the world but whose names were never recorded
- Addressing extraction and exploitation in all its forms—economic, intellectual, emotional
These are not just values. They are survival strategies. They are the tools that carried me from the farm to this platform.
My story is not polished. It is not linear. It is not triumphant in the way success is often packaged. It is a story of falling and rising, of being broken and choosing to heal, of being silenced and choosing to speak anyway.
If my work has any power, it is because it comes from a life lived fully—in pain, in faith, in community, and in courage.
