Revisiting the roots of Gikuyu culture through the sacred Mugumo tree

Using methods such as oral history, historical archaeology and anthropologically informed historical analysis in order to construct knowledge about people who had previously been left out of academic histories, this paper examines the Gikuyu culture by exploring a central aspect of their traditional cosmology and worship. The Mugumo (Ficus natalensis / Ficus thonningii) is taken as a sacred tree among the Gikuyu of Kenya and is the key to understanding the cosmology of this ethnolinguistic community of central Kenya. The paper explores the characteristics of this sacred tree and how the rituals associated with it express the Gikuyu claim to land, political power, religious hegemony and identity. The paper also explores the contribution of the sacred Mugumo to the contemporary studies of religion and politics.