A colleague supporting Kiguru’s appeal, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of Home Office reprisals with her own visa, said: “They imply Doseline chose to leave her daughter. The hostility of that reasoning, which can only come from a place of racism and misogyny, took my breath away.”If she didn't choose to do it, who else did it for her?
She first came to Bristol in 2021 as a research associate on a £1.3m EU-funded project on literary activism in Africa. Her field work required her to spend large amounts of time in Kenya, so the family decided it was not necessary to uproot her daughter. However, when she was offered a permanent lecturer position, she committed to starting a new life in the UK with her daughter. Her husband, who is also an academic, cannot look after his daughter because he travels a lot for research, but hopes to move to the UK.
Sounds like a calculated plan to get the whole family here to me, and perhaps to the Home Office as well.
Madhu Krishnan, a professor of African, world and comparative literatures at Bristol University, said: “The decision to separate a young child from her mother under such spurious grounds is an act of unthinkable cruelty, of which we have sadly become familiar in recent years.” She described Kiguru as a “world-leading scholar” and said her loss would be “strongly felt” if this drove her out of the UK.
I think we could live without a professor of world literature quite well.
