Plotting categorical data with pandas and matplotlib

I have a data frame with categorical data:

     colour  direction
1    red     up
2    blue    up
3    green   down
4    red     left
5    red     right
6    yellow  down
7    blue    down

I want to generate some graphs, like pie charts and histograms based on the categories. Is it possible without creating dummy numeric variables? Something like

df.plot(kind='hist')

You can simply use value_counts on the series:

df['colour'].value_counts().plot(kind='bar')