Memories of the many years spent in the city writing and acting

The publication of my play A Hole in the Sky, dedicated to the memory of the late Wangari Maathai, triggered a sharp strain of nostalgia in me. With practically every line I wrote, every scene and every character, I would be visualizing a stage, a set and an actor, somewhere in Nairobi.

The 20 years, between 1978 and 1998, that I spent strutting and traversing the stages and auditoria of Nairobi left an indelible mark on my consciousness and played a crucial role in my understanding of creative expression. They were arguably the most enriching aspect of my artistic experience.

I plunged in immediately after I joined Kenyatta University. David Mulwa and the late Francis Imbuga were planning a new production of Muntu, the African history epic by the Ghanaian Joe de Graft, and they asked me to team up with them.

Mulwa and Imbuga, who were to become my closest personal and professional friends, were not close acquaintances then. But I knew them by repute as the rising stars of Kenyan theatre, and they had heard of me, especially from David Rubadiri and John Ruganda, who had relocated to Nairobi from Makerere some years earlier.

FAREWELL TRIBUTE

We also shared our love and respect for Joe de Graft, with whom I had worked briefly at the FESTAC77, the Festival of African Arts, in Lagos and who had earlier been their teacher at the University of Nairobi. Indeed, the two had acted under Joe de Graft’s direction in the première production of Muntu.

The elder had gone back to Ghana and Francis Imbuga had just returned from a brief visit to him, but with worrying news. De Graft was in very poor health and prospects of his recovery were pretty dim.

Maybe Mulwa and Imbuga decided to perform Muntu as a form of farewell tribute to him, for, as it happened, Joe de Graft passed away soon after our performance.

The show, however, was a roaring success. David directed a combined cast of staff and students of Kenyatta University to produce a really vibrant performance.

Acting as the First Son of Muntu, I found myself onstage opposite the crème de la crème of Kenya’s literati, among them Ciarunji Chesaina, whom I had last seen at Makerere in a sparkling rendition of Song of Lawino, and the late Arthur Kemoli, best known as a musician, although he was officially a literary academic and teacher.

WHIRLWIND OF PERFORMANCES

From then on, for me, it was to be a non-stop whirlwind of theatre activity, mostly acting, for the next two decades. Soon after Muntu, we were working on the première of Imbuga’s satirical rap on the idiocies of political greed, The Successor. This time, Mulwa, Imbuga, Steve Mwenesi, then a student, and I were under the direction of the mercurial John Ruganda.

The Nairobi University Players (NUP), under which we performed The Successor, was Ruganda’s creation. It was his attempt to harness the energy and talent he had generated with his Nairobi University Free Travelling Theatre, itself a replica of the Makerere Free Travelling Theatre, of which he had been a member.

I had met Ruganda in Makerere but only briefly worked with him there, when I cast him as Jero, the rogue pastor in Soyinka’s Trials play. The production, in 1969, was for Uganda Television but what I remember most about it was the trouble I had getting Ruganda to remember his lines!

By the time we reconnected in 1978, however, Ruganda had firmly established himself in Nairobi theatre circles as a teacher, playwright and, especially, director. He was directing such heavyweights as Oluoch Obura, Waigwa Wachira, Wanjiku Mwotia and John Sibi Okumu.

CORE PERFORMERS

His anti-Amin play, The Floods, had taken Nairobi by storm, and he had unearthed rare talent in young performers like Hawi Odingo, Wakanyote Njuguna and the utterly exceptional Stella Muka.

These three were to become Ruganda’s core performers, for whom he specifically created the Odie, Wak and Stella characters of Shreds of Tenderness. Stella Muka, who performed with us in The Successor, was soon to perish in a freak building site accident, just after she had completed her electrical engineering degree course. The shock and sorrow of our community was indescribable.

Anyway, with the theatrical exuberance of those days, with Mulwa, Ruganda and the impressively resourceful Tirus Gathwe producing and directing, at Kenyatta, the National Theatre, UoN’s Education Theatre Two, and the French Cultural Centre, there was no shortage of ‘employment’ for those of us willing to act. Only, there was hardly any pay or other material gain for our efforts.

Indeed, we nearly always had to subsidise our participation in the spritely shows we produced. Sometimes we would be rehearsing as late as 3am, especially with ‘Chief’, as we called Ruganda.

GETTING LOST

We would then mobilise our resources for a pack of chips and maybe a sausage each, at the Delicious (later Afro-Unity) Club, before heading home from Muindi Mbingu to the Nairobi suburbs! Those few of us with vehicles would not get home till we had dropped off the last member of the cast at his or her residence.

Once I lost my way in the Dandora complex. I had dropped off a colleague there and then taken a wrong turn. I found myself facing a veritable terra incognita. It took me over 30 minutes’ frantic driving around before I got back on to Ring Road.

We were ‘amateurs’ in the raw, French sense of the word, ‘lovers’. We immersed ourselves in theatre for the pure joy of it, and also, now I realise, for the sense of belonging that it gave us.

We were a close-knit community and many of the friendships we formed turned out to be lifelong. One cannot help recalling, for example, the lovely couple of the late Esther Njiru and Martin Okello, who were regular performers in our shows.

Soon, however, we were to be thrust onto television and find our social roles and responsibilities drastically changed. A story for another day.

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and literature in East Africa.