In death as in life, Bantu left an indelible mark

IN KENYA, WHEN AN ARTIST dies, we don’t just mourn the death of an individual, but the demise of an entire art form.
This is partly because there are so few truly talented and innovative artists left in the country, and the departure of just one leaves a huge void in the artistic sphere.

It is also because each death in these turbulent times is seen as part of a larger and increasingly tragic Kenyan narrative, where the best and the brightest seem to be dying in the prime of their lives. Often, this is in the most bizarre or unusual of circumstances, leaving a question mark as to why the death had to occur at this critical point in our history when we are in most need of creativity, innovation, intellectual rigour and artistic expression.

When one such artist died last week, it was not just his friends and family that grieved, but the entire artistic community. Bantu Mwaura, an award-winning performance artist, playwright, poet, storyteller and human rights activist, was found dead near his home in Nairobi’s Langata area. He was only 40.

No one can know for sure why someone chooses death over life. It is a question writer Virginia Woolf’s husband might have asked, or poet Sylvia Plath’s. American author and poet Andrea Dworkin has suggested that tormented artists resort to suicide because “self-destruction is a great and morbid bitterness in which one destroys what one knows by destroying oneself”.

What is most difficult to understand about Bantu’s death is why someone who had everything to live for would choose to end his life. Anyone who has met Bantu would describe him as a jovial extrovert, bubbling with ideas and opinions. Flamboyant, passionate, loud and argumentative, Bantu was not the type who would sit quietly in a corner and watch the world pass by.

He would actively engage in conversation, swinging his dreadlocks to emphasise a point, and insisted on wearing traditional African attire even in the most formal of occasions. He often quoted his mentor, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, another genius who left Kenya’s literary community impoverished by choosing exile.

Unlike many of our academics, Bantu made a conscious decision to come back home after completing his PhD at New York University’s Performance Studies Department. I remember encouraging him to stay on in America, not because I did not think he could make a valuable contribution to this society, but because I feared for people like him who have no place in this society, where money, rather than ideas, determines one’s fate.

HOW MANY OF OUR BEST AND BR-ightest have we lost to senseless death, either through a bullet, through a reckless driver or doctor, or because of alcoholism or depression? Would a person like Bantu survive Kenya? I often wondered. Or would he be taken away prematurely like our original “son of the soil” Wahome Mutahi or JM Kariuki and Robert Ouko, among many others, who died simply because they were too good, too honest and too brilliant for this country?

Bantu focused a large part of his work and research on examining how performance theory interfaces with theatre practice in Africa. In an essay that he wrote for an anthology I edited, he mourned the death of both traditional cultural practices and creative ideas, which he blamed on implicit and explicit State censorship in the 1980s and 1990s, and the emergence of what he called “donor-driven theatre”.

His passion for all things Kenyan, and his belief that societies must look to their own cultural practices and traditions for inspiration, made him an odd-ball in some circles, especially those that aspire for all things Western. For instance, he refused to cut off his dreadlocks even when they stood in the way of getting a job, and in the last few weeks, he had joined a campaign to seek justice and reparations for the Mau Mau.

He spoke openly about the role played by the so-called “home guards” in the dispossession of former Mau Mau fighters and did not mince words when analysing the reasons for Kenya’s underdevelopment in the arts and in other fields. He may be gone now, but his ideas have left an indelible mark on all of us who knew him or were touched by his work.

Fellow academic Keguro Macharia couldn’t have said it better when he implored Bantu to “not rest in peace, but to haunt us and whisper to us in our dreams” so as to “give flesh to our visions and urgency to our actions”.

Ms Warah is an editor with the UN. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations.