Kenneth Watene: Man of theatre, song and trade

Outstanding artistes are neither linear nor analogous. They display the full extent of creative talent from the visual to the audio, the scripted and the performative.

Kenneth Watene is a good example.

Largely known for writing the play Dedan Kimathi, he is also the man behind the vocals on David Amunga’s famous 1967 ballad America to Africa. He did not just co-author those lyrics, he also accompanied Amunga in the duet.

So Watene is more than a playwright. He is a musician, a novelist, and an actor who achieved considerable excellence in each of these fields. Interestingly, Watene has another skill that is somewhat rare in artistes — he is a trained and consummate businessman.

Soon after independence, the Kenyan Government launched a two-and-a-half year commodities trade and export programme aimed at equipping Africans with business skills and exposing them to international trade.

It was supported by the German Government and Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft, an organisation that believed transatlantic exchange was critical to the growth of local industries. Watene had just graduated from Thika High School in December 1965 when he enrolled in the first cohort of Kenyan trainees.

One weekend in 1966, he stunned himself and his German hosts by winning the third prize in a talent show in Hamburg where he strummed out a couple of his own compositions on a newly-acquired guitar.

Mr Krasuen, one of the show organisers, was so impressed he offered to promote Watene’s music through Philips Records. But Watene valued his commodities training too much to abandon it for the studio. Not even one in Germany.

The course paid particular attention to international coffee trade, so upon his return home Watene was among the first indigenous Kenyans to be licensed as a coffee liquerer by the Coffee Board of Kenya. He got a job at A. Baumann’s, a trading company. But the music bug kept biting.

Sam Kahiga, his old friend from Thika High School with whom he had recorded In the Park in 1965 — arguably Kenya’s first all-English song — was still on the scene writing and recording.

Watene had been deeply angered by Charles Worrod, the man who recorded In the Park. He did not regret ordering Worrod to erase all of the tapes he had recorded of Watene and Sam because he was so affronted by piracy. He wanted an alternative to the dominance of Worrod’s Equator Sounds label.

Worrod claimed to make “East African Music for East Africans”, but Watene was convinced that his business was run in ways that did not give maximum benefits to local artistes.

So Watene put his newly acquired business skills to helping his friend (and later an in-law) David Amunga set up Mwangaza Studios as part of Kassanga Stars Productions, next to Hallian’s Club on Victoria Street.

They recorded George Mukabi, Daniel Owino Misiani and George Owino.

These musicians brought with them an exciting new guitar sound — benga — that was distinguished by the plucking rather than the strumming of the guitar strings.

It is said they borrowed this technique from pioneer Congolese musicians living in Nairobi in the 1950s but arguably; plucking was intrinsic to our traditional string instruments like nyatiti, the Luo harp.

In 1967, Mwangaza broke fresh ground by recording DK Mwai’s first song Mummy Hingorera. They exposed him to Luo session guitarists who influenced the benga beat in DK’s later compositions such as the 1970 hit I Love You.

One day in 1967, Watene found Amunga rehearsing an English song. That was unusual. Amunga usually sang in Kiswahili. Watene listened for a while and concluded that the song’s lyrics and metre were not right. He offered to help.

Amunga was writing about nostalgia on account of a letter that his friend, and fellow musician, John Blasto Bulawayo had written to him from America. Watene, having lived in Germany, had direct experience of the nostalgia of diasporas.

They rearranged the song that became America to Africa with Peter Akwaabi playing the endearing harmonica, Daniel Hamisi on rhythm guitar and the Congolese Michel accompanying him. They also added a speech that Watene would narrate within the song.

Using his acting experience from Thika High School, Watene gave a dramatic rendition — something in the manner of the exultant speeches of African elder statesmen like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. “Honourable countrymen, we’ve had a wonderful time together. I have enjoyed seeing your mountains and your rivers.

“I have admired the national character of your people but you know, home is always sweet and all my beloved ones live there. And when I remember Africa, how I long to go back home”.

Bamboo Night Club on Cross Road near Nyamakima presented another opportunity to do music. Watene and Amunga set up a band of mixed repertoire there featuring Steele Beauttah as the soul vocalist while Habel Kifoto jammed rumba beats. They created quite some fusion when Watene added a nyatiti player to their mix.

In 1968, Seth Adagala took over the running of the Kenya National Theatre. He soon realised that for KNT to thrive as a space for indigenous productions, he needed to train a wide range of theatre workers.

Watene had quit his day job to finish writing his first novel, Sunset in Manyatta, which John Nottingham later published through East African Publishing House.

He decided it was time for him to revive his theatre skills and enrolled in the first class of Adagala’s National Theatre Drama School (NTDS), which was opened by Tom Mboya.

It was run with help from lecturers of the then English Department at the University of Nairobi. Other NTDS alumni included Tirus Gathwe, Ann Wanjugu and Paul Onsongo.

Whether it was the coffee business, music or theatre, Watene seemed to keep walking into the politics of providing authentic local spaces for indigenous African talent.

It was in the days before the meaning of the word ‘African’ had expanded to mean a person of whatever race born on the continent and, or, one who places the continent’s interests ahead of racial concerns.

Variety of tactics

The Kenya Cultural Centre was a partner in NTDS, but was still in the hands of a resistant white settler class that had, thus far, defined theatre in Kenya.

This group frustrated attempts to stage local productions using a variety of tactics including block booking the theatre for its theatre companies and ensuring that the calendar had no room to stage African plays by groups such as the National Theatre Company (NTC) that had started as part of NTDS.

It was quite an achievement when NTDS staged Athol Fugard’s The Blood Knot in 1971 with Francis Imbuga playing Zachariah to a full house.

On January 31 1973, NTC advertised the February 14 staging of Watene’s play My Son for My Freedom in the entertainment pages of the Daily Nation. The advert appeared again on February 13.

The next day NTC’s competitors advertised the staging of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from March 1, thus: “book now for this sophisticated Theatre Group production”.

The rivalry was nearing boiling point. The Inter-African Theatre Group (IATG) appeared to call a truce presenting the UN expatriate Janet Badjan-Young and the famed Ghanaian playwright Joe De Graft in Antigone, the Greek tragedy by Sophocles, directed by James Falkland. But by that time, the Africanist school had already whitewashed the walls at KNT obliterating the history of colonial theatre in Kenya.

The old interests had friends in powerful places. Reduced government funding would soon cripple KNT and its allies at the university would be detained or forced to flee into exile as the spaces for free expression shrunk in a growing dictatorship.

But for now, the struggles to Africanise the aesthetics of the national theatre raged. Millie Kiarie starred in De Graft’s famed Muntu, a panoramic presentation of Africa’s past that builds a post-colonial cultural spirit.

Watene was thriving. He wrote The Lonely Silence, a television script for VoK. When IATG staged Othello, he worked back stage as a prompter, struggling to suppress his laughter as de Graft forgot his lines, sometimes skipping entire sections.

In February 1974, Watene acted with Gacheche Waruingi and David Mulwa in Wole Soyinka’s The Road. As the director, Watene interpreted the play on the level of its deep spiritualism.

In the world of literature, Watene is fascinated more by African mysticism than by realism even when that realism stretches into Marxist dialectics as in Ngugi’s later fiction. African idioms of the Soyinka kind influenced Watene’s writing.

So did Shakespeare’s tragedies. He wrote two more plays, Broken Pot and The Haunting Past.

It was 1974 and all over the airwaves came the sound of the Hues Corporation song asking “so I’d like to know where you got the notion, (that) you could Rock the Boat?” Watene was in the mood to rock things up on a national scale.

He had decided to write a play about Dedan Kimathi, a man whose place in Kenya’s history was, to say the least, checkered. Loathed by the settler class, persecuted by the colonial administration and embraced with varying shades of warmth by those who clamoured for freedom, Kimathi was after 1963, a difficult subject to engage rationally.

What drove Watene to write Dedan Kimathi? “…when Mau Mau exploded, I was a big person, I was hearing a lot of stories of heroism, of Kimathi’s daring… and now nobody was talking in drama, or writing much, about Mau Mau ... I wanted to break the silence.”

That was a difficult thing to do. Where were the colonial records on Mau Mau? Additionally, local knowledge on Kimathi consisted largely of myths about his magical powers.

Met hostile criticism

Janet Young premiered the play. Mhlangabezi Ka-vundla directed it with Steve Mwenesi in the lead role. It met hostile criticism from the Ngugi school of Kenyan fiction and history. Ngugi argued that Watene had showed Kimathi as a coward.

The women in the play had ambiguous roles either as comforters of men or as their betrayers. But by the same token, Watene refused to idolise Kimathi. He was, seemingly, reading from Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim “show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy”.

Legendary figures make for difficult subjects. Watene says he “was asking a question about heroism … because African politics of the time was full of hero-worship – Jomo Kenyatta lionised, Kwame Nkrumah, even Amin! I thought let me ask about a hero… but a hero that is dead. Was he really a hero? Must we make him a demi-god?”

The young Watene battled to find answers. Intrigued by Kimathi and by the criticism of his play, he re-researched and rewrote it. The revised edition was staged at the Phoenix Theatre in 2002.

In September 1974, Anne Wanjugu announced that NTC had decided to switch from English to Kiswahili productions. The battle over post-colonial cultural identity was unending.

January 1976 opened with Watene asking, “When will Africans use National Theatre?” in his weekly Theatre Review column in the Sunday Nation. James Falkland had just been appointed to take over from Adagala and there was anxiety that “socio-cultural falsehoods” would persist with foreign interests and aesthetics dominating KNT. Watene also raised the even bigger headache of sufficient funding and efficient management of KNT.
In March 1976, Watene started writing a humour column that echoed Hilary Ng’weno’s old With a Light Touch and Joe.

It came to be known as Masharubu’s World and was later taken over by Watene’s friend Kahiga. These are the roots of Wahome Mutahi’s style in Whispers.

As State repression grew in the Moi years, Watene felt his creative energies being sapped. Fiction and drama required more latitude than he could muster. He turned to poetry and published in Gitobu Imanaya’s Nairobi Law Monthly.

Watene thinks we have learnt nothing from the Moi years because they were never adequately ficitionalised. “We are a transitional society that has not defined its values… Before one generation digests what the writer has said, something new comes up; before you can write about it another thing has come.”

A renaissance in the arts can only be sustained when there is coherence in the sector between training, publishing, practice and performance. Watene has fond memories of the work NTDS did to start the travelling theatre that was later taken up by the University of Nairobi.

The glaring irony of the National Schools Drama Festival bothers Watene. “Nothing happens from that point despite all the talent that is displayed there. The government should have created a better national drama school… What happens to all those young actors? Where do they get further training to refine their talent and grow the local theatre industry?”

“There have been no new theatres built and anyway KNT has always been in the wrong location”. But Watene recognises the big leaps that have been made by Tirus Gathwe, Wahome Mutahi and Heartstrings Ensemble in indigenising theatre and growing audiences.

However, he stresses that our laughter industry “must grow beyond slap comedy. The voice projection is terrible — why do they always shout? And the stage movement needs to be refined”.

Has his work as a businessman affected his life as an artist? Watene smiles and says wisely: “When you are an artist you read people better, you associate better, you have empathy. You don’t have to be a b******* to be a businessman”.

Combine creative excellence

Though busy with trading enterprises, Watene still has several publishable manuscripts. A novel from 1976, three plays – The Fire Beneath, A Street for a Dream and Nowhere to Take Flowers — and Tears of a Continent, an anthology of poems.

Last month Kenneth Watene turned 70. Last week he was at Ketebul Studios singing with Sam Kahiga and Patrick Kanyue. Watene is an example of how versatile Kenyan artistes are and how successful they can be when they use their creativity in other sectors.

Few people combine creative excellence with commercial sense. Kenneth Watene is one of them. As we strategise to grow our creative economy a hundredfold, we should not hesitate to exploit Watene’s immense knowledge and experience.

Dr. Nyairo is a cultural analyst – [email protected]