Kenyan theatre has gone mute; we need to break the silence

At the 2015 Storymoja Festival in Nairobi, playwright Donald Molosi from Botswana staged a one-man play titled Today It’s Me. It told the story of Philly Bongolei Lutaaya, the Ugandan musician who, upon contracting HIV-AIDS at a young age, dedicated his life to creating awareness on the disease. The unforgettable bit about the performance was that at the end of it, there were only a few dry eyes in the audience.

A couple of days after his performance at Storymoja, Molosi staged another of his plays at the University of Nairobi. Blue, Black and White told the fascinating story of the former president of Botswana Seretse Khama and the battles he had to fight so as to marry a white woman.

Just like Lutaaya, Molosi has succeeded in steering and fuelling conversations around issues that many find uncomfortable to speak of.

Kenyan theatre, if the past few years are anything to go by, gives one the impression of shying away from difficult contemporary discourses. A myriad of the plays I have watched lately are either adaptations of old western plays or tribal prejudices served to audiences in predictable, if slightly varied, forms. Very few of our playwrights seem interested in taking our current societal issues head-on in a refreshing and bold manner. They seem to prefer storylines that will make us laugh but give us nothing to ponder over or talk about.

Even as we dance ourselves silly on the platforms our tribal leaders afford us, our creatives — playwrights included — are unable to offer us imaginative interpretations that go beyond the regurgitation of so-called tribal accents, love for tea, pride for material wealth and love of money.  Is this narrow prism the only way we can reimagine our society?

In Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust, we see Odidi’s father Nyipir, who, though  he recalls a very difficult past and the torture he underwent at the hands of the police, only says, as way of explanation to Ajany, that “nineteen sixty-nine was a very hard year.” The weight of his words lie not in what he tells his daughter but in what he chooses not to say to her. In a similar vein, could we perhaps assume that the lukewarm scripts our playwrights feed us are just the tip of the iceberg? A scratch on the surface of the real conversations we ought to be having? That they, like Nyipir’s sentence, are laden with dark secrets that we as audiences are unable to access because, unlike the novel which can employ stream of consciousness, theatre  doesn’t allow us into the mind of the actor.

But then, what happened to the outspoken playwrights of old? Who brought these silences to our backdoor? Why are we silent at a time when our voices are needed more than ever?

The answer might, in my opinion, partly lie in a couple of news items I saw in the July 1982 edition of Hillary Ng’weno’s The Weekly Review. The first was about two lecturers, Alamin Mazrui and David Ng’ang’a, who were picked up for questioning for staging Kilio cha Haki at the National Theatre. The second incident was the sacking of the editor-in-chief at the Standard, George Gathii, because he wrote a strong editorial column criticising the government detention measures.

Perhaps the death of  poet Okot P’Bitek that very July in Kampala, was a metaphor for the death of the creatives’ voice in Kenya. For, a week later, the coup attempt happened and then the real silences set in and stayed for so long that when Mwai Kibaki took over power and dismissed his critics with an aloof ‘pumbavu,’ we all laughed a little too loudly at a loss of what to do with a Head of State who didn’t send dissidents to Nyayo House for ‘a little questioning.’ 

In 2013, the ministry of education placed a ban on the Butere Girls play, Shackles of Doom. The play, which told a hypothetical story of the exploitation of the Turkana community by rich and powerful people, was staged at a time when oil had just been discovered in the county. Those in power reduced it to a simplistic ‘promoting tribalism and teaching vices to young minds.’

To playwrights across the country, it might have been a subtle warning to keep veiling the messages they are trying to pass, just like the authors of Amezidi, Visiki, Kilio cha Haki and Walenisi. This, however,  seems an impractical solution, especially in a technological age where our children see the tribalism and hatred we are peddling on social media, TV and in the conversations we have in our homes.

At the third Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference held at the University Of Dar-es-Salaam this August, the keynote speaker Walter Bgoya challenged content creators and African intelligentsia to ensure longevity of their content even as they worked to retain readers’ interest. Quoting Nadine Godimer, he asked: “What is poetry that doesn’t save the nation and the people? In the same breath, perhaps we need to ask our playwrights, what theatre is if it doesn’t break uncomfortable silences and speak for the oppressed.”

A few theatre groups strive to bring pressing issues to the fore, like the Strathmore University Theatre Group with their latest production Pillars of Society and Silvia Cassini with her play A Man Like You. Other playwrights are forging new paths, doing exciting things with books and history. Mshai Mwangola’s performance team reads texts then act out chapters once every two months during the Point Zero Cafe Book Club. There is also Brian Ngartia’s Too Early for Birds which seeks to retell, through performances, the important histories that the blogger Owaah makes impossible for us to forget.

Real life stories like that of Henry Kuria who, in 1953 wrote the script of the first Kiswahili play in Kenya, seem like a myth to those of us weaned on  the silences that were served alongside maziwa ya nyayo in primary schools. It is thus hard to imagine that Kuria, then a high school student, would go against his white masters and write Nakupenda Lakini just to prove that English is not the only language and that Shakespeare isn’t the only playwright.  Because it was during the emergency period, Kuria and his peers had to get passes to travel to Nakuru town in order to perform at the new Menengai Hall.

The optimist in me would wish for more of such ceiling-breaking stories. However, as many a Kenyan dramatist discovered, soon after independence, the black master they had exchanged for the white didn’t take criticism kindly. From Tim Wandori’s 1981 winning play Makwekwe to Khaemba Ongeti’s Visiki in 1982 and its runner-up Kilio cha Haki, the national drama organising committee and adjudicators realised that drama was seen by the state as a way of inciting people. Soon enough, both producers and scriptwriters found themselves on the run. They were, in the true spirit  of drama, the new  makwekwe and if they didn’t stop writing, their vilio vya haki would go unheeded as they got relieved of their body parts until in the end, they’d remain visiki or worse still, shut down like the Phoenix Theatre in Nairobi did a few months back.

The writer is a teacher in Baringo