Kenyan Theatre after Kam°r°°th–
G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g°
Using the term “language” as a metaphor for both form and content, Ng–g° wa Thiong’o presents the Kam°r°°th– popular theatre experiment as an effort to evolve an authentic language of African theatre (:–) and as the first meaningful challenge to imperialist cultural domination in Kenya (:). He reports that Kenyan theatre in the early s was trying to break away from the imperialist colonial tradition whose symbols were the European- dominated Kenya National Theatre and the Donovan Maule Theatre in Nairobi, and other such centers in the major towns (:). In Writers in Politics and subsequent writing, Ng–g° reports that The Trial of Dedan K°mathi, written by himself and Micere M–go, and Betrayal in the City (), by Francis Imbuga, could not book more than four days to perform at the Kenya National Theatre in October even though the two produc- tions were the official Kenyan entries to Festac ’, the nd All Africa Black Arts Festival to be held in February . By performing at Kam°r°°th– village then, the Kam°r°°th– group demonstrated that Kenyan theatre could take place outside the confines of the National Theatre building. They converted the “empty space” at Kam°r°°th– into a “seeing place,” thereby reconnecting Kam°r°°th– to performance traditions in African theatre where the theatre was not a physical building but a space in which there were performers/actors and an audience. By performing for a mostly rural audience with low levels of lit- eracy, Kam°r°°th– also redefined the audience for Kenyan national theatre. The groups first play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want, ) drama- tized issues that affected the underprivileged in Kenya. It directly reflected the lives of the majority of the people of Kam°r°°th–. The original play was written in G°k–y–, a language that a majority of the audience in the Kam°r°°th– area could understand. It also incorporated the people’s folklore as the central fea- ture of form. By having workers and peasants act in Ngaahika Ndeenda the Kam°r°°th– group departed radically from the practice of other theatre groups by having the underprivileged act in the drama about their lives. The second Kam°r°°th– production, Mait– Njug°ra (Mother, Sing for Me, ) sought to consolidate the political gains from the first production, with one difference: the play was to be done at the National Theatre. Ng–g° ex- plains the reasoning behind the decision:
By going to perform at the Kenya National Theatre the alliance [“of workers, peasants and progressive teachers and students”] was going to make the point that an authentic language of African theatre, no matter in what specific African tongue it found expression, would communicate
The Drama Review , (T), Summer . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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to people of all nationalities. It was also going to prove that this trend had the support of Kenyan people of all nationalities. Where else to prove this than on the premises of the so-called Kenya National Theatre [...]. (:)
Another reason for the decision was that the production required technical effects only available at the Kenya National Theatre. Though in the end the group was not allowed the use of the National Theatre, their rehearsal/perfor- mances at the neighboring Education Theatre II of the University of Nairobi achieved almost the same results. In its use of a local language as the medium of a major theatre production, Kam°r°°th– broke new ground. The effort at class-conscious theatre done by, for, and with the lower classes was also something new in Kenyan theatre. No intellectuals had been involved in this kind of effort before, nor has it been re- produced since. In relocating Kenyan theatre from the petty-bourgeois base at the institutions of higher learning to the workers and peasants, Kam°r°°th– achieved another “first.” To be able to properly assess the impact of Kam°r°°th– in the development of a language of Kenyan theatre then, the key issues of the performance space, actors and their audience, the content of the performances, form, and the language of the performances have to be analyzed. It will be the argument in this paper that Kam°r°°th– was a product unique to the s and early s in Kenya. Its effect on the Kenyan theatre scene was to a large extent dependent on Ng–g° and the intellectuals working with him, who were themselves products of the intellectual climate in the Kenya of the late s and early ’s. To the extent that Kam°r°°th– was successful, it also gave rise to conditions that made it difficult to reproduce its success. After Kenya regained its independence in , the next decade saw the Africanization of the key personnel in strategic national institutions. This did not happen fast enough in the area of cultural institutions. The Kenya Na- tional Theatre and the adjacent Kenya Cultural Centre, for example, re- mained British controlled, with the Kenya National Theatre getting a British manager, James Falkland, as late as January . Falkland’s appointment was greeted by an immense public outcry, much of it led by Ng–g° wa Thiong’o who had barely three years earlier become the first African chairman of the
. The government built Kam°r°°th– Village Poly- technic at the site where the Kam°r°°th– group staged its plays in . The idea was to make the people of Kam°r°°th– forget about Ng–g° and his “anti-devel- opment” plays. Ironically, the local people call the site of the polytechnic “Ha Ng–g°” meaning “Ng–g°’s space/place.” (Photo by G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g°)
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Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi. This department (previ- ously the Department of English) was renamed in after concerted efforts led by Ng–g°, who also argued for the restructuring of its courses from a Eurocentric to an Afrocentric focus. Added to his accomplishment as an author of international repute, the chairmanship gave Ng–g° the clout he needed to comment and be taken seriously on matters of national cultural interest. When the Festac ’ group could not get the dates at the National Theatre they needed for the performance of his play and that of Francis Imbuga, Ng–g°, Micere M–go, Seth Adagala, Imbuga, and others led the protests against cul- tural imperialism. Ng–g°’s protests against Kenya’s cultural domination by foreigners and his writings on culture in the s reflect the influences of Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, and Amilcar Cabral, the Guinean revolutionary. For Ng–g°, the defeat of imperialism in Kenya was only possible where the economic struggle for self-determination was reinforced by a cultural reassertion. His outspokenness on class inequalities in the Kenyan society of the s was a manifestation of the relatively free intellectual atmosphere at the time. Beyond writing about workers and peasants in The Trial of Dedan K°mathi () and Petals of Blood (), his two works published in the mid-s, Ng–g° had not worked closely with his “workers and peasants.” The conscription by the Kam°r°°th– community to work with them on their literacy and theatre project therefore gave Ng–g° the opportunity to work closely with real workers and peasants. It also gave the theatre project a prominence it would otherwise not have had. K°mani Geca–, and Ng–g° wa M°ri° (the other intellectuals working on the project) shared his ideological persuasion. That only Ng–g° was detained when the government banned the first play, Ngaahika Ndeenda, is an indica- tion of the government’s estimation of the level of his influence. No such po- litically conscious theatre had been staged in Kenya before Ngaahika Ndeenda in . There had also not been any history of a group performing such class-conscious theatre before this. The intellectuals in the group exerted a high level of ideological influence on the rest of the group, which explains the inability of the “workers and peasants” to revive the Kam°r°°th– project in the absence of the intellectuals.
. Maina M–horo, Jane Mbinya, Njeri R–gene, Richard K°mondo, and G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g° per- form in Francis Imbuga’s Man of Kafira (). A production of the Literature Students’ Association, the play was performed at Education Theatre II, University of Nairobi. (Photo courtesy of G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g°)
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. This newspaper spread reviews cases of theatre cen- sorship in Kenya. In the middle of the page is a pic- ture of a rehearsal of Maith– Nj–g°ra () at the University of Nairobi. (Photo by G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g°)
Ngaahika Ndeenda was the first play to be banned in independent Kenyan history and it set a dangerous precedent. With the death of Jomo Kenyatta (independent Kenya’s first president) in August , and the installation of a more paranoid regime, censorship in the theatre reached unprecedented lev- els. When in Ng–g° tried to have Mait– Njug°ra performed at the Kenya National Theatre, the regime refused to issue a license for the performance. In February , the performance of Muntu by Joe de Graft had been stopped at the same theatre barely a week before Mait– Njug°ra was supposed to open, ostensibly because the play promoted violence. With the effective banning of Mait– Njug°ra, the need for writers to censor themselves became much more urgent. The banning of these two plays was not an isolated incident. At the annual schools drama festivals in , the government began a gradual stifling of creativity in primary and secondary schools. Politically con- scious plays were eliminated from the festivals in a bid, as drama critic Wahome Mutahi noted, “[...] to keep drama within the path of the key guid- ing philosophies of the country’s education” (:). Mutahi notes that St. Paul’s Primary School from Nairobi was knocked out of the Primary Schools’ National Drama Festival finals because its play was deemed to be politically offensive. In November of the same year, Human Nature (), a play about corruption by Kenya Science Teachers’ College, was ordered struck off the program barely hours before the start of that year’s Colleges’ Drama Festi- val (Mutahi :). In the larger society, the provincial administration in Nyeri stopped stu- dents from the Nyeri District University Students’ Association from showing Ng–g°’s Ngaahika Ndeenda and The Trials of Dedan K°mathi to schools in Nyeri
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. Ruth Kamau as Naomi, Maina G°chane and M–igana Kari–ki as Angels, and G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g° as Moses in Jo- seph G°chuk°’s musical play The Third Testa- ment () at the French Cultural Centre. (Photo courtesy of G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g°)
District. The two plays had just completed their run at Education Theatre II at the University of Nairobi. At the university, the authorities turned a deaf ear to the highly radical performances by student groups like Wananchi Arts, or the highly popular annual Poetry Night sponsored by the Literature Stu- dents Association at the University of Nairobi. At the Poetry Night, anybody could present short skits or read their poetry to university students assembled at Education Theatre II. That this was a luxury allowed only to university students was forcefully dramatized when in , the Department of Litera- ture was asked to produce a play for the national celebrations marking years of Kenyan independence and President Moi’s years at the helm. Some open-minded lecturers and students chose to do Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest () and duly submitted three copies of the play for perusal by the celebration’s planning committee. Though the copies were submitted more than two months before the performance, it was only a week to the perfor- mance date that somebody in the committee realized the satirical parallels be- tween Kongi’s Isma and Moi’s Kenya. The production was removed from the program for Nairobi, and the department ordered to come up with a play that espoused Moi’s slogan of Peace, Love, and Unity. Naturally, such a play did not exist, and the Department of Literature was subsequently left out of the official celebrations. The production went on, however. In an act of defiance, various directors and actors who were involved in Kongi’s Harvest decided to revive the productions that they had done during the year, with Kongi’s Har- vest as the main attraction. Other plays included Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People
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(, Norway), John Ruganda’s The Floods (, Uganda), Bode Sowande’s The Night Before (, Nigeria), Mbongeni Ngema’s Asina Mali (), and Matsemela Manaka’s Egoli (; both South Africa). For one week, the uni- versity community celebrated with theatre, as the leaders celebrated with their wine and champagne. Thus was born the “Harvest of Plays” which has be- come an annual event. Between and a number of Kenyan productions were denied li- censes for public performances. The worst year was , when a total of eight plays were denied performance licenses. These included Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay (), Tewfik al-Hakim’s The Fate of a Cockroach () (the censor wanted to know who the cockroach was), and Oby ObyeroOdhiambo’s original play, Drumbeats on Kerinyaga (). The latter was stopped for the simple reason that it portrayed a Kenyan
. Monica Kathina as Amope in a scene from Wole Soyinka’s The Tri- als of Brother Jero () at Education Theatre II. (Photo courtesy of G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g°)
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society that was culturally diverse but politically cohesive, in direct contradic- tion to the president’s argument that the country was not cohesive enough, which he was using to delay the introduction of multiple parties in Kenya. While some of these productions were subsequently allowed to be performed in and with the relaxation of rules governing freedom of expression, the government censor was still stopping productions as late as May , when his authority was constitutionally challenged in court for the first time. Miujiza, a new theatre group that was formed in September , was rehears- ing Bode Sowande’s The Master and the Frauds (), a play about corruption set in Nigeria. While other Sowande plays had been performed before (notably The Night Before, Flamingo [], and Farewell to Babylon []) the censor would not allow the performance of The Master and the Frauds. Miujiza went to court and challenged the legality of having the District Revenue Officer at the Provincial Commissioner’s Office, Nairobi, as the official government cen-
. M–turi Chege as Buntu in Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead () at Education Theatre II. (Photo courtesy of G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g°)
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sor for plays in Nairobi. They argued that while the constitution allowed for the appointment of a Stage Plays Licensing Authority, no such authority had ever been gazetted, and therefore, there was no constitutional authority vested in the Revenue Officer to vet plays. The judge ruled in Miujiza’s favor, and The Master and The Frauds was shown at the Miujiza Theatre (Gacheru :). This did not, however, stop the government from blocking the pro- duction of plays it deemed politically offensive. In July for example, the police stopped a performance of Ng–g°’s Ngaahika Ndeenda barely ten minutes after it began at Kikuyu Country Club. The play was later shown freely in De- cember . The government, however, still routinely breaks up perfor- mances under the pretext that they threaten public security. The role of government censorship has been explored in such detail to illus- trate the institutional handicaps that have prevented the emergence of another Kam°r°°th–. The ideological and intellectual atmosphere has also changed. Since Ng–g°’s detention and subsequent exile, the political situation has been such that no intellectual is free to work closely with workers and peasants. Of course, this is assuming that there is such a high-profile intellectual who would renounce his or her class and would be willing to suffer the kind of harassment that Ng–g° endured from the state. Again, the latter half of the s and the s have been characterized by high inflation levels; people spend more time trying to make ends meet, and have little time to engage in the kind of theatre Kam°r°°th– represents. Also, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early s, leftist rhetoric about workers and peasants began to sound empty. Again, over the years that he has been president of Kenya, Moi has largely co-opted the intellectual community into the state apparatus through appoint- ments to state corporations and gifts of government land and cash. Ironically, in and , it was Henry Indangasi, the chairman of the Literature De- partment at the University of Nairobi, who was the unofficial theatre censor at the university. In , when the annual Harvest of Plays became too politi- cal—with poetry criticizing the arrest of multiparty crusaders taking center stage—it was Indangasi who persuaded Professor Philip Mbithi, the then Vice Chancellor, to ban the Harvest. It took the concerted protests of the students for Mbithi to reverse his decision. In , the Literature Department chair- man together with the University Security and members of the Special Branch (an elite arm of the police force) personally stopped the performance of Oby ObyeroOdhiambo’s Drumbeats on Kerinyaga at Education Theatre II. In the s the Department of Literature was the home of radical intellec- tuals like Ng–g°, Micere M–go, K°mani Geca–, and Gacece War–ing°, who nurtured a radical theatre at the university. Up until , Theatre Workshop Productions, the group rehearsing Drumbeats on Kerinyaga, had been housed in the Department of Literature under the wings of two of its cofounders, Opiyo Mumma and Gac–g– Makini, who were lecturers in the department. With their departure in , Indangasi threw out Theatre Workshop Productions, arguing that they could not use the university to attack the government (Oby ObyeroOdhiambo ). Education Theatre II has traditionally functioned as the alternative Kenya National Theatre but in the early s that venue too was lost to government control. It is crucial to explore at this point the issue of the performance space for the national theatre in the post-Kam°r°°th– phase. Ironically, the Donovan Maule Theatre, which Ng–g° presents as the sym- bol of imperialist cultural domination in Kenya, did not survive the demise of the Kam°r°°th– theatre effort by far. In its day, this repertory theatre was the only professional theatre in Kenya. Between June and May when it closed, about productions were presented. Of these, none was an African play, and only once did an all-black cast grace the floorboards of the Donovan Maule Theatre. This was the production of Macbeth in June , a produc-
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tion that was meant to coincide with the Organization of African Unity (OAU) meeting of African heads of state in Nairobi. Predictably, the pre- dominantly white theatre critics remarked on the oddity of an African cast performing Macbeth (see for example Huie :). The rest of the theatrical fare at the theatre comprised of reruns from Europe and the United States, with the theatre once in a while acquiring the rights to produce a major Western play concurrently with its premiere in London. In its prime, the Donovan Maule Theatre was able to contract actors and actresses directly from London. Over the years, however, the audiences declined and by , the DM (as it was popularly known) was in financial trouble. When it became clear that the theatre was about to close, a group of some of its most devoted members got together and tried, unsuccessfully, to take it over. Determined to continue the theatrical tradition established by the Donovan Maule Theatre, the core members soon identified a space right opposite the DM, at the Professional Centre. Thus was born the Phoenix Players who, in a sense, rose from the ashes of the Donovan Maule Theatre. After major renovations to the basement room that was to house their new theatre, the group opened on June with Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. James Falkland and James Ward codirected and also acted. The production was repeated in and again in , to mark the group’s th and the th productions respectively. In a lot of ways, the Phoenix Players are a continuation of the Donovan Maule Theatre. They have stuck with Eurocentric plays that are ideal for the large expatriate population in Kenya, which needs to be reminded of the West End and Broadway. In a booklet to mark the th production in , Kenneth Mason (a founding member) notes:
[James Ward and James Falkland] have selected comedies; dramas; Shakespeare’s; musicals; thrillers; classics; farces and one-man shows; they have ransacked the dramatic output of nations—British, Italian, American, Australian, South African, Caribbean, French and Norwegian. (n.d.:)
Of these first productions, only one play was from Africa. This was the ever popular Sizwe Bansi Is Dead written by Winston Ntshona, John Kani, and Athol Fugard which was produced in . This production ran twice in the same year, becoming production numbers and . Since its inception, Phoenix Players has established a tradition of perform- ing a Shakespeare play and a Christmas musical every year, but the idea never . The Odd Couple seems to have occurred to them to do an African play every year. At the the- (), produced by the atre, no Kenyan play has ever been done, unless one considers Out of Africa Phoenix Players. (Courtesy (), Laurie Slade’s adaptation of Karen Blixen’s work of the same title, a of the Daily Nation) Kenyan play. To their credit, Phoenix Players have had a policy of multiracial casting for some time now, with leading indigenous Kenyan actors like Steve Mwenesi, Sam Madoka, Ian Mbugua, Sam Otieno, and Charles Tsuma getting to play major roles alongside the perpetual leads James Ward, James and Debonnaire Falkland, and Annabel Maule, the daughter of the founder of the DM. Beginning in , James Falkland began consistently Africanizing Western musicals, producing such hits as The Kenyan Mikado (), Ayenka (), and Too Good to Be True (, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona). He also wrote his own compo- sition, Changing Generations (), with music ar-
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ranged by two Kenyan women, Suzzane Kibokosya and Joy Mboya. Indi- vidual members of the Phoenix Players sent logistical support in the establish- ment of Miujiza Theatre, an African repertory group formed in , and, as a result, Miujiza mistakenly came to be seen as a sort of African wing of the Phoenix Players. James Falkland was a cofounder of Miujiza, while Steve Mwenesi, a regular on the Phoenix stage, was the founding chair. The first manager was Sam Otieno, also a Phoenix old hand. Among “African” theatre groups, the Miujiza Theatre group was unique as they were the only group to have their own theatre building, which had been converted from the old Rahimtulla Trust Library in the center of Nairobi. With the closing of Education Theatre II to groups not affiliated with the university, especially those staging radical productions in the early s, the Miujiza stage became an alternative home for African groups, who found the all-Kenyan management more amenable to their needs. It is here that the an- nual Harvest of Plays was held from to . Regrettably, the Miujiza Theatre had to close down in when the lease on the space expired. The theatre had also been heavily supported through donor funding, especially from NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) like Family Life Interna- tional, which supported AIDSCAP, the Miujiza Theatre’s AIDS awareness ef- fort. The funding for such efforts was no longer forthcoming by . Sharing pride-of-place in hosting African theatre groups has been the French Cultural Centre, which was built in . Its medium-sized theatre makes for a very intimate actor/audience relationship. Successive directors of the center have attempted to support the development of African theatre by at times donating the use of the auditorium. The center has also exposed Kenyans to Francophone African drama, flying in groups from West Africa to perform at the center or bringing in French-speaking West African directors to direct plays from that region. This is in addition to the normal theatrical fare from France; the center regularly brings in French directors to work alongside Kenyan codirectors on French productions. In , the French Cultural Centre opened the National Theatre Acad- emy, a facility where many of Nairobi’s newer crop of theatre practitioners learned the arts of acting, directing, playwriting, and costume design, in a pro- gram more comprehensive than that offered at the neighboring University of Nairobi. The instructors for the courses were drawn from Phoenix Players, Braeburn Theatre, the University of Nairobi, and Kenyatta University. The students gained hands-on experience, presenting their performances at the center’s theatre. Notable productions included In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields () by Bernard Marie Koltes directed by Odingo Hawi and In Pursuit of the Drum Major (), a production devised by John Sibi Okumu, a leading Kenyan actor, to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. This particular produc- tion was sponsored by the American Embassy. The National Theatre Acad- emy has also sponsored an annual playwriting competition. In this way, the National Theatre Academy appears to have been serving the role that should have been served by the long defunct Kenya National Theatre Drama School. From around , however, it became increasingly difficult to get permission to perform at the French Cultural Centre—unless a group was doing a French play. Regrettably, funds for the National Theatre Academy ran out in Sep- tember and it too had to close down. While some European theatre groups in Kenya have integrated African ele- ments into their repertoire—but on their own terms—groups like the Lavington Players, Nairobi City Players, Braeburn Theatre, and others have basically gone on with their “West End” performances right in Nairobi. In Mombasa, it was only in that the Little Theatre Club changed from a private club catering to the European expatriates to a multicultural center, years after it came into
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existence and years since Kenya became independent. Like Phoenix Players, the Little Theatre Club has a tradition of a Christmas musical, with Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat being a favorite. Only once in a great while has an African play been shown at the theatre. The Asian theatre groups have also kept to their own fare, with Natak, the leading group, catering to a mostly Indian audience. However, Allaudin Qureshi, one of its founding members has had time to act in African productions and played the role of the Judge in Ng–g° and Micere’s The Trial of Dedan K°mathi in . In the late s and ’s, ironically, there has been little need to fight over the use of the Kenya National Theatre. Years of official neglect took their toll on the large theatre, and groups using it perpetually complained about the outdated lighting system, the dusty and torn carpets, the torn seats, the miss- ing wooden tiles on the stage, the blocked toilets, the peeling paint in the foyer, and the noise from the upstairs bar, which in most cases would be more full than the auditorium. Some renovations were done in , a case of too little, too late. Except for large theatre groups with corporate sponsorship or groups staging high school drama texts (thereby deriving an assured audience from high schools around Nairobi), most have shied away from the large the- atre whose sheer size is enough to kill any creative spirit on a badly attended night. The theatre management has been staging its own productions and va- riety shows, but since the late s and early s the National Theatre has been an unattractive venue to most groups, especially when compared to the more accessible French Cultural Centre, the Phoenix theatre, or the Miujiza Theatre, and, to some extent, Education Theatre II. Ironically, in the early s, the National Theatre attracted an interest of a different sort. Adjacent to the theatre was some . acres of land that had been earmarked for the future expansion of the theatre. But in the land-grabbing mania of the s, this plot of land was taken from the theatre in and leased to the neighboring Norfolk Hotel which promptly constructed a car park for its guests, despite numerous protests from the Friends of Theatre lobby group. The Lonrho group of companies (parent company of the Nor- folk) had wanted to buy the entire theatre and the adjacent land but the presi- dent quashed the idea. The symbolic significance of the National Theatre is still recognizable, but the theatre appears to be caught in a time warp. After getting a grant from the Japanese government in to renovate the lighting and sound systems, nothing was done until the Japanese government itself un- dertook the renovations in . Discussion in this paper has focused on performance spaces in Nairobi and Mombasa because this is where the marginalization of African theatre groups has been most glaring. It is also in the urban centers where competition for the right to use a venue has occurred. With the increase in alternative perfor- mance venues, there have been fewer contests over space in the last decade or so. What has not changed much is the composition of the actors and the audi- ences. By and large, African groups perform for African audiences, while the European groups perform for European and American audiences. Groups like Phoenix Players and, to some extent, the Little Theatre Club in Mombasa have practiced multiracial casting and are able to attract quality African actors because they have the financial resources to pay the actors. Most of the for- eign groups have corporate sponsorships from foreign companies, with a group like Phoenix Players almost always assured of sponsorship from British Airways, for example. But the African groups have not fared that well, with most depending on ticket sales to pay their actors. While leading white pro- fessionals such as Falkland and Keith Pearson have occasionally availed some selected African groups of their technical expertise in set design or lighting, they have not taken any acting roles in those productions. As far as incorpo-
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rating lower-class audiences into their programming, no group appears to have made any deliberate effort to produce plays with or for the workers and peasants, as did the Kam°r°°th– group. Ironically, even a play like Ng–g°’s Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) has been turned into com- mercial entertainment by the members of the original Kam°r°°th–; in / they performed this play and Mait– Njug°ra (Mother, Sing For Me) in numer- ous hotels around Nairobi. Audiences for formal theatre are still comprised of the petty-bourgeois base that Ng–g° derided in the early s. While more African groups have emerged and survived longer since the mid-s, the Eurocentric bias in Kenyan theatre has not been radically al- tered by their performances. At its inception in , Theatre Workshop Pro- ductions concentrated on African plays but, with time, they began to place an equal emphasis on African, European, and Caribbean plays. Miujiza Theatre also began in this way but soon started to pick up plays as soon as their run at Phoenix was over. Between their opening in September and the end of , for example, Miujiza Theatre produced Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again (Nigeria); Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (Nigeria); Smile Orange (The Caribbean); Aikin Mata (Nigerian adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata); The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Germany); She Ate the Female Cassava (Kenya); The Gods Are Not to Blame (Nigeria); The Master and the Frauds (Nigeria); Black Mamba (Uganda); and Changing Generations, Miujiza’s Christmas musical. Since , the fare at Miujiza “broadened” to include such Phoenix favorites as Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife, Derek Benfield’s Anyone for Breakfast, Tim Rice’s musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Beverly Cross’s Boeing Boeing. Trevor Rhone and Errol John have been the Caribbean favorites not just at Miujiza, but with all the other groups. The other groups have pro- duced more or less the same fare, with Friends Theatre demonstrating a bias for French plays, especially those by Molière. For all the groups, the choice of pro- ductions seems to be governed by the dictates of the market rather than any profound ideological position. It is a fact that there are not that many African scripts to go around. Most of the groups have soon found themselves doing a play that recently has been produced by another group. A lot of these groups have been commissioned by Non-Governmental Organizations working in the areas of gender sensitization, human rights, AIDS, and economic empower- ment to produce skits on NGO-specific issues. These are shown usually for free to the specific audiences the various NGOs are trying to reach. In the years since Kam°r°°th–’s demise, plays specifically addressing the lot of the workers and peasants have very gradually disappeared from the Kenyan stage, with the various theatre groups targeting the middle class audi- ence more and more. A rare exception to this trend is the Shangilia Mtoto wa Africa theatre group formed in . The group is composed of teenagers who are former street boys and girls. Their dramatic productions predomi- nantly reflect the lives of the street children. In , the Shangilia example inspired another group of former street children then living at the Wema Centre in Mombasa to produce Chokora, an improvised production about the lives of dustbin-scavenging children. As is to be expected then, the form of the theatre has not changed much. With very few original plays being presented, the space for experimentation with form has been limited. Notable exceptions are Oby ObyeroOdhiambo’s Drumbeats on Kerinyaga and Kit Mikaye, and the CARE Kenya–sponsored Par- ticipatory Educational Theatre projects in the Kisumu area. Oby’s highly successful Drumbeats on Kerinyaga infuses the G°k–y– creation myth with mythical elements and characters from other ethnic groups to create a hybrid myth with a message that Kenya’s diverse language communities live peacefully and cohesively. In production it also used the dress, dance, and songs
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of every major ethnic community in the country. In the modern myth, God (Tshitabwa) gives to the founding father of the nation (Wessayengai) and mother (Nyamrungu) all the land and nine daughters who have allegorical names such as Mulezi (the nurturer), Mwasanya (the one who brings unity), Mwakazi (the hardworking one) and Nangalifu (the watchful one)—all representing the virtues that society needs. The nine daughters help Tshitabwa to mold their nine handsome suitors. In the ideal community that they create, everything is achieved through discus- sion that specifically uplifts the status of the women. While he was writing the musical drama, Oby was helped by members of Theatre Workshop Produc- tions in the collection of songs from the different communities. There were songs in ki-Taita, Borana, . George Kir–b–r– per- Dholuo, ki-Embu, ki-Maasai, Kiswahili, ki-Luhya, ° ° forms as Ramogi in G k–y–, and English, with no one language dominating, unlike in Ng–g ’s ° Drumbeats on Kerinyaga Mait– Njug ra where the songs and the folklore were predominantly from the ° (). (Photo by Maxwell G k–y–. When it was first written in , the authorities associated the ° Agwanda) play’s experiment with multiethnic song and dance with Ng–g ’s earlier play and therefore banned it. In its experimentation with multiethnic song and dance, Drumbeats on Kerinyaga was more successful than the more recent dance dramas Limenya and Tero Buru. The action of these two plays was based on the mythology and ceremonies of only one ethnic group each (Luhya for Limenya and Luo for Tero Buru) which, together with less polished scripts, poor direction, and mar- keting, accounted for the low audience turnout at their performances. The huge box-office success of Drumbeats on Kerinyaga proved that the audi- ence appreciates this sort of experimentation. In November , Kit Mikaye, Oby’s next experiment was performed for the first time at the annual Harvest of Plays Festival at the Miujiza Theatre. Employing multiple storytellers, dance, and drama, Kit Mikaye tells the story of Apiny, a woman from Luoland who is unable to have children. Her husband Rathvon marries a second wife but she too cannot conceive. He gets a third wife who gives him a son. To complicate the situation, Apiny has been seeing a medicine woman who gives her herbs to cure her condition and she conceives a child. She is pregnant for months before giving birth to twins who share one umbilical cord. As the oldest wife she has to reassert her special place in the family, signified by the title Kit Mikaye, the rock of the Oldest Wife. Kit Mikaye won the award for Most Outstanding New Original Kenyan Production and Best New Kenyan Play at the Kenyan version of the Theatre Awards, an idea developed by the Mbalamwezi Players. Oby also got the Outstanding Cre- ative Achievement Award for Drumbeats on Kerinyaga, Kit Mikaye, and scripts sensitive to gender issues devised for Theatre Workshop Productions. In bringing together the art of the narrated word, drama, song, and dance, Oby’s experimental scripts fuse together traditional performance elements. This fusion enriches the reinterpretation of the G°k–y– creation myth as the myth of the Kenyan nation in Drumbeats on Kerinyaga for example. In Kit Mikaye, a fantasy is woven to explain the origin of Kit Mikayi, an unusual rock formation in Nyanza. Thus the reinterpretations create a modern myth. Whereas Oby ObyeroOdhiambo adapts traditional performance modes for the formal theatre, some of the groups working under the auspices of CARE Kenya (a health care NGO) in the Kisumu area have used the techniques of the formal theatre to meet some very traditional audience needs, particularly
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the need for the audience to talk back to the actors. Instead of the audience merely murmuring a running commentary as the performance progressed, the Kisumu experiments have actually stopped the performance and asked the au- dience to respond before going on to a next scene. The Kisumu area of Kenya, and Nyanza Province in general, leads the country in the incidence of AIDS. Theatre groups around Kisumu have been commissioned by CARE Kenya and the Ministry of Health to devise plays and skits on AIDS to spread awareness of this syndrome. Using the techniques of Participatory Educational Theatre, Roger Chamberlain, a British commu- nity theatre practitioner, collaborated with two local thespians, Ochieng Wandera and Lenin Ogolla. The three worked with two local theatre groups, Kamakazi and Apondo Youth Group. With the Kamakazi group, the trio vis- ited Kisumu and collected personal narratives about issues of sexuality and how AIDS had impacted the people’s lives. Improvisations based on these narratives resulted in a play in Luo, Sigand Tom—Ngimani gi Thoni? (Red Ribbons for You?). The play tells the connected stories of Tom and his larger family, of whom members contract the AIDS virus at different points in the story. Tom contracts the virus while studying at the University and dies at the age of . The story of his life is told backwards from his funeral, his childhood, his teen years, his first sexual encounter and infection, to his rejec- tion by family and society, and his attempted suicide. The play was broken down into nine freestanding scenes. On a ’ by ’ board set on a makeshift stage, there were nine smaller boards on which were written a summary of each scene, and also the most pertinent question from the scene. Using a local facilitator, there would be a discussion between the actors and the audience after each scene. They would discuss and analyze what had been shown in a particular scene, and the audience would be encouraged to ask the actors questions on their actions and motives. In turn, the audience would be en- . couraged to role-play: to envision themselves in the character’s shoes and try Brilliant Muhonjo and out different alternatives. The length of the discussions was open-ended and Oby ObyeroOdhiambo perform in Oby’s play Kit depended on the number of questions that the audience had, which was in it- self a reflection of how deeply the dramatized event had touched them. There Mikaye ( ) at the was never any hurry to show the whole play since the idea was to get the Miujiza Theatre. (Cour- community to reflect upon the individual scenes. tesy of the Daily Nation) Because the audience knew what would happen at the end of the story, they were allowed to choose which scene they wanted to watch first. At Ahero, the Participatory Educational Theatre facilitators and the Apondo Youth Group devised Neno Joma Nigi Kute Ayaki (Positive People) also about AIDS. As Lenin Ogolla reports, the initial scene presents HIV-positive people who are at an HIV/AIDS counseling center: “Members of the community are then put into roles as their counse- lors. The project uses familiar, traditional storytelling techniques, with the people choosing whose story they want to hear first, whom they want to counsel first [...]” (Ogolla :). Different people wanted to hear different stories; factions emerged, communal prejudices were exposed and the audience heard different stories from within the community, with some members insisting that it was the tradi- tional practice of wife inheritance that was to blame for the high incidence of AIDS. Others doubted the existence of AIDS until they heard the personal
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stories in the drama. Every question was refocused back to the audience who emerged from the whole experience more conscious of what AIDS is and their own prejudices against infected people. The two PET projects highlight a trend that is emerging in Kenya and much of the Third World: the practice of using theatre to address issues af- fecting the immediate audience. The community’s own performance tradi- tions are integrated into the performance which also uses a local language. Similar efforts have been undertaken in Kenya on gender sensitization and hu- man rights. The experiments are not conventional theatre. Rather, they merely use aspects of the conventional theatre. These experiments represent some of the most radical changes in the form of Kenyan theatre since Kam°r°°th–. The performances focusing on human rights are more political than those oriented toward changing people’s attitudes. While the choice of a local language has been automatic for experiments such as the CARE Kenya one, it is crucial to explore the question of the lan- guage of composition of the other performances. In the s, there has been an upsurge of plays in Kenyan languages, most of them in G°k–y–, which gives the impression that Kenyan theatre is flowering in local languages. Strictly speaking, the upsurge of formal theatre in Kenyan languages is a by- product of the Kam°r°°th– experiment. This has been most manifest in the drama coming out of Kenyan high schools as is periodically reflected in the three annual school-based festivals: The Primary Schools’ Drama Festival, the Schools’ Drama Festival, and the Colleges’ Drama Festival. The high school festival was established in and is the longest running. At the time, only the elite, predominantly white schools participated in the festival. It was adju- dicated by white judges and was privately sponsored. African schools gradually began to compete in the late s, and the Ministry of Education took over the running of the festival in . Occasional plays in African languages started appearing in , but it was in that their place in the festival was firmly stamped by G°k° Tik°o Thuruari (literally: Education Is Not a Pair of Pants), the second-ranked play at the national finals. The play was written in G°k–y– by Gacugu Makini, and was performed by students from Njumbi High School in Murang’a. In , Nairobi School won the first place with their Swahili play Kilio. It was in also that dance and poetry recitations were introduced as categories into the festivals. In the larger society, skits and playlets in vernacular languages have been per- formed in the rural church halls and community centers through the years. Still, in the urban centers, producers have been reluctant to present plays in vernacu- lar languages for fear of being branded ethnic chauvinists. Even Ng–g°’s own productions did not escape this label. Numerous people wrote letters to the editors of the two leading daily newspapers, especially in February and March , with some lamenting the fact that a writer of such international repute had stooped to the level of ethnic chauvinism by writing in G°k–y–. There were letters supporting his decision, but in the arena of public opinion, Ng–g° had retrogressed. Even Joe Kadhi, a leading columnist of the day, wrote a col- umn lambasting Ng–g°’s “tribalism” (Kadhi ). Much of the credit for fuel- ing this opinion goes to the government’s propaganda machinery. Faced with an intellectual activist who was organizing grassroots class-conscious theatre, the government seized on the language of composition to trivialize the impor- tance of Ng–g°’s effort. He was accused of preaching tribalism by writing in G°k–y–, at a time when the president was supposedly trying to make the coun- try ethnically cohesive. In the formal theatre in the s, with Ng–g°’s plays more or less banned and no new vernacular scripts coming onto the scene (even assuming that there were producers willing to put them on), theatre in African languages—especially in Nairobi—concentrated on plays in Swahili. Of these, Masaibu ya Ndugu Jero
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. With the produc- tion of Ngaahika Ndeenda (), M–nyoro and the Kam°r°°th– group converted the play into light enter- tainment. (Courtesy of the Daily Nation)
(the Swahili translation of Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero) and Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile () and Mashetani (Devils, ; both Tanzanian) were the clear favorites. In the s, however, vernacular plays picked up, especially in G°k–y–. With the exception of Tero Buru and Limenya, which were per- formed at the Kenya Cultural Centre auditorium and the Kenya National The- atre respectively, or Drumbeats on Kerinyaga, which incorporated songs from different languages and was performed at the Miujiza Theatre, the plays have been predominantly in G°k–y–. These plays have been performed in converted halls in some of the big hotels like Sportsview-Kasarani, Blue Posts-Thika, Shade Hotel, Wida Highway Motel, and Hillock Inn in Nairobi, with some much poorer skits being performed by upcoming comedians in some smaller hotels. Faced with low audience turnout in the conventional theatres, the per- formers have literally followed the audience to the places they frequent most— the bars. The idea started off with a theatre promoter named Wer– M–yoro. An accountant by training, M–yoro ventured into theatre in when he formed Sarakasi Players with veteran director Tirus Gathwe as the artistic di- rector. Sarakasi Players converted a big room at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre into a theatre by installing a raised platform and some lights. Between and , some of their best attended productions were Chekov’s The Bear (, Russia) Robert Serumaga’s Majangwa (, Uganda), Soyinka’s Jero’s Metamorphosis (), and Aikin Mata, a West African adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. In , Sarakasi tried doing Ng–g°’s Ngaahika Ndeenda but they could not get a license to perform the play. The choice of this G°k–y– play was an early indication of the direction Sarakasi would eventually take. In , M–yoro translated Protais Asseng’s Enough Is Enough (, Cameroon) into G°k–y– . He gave it the title Ciaigana n° Ciaigana (), and wrote himself into Kenyan theatre history. Running Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays for one-and-a-half years for a total of over performances, Ciaigana n° Ciaigana is easily the longest running play in Kenya. An absurdist comedy about a woman who refuses to have any more children after pregnancies, the play was performed for an estimated audi- ence of over , in hotel venues in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Nyeri,
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Thika, and Embu. Mwangi K°mani, the lead actor in the production, attributed the play’s success to women: “They are the ones who pulled their men along so that they could laugh at them undergoing the pains of pregnancy onstage” (in Omondi :). The more subtle themes of women’s equality/empower- ment and family planning were obscured by the production’s emphasis on the exaggerated and absurd elements, hence the play’s uproarious reception. After Ciaigana n° Ciaigana, M–yoro did Wang– wa Makeri (, a play about a mythical woman who ruled the G°k–y– written by local thespian Justus Nderit–); Wamuc–thi (, a G°k–y– translation of Majangwa by Rob- ert Serumaga); Ng–g°’s Ngaahika Ndeenda, Mait– Njug°ra, and Magerio ma K°mathi (, a G°k–y– translation of The Trial of Dedan K°mathi); and Njaaga n° M–k–u (, a translation of Sizwe Bansi Is Dead). Between and , M–yoro controlled the lion’s share of the theatre audience attending G°k–y– plays in the big hotels. The Kam°r°°th– group for a time performed their plays under his wings. There have been others, such as Frontline Arts Society (comprised of members who broke away from Sarakasi) which did Cia M–kar° (The Miser’s Things), and Gikundo and his group which per- formed M–gomano wa Aka, a G°k–y– translation of Aristophanes’ Assembly of Women. Other minor productions include Cirigithagia Athuri (This Confounds Elders/Men, ) by Wanagatanga Comedies, Hutia r°a Ker° (Dare Touch Me Again!, ) by Wandahuhu, Mbeembe n° Ndoge (The Maize/Corn Has Been Poisoned, ) by Vybestar Club, and K–ngiura (If It Rains, ) and K°gunyambara (Maggot, ) by Mangoma Players. But for the quality of these productions, one would have some positive things to say about the “upsurge” of theatre in G°k–y–, and hope that other language groups would follow suit. In taking the plays to the hotel venues, all the groups were ostensibly doing the logical thing by entertaining people at their places of choice—at the bars, where they’d rather be—instead of expect- ing them to go to the theatre. Yet the very choice of hotel venues has had a detrimental effect on the quality of the productions being done there. Though
. & . Advertisements for the Sarakasi/M–nyoro Kam°r°°th– productions of Ng–g° wa Thiongo’s plays sensationalize the subject matter ( September and September ). (Courtesy of the Daily Nation)
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some of the big hotels have easily drawn up to , people for a single perfor- mance of the more popular plays, no hotel has taken the trouble of devising a space that is really ideal for theatre. Most hotels merely provide a raised plat- form in a bare conference room or in their dance hall, if not outside on the grounds. Little or no provision is made for stage lights, sound effects, props or dressing rooms, or even adequate space for movement, let alone acoustics. As a result, the quality of the productions has been compromised. Even Ng–g°’s Ngaahika Ndeenda was converted into light entertainment by M–yoro and the Kam°r°°th– group in /. The cast had been reduced from the original when the play was first produced in to , partly due to the logistics of transportation but also so that the group was small enough to ensure financial gain from the performances for everybody involved. The communal element was lost in the downsizing of the cast, and with it the communal spectacle. The G°tiiro op- era sequence, for example, was originally performed by women, matching the grandeur of the traditional G°k–y– wedding ceremony. In the M–yoro produc- tion, the G°tiiro was performed by only women. The play was mostly per- formed for laughs, with topical jokes thrown in to remove it from the highly didactic atmosphere of . While those cast members who had been in the original production fit somewhat into their parts, the newer cast members, es- pecially the women playing Helen and Jezebel, used their stage appearance to show off their personal wardrobes and hairstyles, with little regard for the cos- tumes and makeup called for in the script. In terms of quality, the M–yoro production of Ngaahika Ndeenda was still head and shoulders above the rest because it involved some actors who had been trained to act in a production that originally addressed communal con- cerns, with little regard for individual gain. These carried into the second ef- fort some of the seriousness from the first production. The text also had been written by the playwrights in G°k–y–, providing a somewhat fixed text. Unlike Ngaahika Ndeenda, most of the translations dwell on issues of sexuality ad nauseum, when they are not presenting misogynous themes, as for example
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in such performances as Gitumia Giki (You Big/Evil Woman, ). The quality of the scripts and the acting is generally poor. The audience (which drinks beer during the performances, with waiters moving in between seats to take orders) is normally looking for entertaining diversion and not a quality performance. The bawdier the performances, the merrier the audiences. In one such performance I attended at Jambo hotel in Karatina in January , a woman is seeing four different men at the same time. One of them is a rich man who also pays the woman’s rent and sees to her upkeep. Two of the men are a father and a son. Each of these men comes to see the woman at different stages in the skit. The first man comes in and is showered with the woman’s professions of love for him. As he makes for the bed, there is a knock on the door. The first man is told to hide under the bed as the woman lets in the second man. The second man complains that the woman no longer shows him any attention, the woman con- fesses that she still loves him and, as they embrace in a sexually suggestive way, there is a knock on the door. The second man is hidden under the table and the woman lets in the third man, who is actually the son of the second man. The same ritual is repeated with the woman professing to love only this man. Before they can go to bed, there is a knock on the door. It is the rich tycoon. The third man is told to kneel down like an animal on the floor and is covered with a large piece of cloth. The tycoon comes in and sits on the third man, mistaking him for a seat. He starts bragging about how special the woman is to him and how he is going to buy lots of new furniture for her, to replace her old and broken furni- ture like the sofa which, he says, keeps moving. At different points in the action, one of the two first men sneezes and the tycoon asks whether there is somebody else in the house. He is assured that there is nobody. Periodically, each of the men peeps out from where they are hidden to see who is receiving attention at that moment, eliciting knowing giggles from the audience. The climax comes when the third man gets tired of being sat upon; he throws off the tycoon and starts haranguing him for taking his “girl.” The other two men come out of their hiding places and turn on the woman for cheating on them. In a big fight during which everything in the house is broken, the son discovers that his father also pa- tronizes the woman. They turn against each other, each asking: “What are you doing here?” The conflicts are magically resolved when the woman tells all the men to get out of her house. Surprisingly, all the men flee and thus ends the show. Luckily, I did not have to pay for this “entertainment.” I bring up this particular skit to illustrate the low level to which the profit motive has driven a section of Kenyan theatre. The level of the performances is mediocre, the scripts (if they exist) are third-rate, and the whole enterprise unduly elevates slapstick comedy. It is also very sectional. While most of these “productions” have been in G°k–y–, one hopes in vain that this brand of the- atre does not become established as a national trend; the “bar-productions” are trivial and retrogressive. What these productions have done is to widen the gap between audiences: an audience seemingly from high society which demands refinement in a production goes to watch the Phoenix Players and Theatre Workshop Productions, for example, and an audience with more ba- sic taste goes only to “bar-productions.” That the latter are written in a local language seems to have absolved them from the requirement for quality in production in the eyes of their audiences. They set a bad example of what theatre in local languages should be, where it should be performed, and who its audience should be. Looking at issues regarding performance spaces, the actors and their audi- ences, the content of the performances, and the form of these performances, it is clear that Kam°r°°th– has been unequaled in its search for an African theatre identity that emphasizes indigenous aspects. While most groups are able to successfully incorporate an African song and dance here and there, it is experi-
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ments such as those by Oby ObyeroOdhiambo and the PET groups that might rival Kam°r°°th–. But as intimated earlier, Kam°r°°th–’s accomplish- ments made it all the more difficult to reproduce their success. The havoc wreaked on the theatre scene by an over-zealous censor before his own ille- gality was discovered hampered further experiments when Kam°r°°th–’s ex- ample was still fresh in people’s minds. This was made worse by the intellectual cynicism of the mid-s and ’s, where there has been a dearth of self-sacrificing intellectuals who choose to go the Ng–g° way. Most theatre groups have developed a repertoire of plays that appeals to their particular au- dience. This ensures that that audience will remain loyal. For the middle- and upper-class audience that most groups have been able to cultivate, the leftist resistance rhetoric about workers and peasants eventually emerging trium- phant sounds like idle talk. Coupled with this is the commercialization of the- atre, with most groups relying on corporate sponsorship to survive. This exerts pressure on the group to guarantee that their product is at least ame- nable to the capitalist interests of the sponsoring body. The lower end of this commercialization is the emergence of the bar-theatre whose audience needs to be titillated with bawdy comedy, not lectured on the theory of surplus value. Looking back then, it is clear that while Kam°r°°th– was an incomplete project, its efforts in theatre remain unequaled to this day. But having said that, one also has to recognize that Kam°r°°th– was a uniquely s and early s phenomenon. This is the point that is forcefully emphasized by the s’ commercial use to which members of the original Kam°r°°th– have put the fruits of their struggles in the s and early ’s.
Notes .Ng–g°’s original reference to the space at Kam°r°°th– in Decolonising the Mind where he invoked Peter Brook’s title. Ng–g° argues that while a performance site may be bare or open, it is never empty (:). . The play was written by Ng–g° wa Thiong’o together with Ng–g° wa M°r°°, and was based on autobiographies written by some workers and peasants around Kam°r°°th– Vil- lage. . In , for example, I was embarrassed when, as the organizer for that year’s Poetry Night, I allowed Joni Nderit– onstage, one of todays’s leading directors. He had not been previously scheduled. Nderit– went onstage and presented a skit bitterly satirical of the entire faculty of the Literature Department, much to the chagrin of some who were present. . Theatre groups from outside the university had always been free to rehearse and to per- form at the university with minimal constraints prior to this. . Besides Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (), the only non-Eurocentric plays among the first productions are Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (), Trevor Rhone’s Smile Orange () and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (). . Some more comprehensive repairs were done in January . . The approximate seating capacity for the theatres is for the National Theatre, for the French Cultural Centre, for the theatre where the Phoenix Players perform, for Miujiza and for Education Theatre II. . In the early s, most groups survived for a year or two and then folded. But Friends Theatre, Mbalamwezi Players and Theatre Workshop Productions have survived. The first two were formed in and the latter in . All of them are still going strong. . Phoenix Players produced it in . . For example, in Miujiza produced Trevor Rhone’s Smile Orange, Theatre Workshop performed his Old Story Time, and Phoenix did School’s Out. Theatre Workshop and Phoenix each produced Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl during the same period. . A combination of the traditional gods of the Luhya (Were), Luo (Nyasaye) and G°k–y– (Ngai).
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. The others are Mcheki (the bearer of happiness), Wakarimu (the generous one), Wendo (the loving one), and Chinamwaminifu (the honest one). . Of the or so songs used in Mait– Njug°ra for example, only eight are not from the G°k–y–. . On the first night of Tero Buru, the theatre was actually empty, prompting the Daily Na- tion, the country’s leading newspaper to run an editorial lamenting this extreme (:). . Much like popular theatre but less political, Participatory Educational Theatre attempts to dramatize the problems that affect a particular group and encourages them to respond immediately on issues that touch them, rather than solving the problem for them. . For a more detailed discussion of the Kamakazi experiment, see Roger Chamberlain et al. (:–). . Among the Luo, traditionally there were no widows. When a husband died, the wife was inherited by her brother-in-law and among the first rituals that she had to undergo after the burial of her husband was to have sex with her new husband. Where it is still prac- ticed, this ritual has led to the spread of AIDS, especially in rural areas where it is more than likely that the husband will have died without a medical diagnosis being made. . For a more detailed discussion of the Ahero experiment, see Ogolla (). . Under pressure from her husband (Bakony, Njaga in the G°k–y– adaptation) to get a th child so that he can get the National Father award and a gold medal, the woman (Bissabey) convinces her husband that he is himself pregnant with their th child. She promptly sends him to Dr. Assiko, her gynecologist and ally in the ploy. Dr. Assiko confirms the pregnancy to a distraught Bakony who then goes through the psychologi- cal and physiological changes of an actual pregnancy. At his wit’s end, he consults a sorcerer who merely listens to Bakony’s complaints about his pregnancy before con- firming that Bakony can expect to give birth not just to one but to two children! The climax comes during Bakony’s “delivery” which has been programmed to the minute by his wife. After riding horseback on his belly to induce “labor,” Bisabey goes out os- tensibly to get Dr. Assiko. She instructs Bakony to count until she comes back. He has reached , by the time Bissabey comes back, not only with Dr. Assiko but with a delegation of , women, all members of the Movement for the Liberation of Af- rican Women, of which Bissabey is now president. Heads of state join the delegation to witness the “delivery,” and the pregnant man receives congratulatory messages from all over the world. Even the Pope sends his best wishes, and the event is reported live on Voice of America, the BBC, and Radio France. The delivery turns out to be Bakony’s discovery that he already has enough children and that his wife was more than a means of getting children and medals. The resolution comes when the women sit on his stomach in order to deflate it, all the time asserting the equality of the sexes. He had only been given the powder from a shrub, which is what inflated his stomach. Sitting on the belly is the only antidote. A more contrite Bakony emerges from the whole ex- perience, enumerating the virtues of his children and his wife and asserting the play’s central theme: enough is enough: enough of sexual discrimination, enough children. . For example, the translation of Majangwa as Wamucuthi (The One with a Big Penis) draws unnecessarily strong emphasis on a minor incident in the play when the two characters relive a past incident in which they had to perform sex acts for pay. There was a lot of emphasis on explicit sex talk. . This is especially true in the smaller hotels and bars which do not pretend (like the big- ger hotels) to be offering family entertainment whereby issues of sexuality are treated with some subtlety. . While the trend has been to translate established plays from the formal theatre for the “bar-theatre,” Wahome Mutahi’s satires M–bogothi Ndotono (The Babbler with a Trun- cheon) and M–bogothi M–gathe (His Excellency the Babbler), have been developed in the “bar-theatre” and moved to the National Theatre. They have also been translated into Swahili. However, this is the exception. . See, for example, a newspaper cutting of the Entertainment Guide from the Daily Na- tion of October . While the Phoenix Players present their rare African produc- tion at the Professional Centre in the center of Nairobi, Texas Garden, Laikipians Pub, Thai-land Cultural Village, Gachuiri “B” Uth°r–, and Benrose Motel present their “plays and lots of comedies” in Dandora, Kayole, G°th–rai, Uth°r–, and Umoja One respectively, all of which are modern slum areas. For those seeking to get out of Nairobi there is Cheers Highway Motel-Juja, New Muno Inn-Ruiru, both on the out- skirts of Nairobi, and “plays and hot comedies” at Leisure Village in Mombasa. In sev-
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eral of these venues, the “comedies” are supplemented with music. Significantly, out of this random selection, there are venues on this holiday weekend offering “com- edies” and music, as opposed to just six offering live bands or disco.
References Chamberlain, Roger et al. “Change in the Village: A Participatory Educational Theatre Approach to the HIV/AIDS Pandemic.” In Drama and Theatre: Communication in Development; Experiences in Western Kenya, edited by Loukie Levert and Opiyo Mumma, –. Nairobi: Kenya Drama/Theatre and Education Association. Daily Nation “Play’s Rejection a Cultural Blow.” Daily Nation (Nairobi), May:. Gacheru, Margaretta “Why Portrayal of Corruption in High Places Is a Sure Non-starter.” Sunday Nation (Nairobi), May. Huie, Wade Daily Nation (Nairobi), June:. Kadhi, Joe “Ng–g°’s Play Is Tribal: Joe Kadhi Asks Why?” Sunday Nation (Nairobi), February. Mason, Kenneth n.d. “‘The Flight of the Phoenix’: A Brief History of Phoenix Players.” Unpub- lished manuscript. Mutahi, Wahome “Theatre and Culture.” Daily Nation (Nairobi), November. Ng–g° wa Thiong’o Writers in Politics. Nairobi: Heinemann. Decolonising the Mind. London: James Currey. “Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space.” TDR , (T):–. Oby ObyeroOdhiambo Interview with author. Nairobi, January. Ogolla, Lenin “A Day in the Village: A Detailed Anecdote Arising out of a PET Perfor- mance of the Apondo Youth Group’s Project Positive People or Neno Jomo Nigi kute Ayaki.” In Drama and Theatre: Communication in Development; Experi- ences in Western Kenya edited by Loukie Levert and Opiyo Mumma, –. Nairobi: Kenya Drama/Theatre in Education Association. Omondi, Deo “Behind Ciaigana n° Ciaigana Success.” The Standard (Nairobi), Septem- ber:.
G°chingiri Nd°g°r°g° is a recent graduate of the UCLA PhD Program in Theatre. He now teaches African Literature in the UCLA English Department. He was previously a student at the University of Nairobi where he was active as both an actor and director in the mid-s. Nd°g°r°g° has had an enduring interest in the work of Kenyan author Ng–g° wa Thiong’o and the Kam°r°°th– popular theatre experiment. He has published articles in G°k–y– in M–tiiri, the journal of culture, published out of the Comparative Literature Department at NYU and edited by Ng– g°. His book, Ng– g° wa Thiong’o’s Drama and the Kam°r°°th– Popular Theater Experiment is forth- coming from Africa World Press.
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