Gender and the Erotics of Nationalism in Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s Drama Evan Maina Mwangi

Evan Maina Mwangi is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University, where he researches the intersection of nationalism, gender, and sexuality in African literatures and popular culture. He is coauthor (with Simon Gikandi) of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2007) and the author of Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (forthcoming, State University of New York Press). His current book project, “(M)Other Tongue Matters: Translation and Gender in Indigenous African Literatures,” focuses on Ngu˜gı˜’s and other writers’ use of sex as a theme and a metaphor in creative works and polemical essays.

TDR: The Drama Review 53:2 (T202) Summer 2009. ©2009 90 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 Introduction Kenyan author Ngügï wa Thiong’o has been a leading voice in African indigenous-language community theatre for over 30 years. In 1977 his first literary work in Gïküyü, Ngaahika Ndeenda (published in 1980 and translated as I Will Marry When I Want in 1982), coauthored with Ngügï wa Mïriï in collaboration with peasants and workers from their hometown of Limuru, led to his detention without trial by the Kenyan government. This kind of politically engaged performance forms the centerpiece of Ngügï’s artistic production. The influence that orature and indigenous theatrical performances have had on Ngügï’s oeuvre and the running theme of the role of art and the artist in society in almost all his work demand that we pay attention to the specific occasions, the particular audiences, and the speakers in the fictional live performances depicted or implied in the narratives.1 However, the gendered ways similar techniques are used in his dramas has not been adequately analyzed, primarily because some of these texts were originally written in Gïküyü, Ngügï’s mother tongue, and most of the nuanced sexual connotations are lost in translation. Ngügï’s writing is packed with phallic symbols that are used to structure overtly political themes. It also presents the theme of performance to register gendered social perceptions. While being alert to the dangers of naïvely Freudian readings that would see Ngügï’s artistic production as an expression of infantile tensions in an idealized family structure, I find an intermingling of sexual and political language in his later drama and poetry.2 The regressive ways that Ngügï represents gender roles in dramas demonstrates that, contrary to the latent Whorfianism3 in discussions of African-language theatre, the use of an indigenous language in African drama is not in itself liberating. The emancipatory potential of writing drama in an African language resides in the way that language is deployed. The language can be used to entrench stereotypes and maintain the status quo as much as to liberate certain oppressed categories. Agency, as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell reminds us, is protean and ambiguous. It is not only “communal, social, cooperative, and participatory” but also “constituted and constrained by the material and symbolic elements of context and culture” (2005:3). The fact that a writer uses a particular language in theatre practice (Gïküyü, Kiswahili, or English, in Ngügï’s case) does not in itself guarantee agency for the African woman. It is how that language is used that matters. Indeed, as we shall see, the same word or technique has different effects in different contexts with regard to women’s agency.

1. Ngügsï’ novels and short stories not only create the impression of fireside stories articulated by nonliterate indi- viduals, they also deploy oral literary devices such as song interludes, proverbs, and myths to elicit the embedded local audience’s participation in the performance of the implied oral narrative. The prose fiction contains dialogue scenes set as dramatic texts, complete with stage directions, to signal the dramatic tension and enhance the text’s affinity with oral traditions. Theatre is also a central theme in Ngügïs’ later fiction, with his novel Mürogi wa Kagogo (2004), translated as Wizard of the Crow (2006), which follows the antics of thespians in their efforts to liberate Africa from patriarchal and authoritarian regimes. In the novel, the central female character Nyawira (whose name connotes “the worker”) is a theatre artist who uses her talent and professional training to educate African women on how to liberate themselves from a dictatorial regime and forge alliances with fellow third world women. 2. It is within this simplistic Freudian framework that Joseph Mbele (1992) chides Ngügï, claiming that writing in his mother tongue reveals a longing for his mother and his desire to kill colonialism—the father. Gender in 3. I use the term “Whorfianism” to refer to that relativistic philosophy in linguistics that holds that some thoughts can only be represented in a particular language. Ngügï (1986) argues that an African culture can only be expressed in an African language. Ngügï ’s Dramas

Figure 1. (facing page) Ngügï’s Kamïrïïthü collaborators identify themselves with song and a copy of Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) as they wait to receive Ngügï from exile in August 2004. (Courtesy of the Nation Media Group, Nairobi)

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 For the purposes of this discussion, I use the term “performance” to signal not only a dramatic show onstage or the representation of a dramatic character, such as those in Ngügï’s theatre, but also to signify the way an utterance acts, especially the way it acts to transform perceptions. As part of a program of political activism, Ngügï’s performance in this sense can be gauged by the effects his theatrical and poetic works have had on our perceptions, and the changes they incite in the real world. This is especially true in his later theatre, which was influenced by Bertolt Brecht and, later, Paulo Freire. It is because of his theatre’s ability to inspire change in the real world that the Kenyan neocolonial government became jittery about Ngügï’s indigenous-language theatre and detained him without trial. In 1982, government agents razed to the ground Ngügï’s open-air educational theatre at Kamïrïïthü. I’m also drawing on J.L. Austin’s (1962) and Judith Butler’s (1997) idea of the performative, in which some linguistic statements are seen as not only constative and reflective, but also perfor- mative in the sense that they take up different meanings in the receptive context. In critiquing the limits of “speech acts” instituted by Austin in his seminal How to Do Things with Words, Shoshana Felman (1983) has shown that some constative or reflective speech acts also have perlocutionary and performative effects—therefore almost all language is performative. Jacques Derrida (1980) too emphasizes the citationality of speech, allowing that no linguistic statement can be completely autonomous from the power relations in the context within which it is used. I find Felman and Derrida particularly appealing for my purposes because Ngügï’s language— even those seemingly innocent statements that appear on the surface to be stating simple facts— are enmeshed in a performative, iterative process that both entrenches and disrupts power relations in society. Limitations There are a number of limitations to this discussion. Because of space considerations, I focus on two of Ngügï’s most sophisticated plays: The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and Ngaahika Ndeenda (1980; I Will Marry When I Want 1982). The works present the history of Kenyan struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism, but they incorporate gender as a subtheme in a way that allows us to appreciate Ngügï’s gendered presentation of nationalism. Second, although I speak Gïküyü as my mother tongue, I approach Ngügï from a particularly disadvan- taged position. I was trained at the University of Nairobi in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when anti-Ngügï sentiments were well entrenched in Kenyan departments of literature. It was an open secret that some of the professors at the time were hired and promoted with specific terms of reference to reduce the popularity of Ngügï’s creed in the country and to teach students to be loyal to the government; scholars who had not fully joined the anti-Ngügï bandwagon kept his works at bay or talked about them in the abstract to avoid offending the dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002), who would plant spies in lecture halls. Well-known theatre personalities who had collaborated with Ngügï when he was a professor at the university—such as Kimani Gachaü, Ngügï wa Mïriï, and Micere Githae Mugo—had been sent to exile, and students seen to be leaning toward Ngügï’s community aesthetics—such as Wahome Mütahi and Magayü wa Magayü—had already been hounded out of the program to try their luck in journalism and linguistics amid relentless police harassment.4 By the time I was in college, the government had already converted Ngügï’s open-air theatre at Kamïrïïthü, near Limuru, into a youth polytechnic where girls were taught domestic skills with training in “feminine” trades like sewing. Coming from a place where students were systematically brainwashed to disapprove of and dislike Ngügï, I am aware that it is possible to be uncritically dismissive of his work. Yet I resist

4. Although successful journalists at the time I was a student, Magayü and Mütahi were still held up as examples of what a good literature student should not be—political demagogues with little respect for art. Around 2000, Mütahi (1954–2003) revived a project similar to Ngüg ï’s, staging hilarious original compositions and translations of popular plays in indigenous languages. EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 seeing Ngügï as the ideal. Given his towering stature, it is also possible to miss blindspots in his writing. It is appropriate for students of African theatre to read Ngügï with a bit of skepticism and expose him to unsentimental critique. To point out contradictions in Ngügï’s fairly gender- sensitive theatre is to enable the many practitioners he inspires to be aware of pitfalls they can be vulnerable to in their own theatre practice. Therefore, since I have attained the freedom to read Ngügï more keenly than I could as a student in Nairobi, I have tried to appreciate and critique his works in the context of their production, as Simon Gikandi (2000) has exemplified—that is, admire their power of imagination and social relevance without presenting them as the ultimate masterworks in African liberatory politics. To be sure, the theatre in African languages that Ngügï advocates can be strengthened not by praising it wholesale and in nonspecific terms, but by especially criticizing the unfortunate weaknesses in its strongest texts. Ngu˜gı˜’s Early Dramas in English The fairly positive presentation of women in Ngügï’s later plays is an improvement over his earlier almost total suppression of female subjectivity. At the center of Ngügï’s early drama is the betrayal of masculinity that symbolizes imminent failure of the emergent East African nations. Written in English in the early 1960s, when the East African nations were emerging from colonialism but were faced with problems of ethnocentricism, a poorly educated general population, and an educated elite that was alienated from self and society, the plays express anxiety about the possible failure of these nations. The plays are not particularly sophisticated, having been written for the university stage at the Makerere University College, which Ngügï attended (1959–1963). But they reveal preoccupations that would engage Ngügï’s later theatre. For example, in the short play The Rebels, written for the Makekere stage in 1961 and broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corporation radio in 1962, the male elders dominate the stage. The subject matter is typical of the time: an educated student returns to his village on completion of his studies. In the play, the Kenyan student, Charles, returns to his village from Makerere University College with a Ugandan girlfriend, Mary, the daughter of a clergyman. Charles represents all of the alienated intellectuals in the young nation. Except in a conversation with his girlfriend, Charles’s name is not uttered onstage, mentioned only in stage directions. His anonymity underlines his alienation; he would be “Charles” only to the educated elites, such as the university audience watching the play when it was first produced. The conflict revolves around Charles’s father’s wish that he marry Mumbi, an uneducated daughter of the village chief, while his heart is with Mary. As noted by Oliver Lovesey (2000), Mary’s name reminds the audience of the mother of Jesus in contradistinction to Mumbi’s. Further, Mary is unclean by village standards because she is uncircumcised, unlike Mumbi who has undergone the rite of passage and is named after the mythical mother of the Gïküyü community. Charles pays allegiance to his father and to modernity, and becomes caught up between cosmopolitan Pan-Africanism (Mary) and traditional customs (Mumbi). The confusion is brought to a head when Mary takes him to task for reneging on his earlier pan-Africanist ideals. He is completely torn up by irreconcilable forces that drive the plot: CHARLES: That I love you it is true. I know no other. I owe you fidelity. But I also love—love my people. That’s my curse. Torn between two worlds. I wish I were not myself. Then I would not have to choose between a father’s curse, a tribe’s anger, and

the anguish of a betrayed heart. (1970a:13) Gender in He finally chooses Mumbi, who is also conflicted about marrying a modern man. Mary leaves, but the ultimate tragedy comes when Mumbi is suddenly reported to have drowned in her

attempt to flee from the impending marriage. It is suggested in the play that Charles is com- Ngügï ’s Dramas pletely destroyed, perhaps about to kill himself. Alternatively, like his father who fled his childhood home after rebelling against his father and marrying the woman of his choice, Charles could have left to settle in a different location, continuing the cycle of rebellion.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 The “rebels” of the title refers to the new generation of Africans, like Charles in the play, who have been alienated from traditions and are worshiping new gods; to traditional girls like Mumbi, who won’t marry a modern man even when the mainstream society wants them to; and, ironically, to the custodians of traditions such as Charles’s father, Nguru, who himself once transgressed against his own culture. The play can be described simply as a story of the tension between ethnic loyalties and pan-African sensibilities, but it also reveals the inevitability of rebellion and the tragedies that may follow the clash of opposing cultural practices. The clash between the two forces is expressed by the different languages that blend and clash in the play. Mimesis is problematic when one language is used to represent speech in a different language. Although the play is written in English—except for a few Gïküyü words and songs—at least two languages are supposed to be spoken. On the one hand, there is the language of the uneducated Gïküyü elders; and, on the other, English, which is spoken between Charles and his non-Gïküyü girlfriend Mary, who can never speak to the elders because she doesn’t understand their language. Charles can translate Mary’s words but does not, failing to communi- cate her feelings and opinions and in this way failing to connect his community with another ethnic group. To dramatize the speech patterns of the Gïküyü community in the English text, Ngügï uses grammatical structures borrowed from the Gïküyü language. Expressions such as “look you here” (3) and “stranger you have spoken true” (6) sound like transliterations from Gïküyü. However, the use of a syntax that to our ears sounds archaic signals the antiquated mindset of village elders who speak them. In contrast to Mary’s language, the males come through as outdated in their thinking. I am not suggesting that the text implies that anybody who does not speak English is out of date or backward. But the transliteration does convey that impression, even if its purpose is to realistically express Gïküyü speech in English. The lines by younger people are not in this kind of register, even when the characters are supposed to be speaking Gïküyü in the represented world. The same archaism is found even in Gïküyü discourse, especially the language associated with the village women who are assigned only untranslated passages in the play: For example, in a song and dance5 they perform to celebrate Charles’s wedding, we hear archaic taboo expressions: Itu Ime Nimwakwa mwakorwo Ni mburi nduri ici! (OR ANY OTHER DANCE) (1970a:14; capitalization in the original) [Cloud Dew And there come The goats, you cunts! (OR ANY OTHER DANCE)] (Translation mine) This is an erotic traditional fertility song and dance that invokes the environment and a woman’s genitalia to celebrate Charles’s wedding to Mumbi. The goats in the song refer to the bridewealth to be paid to the bride’s father. Itu (cloud) and ime (dew) suggest the succession of events that lead to rain, rejuvenation, and new life—fertility. Although euphemistic, the term nduri ici (you cunts) expresses disgust at the disposition or behavior of the addressees. The song, then, constitutes what Butler calls “excitable speech” in the sense that it employs an invective—nduri (cunts)—in a high moment of the play’s plot to express the dancers’ mock anger at the audience and the participants onstage for not being as excited as they should be about the unfolding event. Through the song, women are able to break their silence.

5. In most African contexts song=dance in the sense that almost all traditional songs involve dancing. In the Gïküyü language it is difficult to find separate words for “song” and “dance.” Both are “rwimbo.” The verb describing the performance of either of them is “ina” (sing/dance). Therefore, Ngügï uses “dance” to imply song as well. EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 Still, the archaic word for the female genitalia is used in this context as an expletive, underlin- ing the low opinion in which the community regards the woman’s body. One would expect a modern play like The Rebels to suppress folk literature in which women treat their own bodies with disregard. Ngügï, however, gestures to the fact that these women are outdated in their perspective, but with a choice that compounds the women’s silencing. In his stage direction, Ngügï offers the director the freedom to choose any “other dance,” indicating that he not only considers this particular song/dance appropriate, but that he has not specifically chosen this song for its potential as “excitable speech.” In other words, he is not insisting on this song as an opportunity to incite the subversion of male power through the use of potentially offensive speech. The song was probably chosen because it is a traditional wedding song and reiterates the play’s connection with oral literature and disjunction from Western and colonial theatre. The choice is nationalistic, and gender equality is only a secondary consideration. The women’s agency is further compromised by the fact that their excitement in fact marks a moment of dramatic irony: the event whose imminence they are celebrating never takes place because the bride, unknown to them, has died as she fled the event. Gikandi aptly notes that in Ngügï’s early dramas, the “symbolic fields (modern and tradi- tional) are represented by the figures of two types of women, one connecting the hero of the drama to the past and the other pulling him toward the future” (2000:166). In The Rebels, Mumbi pulls Charles to the past while Mary is the force pulling him to the cosmopolitan future. It may be said that Charles has been denied individuality in an effort to demonstrate his alienation, but he is nonetheless allowed to demonstrate his hollowness. This kind of exposure is lacking in the female characters, who serve to reveal Charles’s character, not their own individuality. Using the women (Mary and Mumbi) as symbols of the tension between tradition and modernity, the drama is full of gendered silences. When the play opens, we encounter an elder and a stranger discussing the forthcoming wedding of Charles to the Chief’s daughter. When another character appears to propel the dialogue forward and create variety in the building of tension, it is a male, Charles’s father. The setting demands that the scene be dominated by men because the action is taking place in Nguru’s hut and compound. The wives are in the background, and we only know about their presence when Nguru calls out their names. They never answer, enhancing their absence from the main events. Of all the women in the play, Mary, the symbol of modernity, is the only one who speaks substantively. She is written as a strong character, revealing the contradictions between words and actions in her boyfriend. Her dialogue is replete with philosophical statements that come across as representative of the author’s perspective, especially on the importance of abandoning parochial attitudes to embrace transnational politics with the goal of uniting black people across the continent. Ngügï uses Mary to tell the reader that people should not discriminate against one another on the basis of tribe. She underscores the need to break free of the dictatorship of elders, allowing the educated class emerging in the postcolony to have a say. However, her language is gender-marked with words that prioritize men. To her, the self “finds greater nourishment in a wider co-operative community of men, not held by strictures of religion and tribe” (1970a:12; italics mine). She seems to be mimicking a speech that may have been made earlier by Charles, the self-proclaimed Pan-Africanist. But Mary is not critical of Charles’s gender-exclusive language; rather, she criticizes him for his inability to live up to his Pan-African ideals. We can identify with Mary because she is voicing views similar to the author’s in the

work. What may be troubling is that, probably reflecting the ideas of the time, she does not Gender in consider gender to be an important category in African nationalism. Mary is also used to build up the character of her boyfriend; once she has helped reveal to

the audience what kind of person Charles was at Makerere, she is dispensed with. Other women Ngügï ’s Dramas appear in an amorphous group, unnamed or without any assigned lines. Traditional women appear only in groups, performing unspecified dances that comment on the larger events of the play and help connect scenes onstage. The women, including Nguru’s wives, are undifferenti-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 ated, unlike the elders in the play who, even if unnamed, offer different opinions on issues. The women thus are a silent category. What they are supposed to say and do is expressed in the stage directions, and is not particular. For example, in the song/dance they perform when Charles agrees to comply with the elders’ wishes and marry the chief’s daughter, we are told by the stage directions that they perform the incomplete song/dance printed above, “OR ANY OTHER DANCE” (14). While the playwright is allowing the director a free hand in choosing the kind of dance appropriate for the performance (and emphasizes this through irregular capitalization), he also implies that the women do not have a definite voice in the play. The women enact a similar scenario toward the end of the play when Mumbi dies. Intriguingly, the stage direction is in past tense: “Women might have improvised a dance of death.” This is unlike the other stage directions, which are in the present simple tense as is the norm. The expression “might have” injects uncertainty into the dramatic action, denying the women’s action full commitment. The stage directions also condemn Mumbi to silence: she only speaks offstage, even when she seems to know more than the male elders about the “curse” on Charles’s family. And even though Mumbi’s reason for wanting out of the marriage is because she didn’t want to marry a modern, educated man—not because Charles returned with a foreign girl- friend—we are never told why she did not flee sooner. Further, while we might admire her courage—as does Charles, who says in his eulogy that she was more courageous than him for daring to rebel against the village—she is denied agency by the very act that seals her fate. Unlike the other tragic heroes in Ngügï’s early dramas, she does not commit suicide or go into exile. She dies in what appears to be a freak drowning accident, which Ngügï deploys as deus ex machina to bring about the plot’s catastrophic ending. What emerges from Ngügï’s early plays is a portrayal of female characters as totally subordi- nate to their male counterparts. Women are given minimal space. The focus in these plays is more on nationalistic themes than on the liberation of individuals. For example, in The Wound in the Heart (1970b), rape is used as a metaphor of colonial aggression against African women and the emasculation and betrayal of African men. Progress in Later Dramas In Ngügï’s later dramas, written within a socialist realist tradition, speech acts move from the constative realm of naming the conditions in the society to the performative domain in which they attempt to bring about change. In The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (cowritten in English with Micere Githae-Mugo) and Ngaahika Ndeenda (cowritten in Gïküyü with Ngügï wa Miriï based on community improvisations), Ngügï, together with his collaborators, seems to be aiming at achieving two major objectives: first, he wants to create a theatre that is different from colonial drama by incorporating African methods of theatrical performance such as song and dance, proverbs, and oral narratives that Western theatre in Africa tended to denigrate; second, he wants to establish a national theatre of plays by Africans that would not only replace colonial performances, but also promote socialist nationalism. He is not content with a national theatre space that has been taken over by African theatre practitioners such as Kenneth Watene, whom he suggests portrays a warped and Eurocentric view of Africa through more or less European dramaturgical forms (see Cook and Okenimkpe 1997:172; Lovesey 2000:89). Rather, Ngügï wants a theatre that is much more Afrocentric and socialist, incorporating indigenous forms of expression as a way of freeing it from “its petty-bourgeois base” in formal educational institu- tions and from the “imperialist tradition from which it was trying to break away” (Ngügï 1986:41). Indeed, although Ngügï has not discussed Watene’s play beyond mentioning the author among a host of emergent writers of the 1970s, according to Ngügï’s publisher Henry Chakava, Ngügï and Mugo wrote The Trial of Dedan Kimathi “in anger because they were appalled by the manner in which Kenneth Watene had depicted Kimathi in his play, then just published and entitled Dedan Kimathi” (Chakava 1995:21). It is apparent that Watene’s kind of theatre can be counteracted not only by presenting a more favorable portrayal of Kimathi and EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 his nationalist military efforts against colonialism, but also by using techniques that tap into the oral traditions and rituals of the nation’s oppressed. Peasants united in their fight for a better Kenya, free from foreign domination, provide the material for The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Ngaahika Ndeenda. Both of these plays celebrate the peasant struggles in a world dominated by Western capital. Gender inequality is one of the silent themes in the two plays, but its sporadic appearance helps the reader to locate Ngügï’s gender ideology. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is a testimonial to the resilience of the freedom fighter in his rejection of the bribes offered by the colonialists and capitalists to get him to sell out and give up the fight for Kenya’s self-determination. It focuses on the trial of the key figure in the Mau Mau war for independence in the 1950s. When the action starts, the British have already arrested Kimathi, and his compatriots are trying to find ways to free him. The “trial” of the title refers to the judicial process in 1956, to other internal hearings the Mau Mau conducted to investigate traitors, and to the temptations offered Kimathi by the British in the hope he will abandon his ideals. Although written in English before Ngügï embarked on indigenous- language theatre in 1977, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi includes many untranslated expressions that seem to assume that the audiences understand Kenyan languages. Even colonial officers use indigenous language in their day-to-day administrative subjugation of local communities. Their accented Kiswahili and heteroglossic mixture of English and Kiswahili are a great source of humor in the play, at the expense of the European speakers. It is this play with language, especially in places where translation does not take place, that Ngügï’s and Mugo’s experimenta- tion with Brechtian theatre yields some of the most gendered connotations and effects in the play. The African characters add a humorous dimension to the otherwise tension-filled play through their use of Gïküyü and Kiswahili phrases. By foregrounding Gïküyü peasant speech patterns and laughing at the mangled pronunciation by colonial officers, they convert their own language into a tool of liberation. The freedom songs performed in defiance of the British are also left untranslated, sung either in Kikuyu or Kiswahili. Both strategies recover the local languages that European colonialism and Eurocentric theatre have colluded to suppress. In some instances, the dialogue is in a language other than English and, where Kiswahili or Gïküyü is not spoken locally, directors have to replace the lines with comparable colloquialisms. Take, for example, the moment when Waitina—a colonial officer whose name is a corruption of “Whitney” to connote the Gïküyü taboo word for “anus” or “buttocks”—harasses locals for not carrying passbooks: Waitina: Leta karatasi yako. First Man: Sina. Waitina: (Kick!) Sina Afande! Rudia! First Man: Sina Afande. Waitina: Kazi Yako? First Man: Kulima. Waitina: Mtu ya Kimathi? First Man: Hapana. (Thiong’o and Mugo 1976:7) Gender in [Waitina: Let me see your identification papers. First Man: I don’t have.

Waitina: I don’t have, Sir! Repeat that! Ngügï ’s Dramas First Man: I don’t have, Sir! Waitina: Your work?

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 First Man: Farming. Waitina: Are you a Kimathi person? First Man: No.] (Translation mine) In the untranslated scene, enacted in Kiswahili, Waitina is a laughable authoritarian character who demands appellations of respectability such as afande (sir) from peasants who regard him as an unnamable anatomical orifice through which dirty effluents exit the body. Although ridicu- lous enough, thanks to his vanity and gluttony, audiences would never know Waitina by that name because he is named in the script but not in performance. Because his name is derogatory, it cannot be spoken in his presence. If performance is a form of translation from the script, Waitina’s name is not translated for the stage. In performance, then, his naming in the script loses its raison d’être. I think this is done to limit his agency. Despite the powerful institution of British colonialism that he represents, Whitney (Waitina) is demoted to the same level of subjection that the colonial government has reduced the African world to. Like them, he is not named, but his unverbalized taboo sobriquet lowers him even further. Woman without a Name While Ngügï co-wrote The Trial of Dedan Kimathi with female writer Micere Githae Mugo, he coauthored Ngaahika Ndeenda in Gïküyü with a male artist (Ngügï wa Miriï). The latter play marks a break in Kenyan theatre because it is one of the first major community-devised dramatic texts. Women were part of this collective performance that was developed by Kamïrïïthü peasants and workers in an open-air theatre.6 But is the performance of the play, despite women’s participation in the production of the materials, free of oppressive elements performed through language? Is The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a product of the collaboration between Ngügï and a leading woman writer, free from gender bias? The Trial of Dedan Kimathi revolves around the eponymous historical figure who led the Mau Mau guerrilla struggle against the British in the 1950s. Ngügï and Mugo outline in the preface the reason behind their composition of this historical drama that uses Brechtian theatre to evoke the collective peasant battle against a superior army to win Kenyan independence despite the arrest of their leader, Kimathi. According to the preface, the play seeks to recover the historical struggles for the liberation of the Kenyan nation within the context of global struggle against capitalist exploitation; it focuses on a Gïküyü hero, but the authors promise in the preface to spotlight freedom fighters from other ethnic regions of the country. They also underscore the transnational nature of capitalistic exploitation by mentioning gross alienation of American workers from their labor in Western industries. According to David Cook and Michael Okenimpke, in addition to the reasons Ngügï and Mugo give as the impetus for their urge to compose the play in 1974, “they were spurred on by their, or at least Ngügï’s, anger against Kenneth Watene’s play Dedan Kimathi which was acted in the Nairobi National Theatre [sic] and elsewhere earlier in the same year” (1997:172).7 Watene’s play presents Kimathi as an ambivalent figure who is at times consumed by jealousy, paranoia, and insecurity regarding his fellow fighters. Ngügï and Mugo may have found this equivocal figure of Kimathi offensive to their socialist and nationalist agenda: they present a more charismatic Kimathi who does not bow to the colonialists’ pressure to betray his own people. It is hard to determine which parts each playwright created, but it is widely accepted that Mugo’s contribution in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is largely an analysis of the role of women in

6. Ngügï launches his essay on the language of African theatre in Decolonising the Mind with an anecdote about how his project in indigenous theatre was inspired by an unnamed woman who wanted to know how Ngügï and other intellectuals could help the community. 7. The venue is called Kenya National Theatre. EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 2. Peasants and workers, who participated in the creation of the play, in a rehearsal of the Gïküyü play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) at the Kamïrïïthü open-air theatre in 1977. (Courtesy of the Nation Media Group, Nairobi)

the fight for Kenya’s independence. She is the one who both wrote and first performed the role of “the Woman” (Elder 1995:258), an unnamed female combatant who fights alongside Kimathi, serves as his advisor, and attempts to rescue him from the colonial prison.8 The Woman, the principle female personality in the play, is complemented by another female character, the Girl, through whom the dramatists signify the social construction of gender and the marginalization of women both in colonial and nationalist domains. But while the Girl has to contest the Boy onstage to reveal the gender dynamics in the society, the Woman is presented as complimentary to Kimathi, the male protagonist. The Woman, like Kimathi, is based on a real person whom the authors met when researching Kimathi before writing the play. The writers’ commitment to socialist realism is evident in the Woman created by Mugo. Through the Woman, the two writers espouse “an implicit assertion that classes and their historical conflicts, not gender, is the authors’ main concern” (Elder 1995:258). The Woman is not named so that she may represent other women like her who participated in the subversive acts against colonialism. Like the Boy and the Girl, the Woman’s anonymity makes her repre- sentative while at the same time indexing her marginalized status in colonial and neocolonial Kenya. The anonymity serves an ambivalent function, allowing her agency as a symbol of the masses and expressing her alterity as an oppressed subject of a dehumanizing colonial order. It is crucial to note that her name is suppressed in the preface, the paratext preceding the play proper in which the writers talk about the nonfiction elements in their text. Karunaini, the setting of the action in the jungle, is named in the preface and the text, but the woman’s name is Gender in suppressed in both. The fact that Mugo contributed the inclusion of women to this joint effort toward freedom is suppressed in the preface of the play. Despite Mugo’s own personal contribu- tion to freedom, her text is framed within Ngügï’s perspective, where the women become appendages of the male struggle. Ngügï ’s Dramas

8. For a brief discussion of Mugo’s contribution in the play, refer to Arlene A. Elder (1995). Mugo’s feminist plays and poetry cover such diverse themes as cultural alienation and disillusionment with post-independence Africa.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Woman, a dynamic personality, changes with the circumstances and stages theatrical identities to elude capture by the colonial government. Brecht, upon whose aesthetics the play is based, calls for theatre that indexes its own features to undermine the illusion of reality and mimesis. Through the Woman’s behavior and strong language, Ngügï and Mugo signal the duality and falsity of the action presented in order to jolt the audience from its own compla- cency. The Woman, in reality a freedom fighter who transports food and weapons to the guerrillas, chants in a mixture of Gïküyü and Kiswahili as she sells oranges, foregrounding the comical theatricality of her disguise, so different from her identity in real life: Fruitseller (Woman): Oranges cheap today Oranges cheap today Thandaraita i Kuheherwo gucamirwo Tamu-uuuuuu!… Ukimeza, chozi lajimwaga! Thandaraita i Thandaraita-aaaaaaaa (1976:30)

[Fruitseller (Woman): Oranges cheap today Oranges cheap today Tangerines Cooling and tasty Taste the sheer sweetness When you swallow, a tear flows because of the sweetness Tangerines Tangerines!!!!] (Translation mine) As a freedom fighter, the Woman has to be a trickster and an actor, passing for what she is not. Multiple identities slide into each other as she tries to survive colonial onslaught. She advises the youth, symbolized by the Boy and the Girl: “In the struggle, you learn to adapt to changed circumstances […] I dressed as a fruit seller so that you would easily recognise me” (1976:60) Her dynamic and courageous conduct is meant to elicit admiration and paints her as a latter-day Wanjiru, the captured freedom fighter one of the colonialists compares her to: “You look like a Mau Mau. Like one of them, Kimathi women. Wanjiru they called her. She was lean, wiry, and strong. Fought like a tiger in the battle of the Beehive. No wonder the terrorists made her a Colonel” (10). While in the premier edition of the journal Mutiri, which Ngügï edited in New York, female critic Waithera wa Mbuthia speaks against words that signify “üciari witü nï kïndü kïïürü” (our private parts are a bad thing) (1994:96), the Woman in the play uses an untranslated swear word to elude arrest. When the colonial administration soldiers make to frisk her for weapons, she screams at them “uuu—u! nduri ici ni kii giki” (What the f--- is this, you cunts!; 1976:8; transla- tion mine). Her curse is not unusual; it is typical of an elderly Gïküyü woman to use derogatory words for female genitalia as a way of registering her outrage. Her equivalent in A Grain of Wheat (1967), a woman called Wambui who is rumored to have done a similar act to elude arrest, describes in very negative terms the genitalia that the ill-mannered soldiers are suppos- edly so anxious to see. While in The Rebels the use of nduri ici (you cunts) is performative of both protest and subjection, in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi the derogatory term elicits more humor than outrage because the audience knows that the Woman is staging anger so that the guns she is hiding under her clothes are not found. This illustrates Butler’s view in Excitable Speech (1997) that hate speech can be turned on its head to give agency to the marginalized group. The Woman manages to walk through a police checkpoint by shouting at African soldiers employed by the colonial government a swear word that derogates her womanhood—furthering the struggle

EvanMaina Mwangi for independence despite a rhetoric of self-loathing.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 By contrast, it is Johnnie, the young colonial officer in the play, who is presented as perverse. He attempts to lure the Woman and another older female freedom fighter (Wanjiru), to have sex with him. This action is silent but actively performed in mime and described in detail in the stage direction (9). The taboo act by the colonial officer can only be rendered in silence; its unmentionable import is, however, translated in mime to signal the double oppression of women under colonialism: women are not only brutalized like their male counterparts by the colonial order, but they are also subjected to sexual harassment. The stage direction uses the expression “with dignity” to describe her resistance to the colonialist’s seduction to underline the fact that she is an honorable person and to contrast her conduct with the unbecoming banality of the powerful colonialist. With Wanjiru’s and the Woman’s comportment, and with the colonial response to these women, the play creates the impression that the man/woman schism is a creation of the colonial government. It is the colonial officer who is obsessed with gender differences. Further, through the Woman, the dramatists conflate gender discrimination with tribalism as one of the criteria the colonialists use to divide the peasants: “We are told, You are a Luo, you are Kalenjin, you are Kamba, you are Maasai, you are Kikuyu. You are a woman, you are a man, you are this, you are that, you are the other” (1976:14). From the Woman’s statement, the audience is meant to understand that gender and ethnicity are socially contrived labels that can be erased and reconstituted for the common good. While the playwrights suggest that there are no gender distinctions in the nationalist struggle, in the reality they present, it is women who should be like men—the play insists on masculinity throughout. At one level, the play exploits colonialist myths of masculinity to empower the women freedom fighters when confronted by a male colonialist. This fact has been noted by Arlene Elder when she says that “exploiting a very conventional concept of the source of women’s Figure 3. Ngügï wa Thiong’o (center) joins Kamïrïïthü women collaborators in a power, she [the Woman] dance to welcome him home from over two decades of exile in August 2004. He uses sexual wiles and a mask is highly respected by Kenyan women’s groups for advocating for their empower- of helplessness to fool a ment. (Courtesy of the Nation Media Group, Nairobi) white soldier and prevent his finding the gun she is carrying to Kimathi” (1995:258). Ngügï and Mugo seem to suggest that even stereotypes should

be exploited in the struggle for liberation. Gender in The Woman exploits the dialectical relationship of male power versus female helplessness to hoodwink a powerful male soldier. For her part, the Girl uses conventional definitions of

masculinity as a survival mechanism when she expresses her doubts about the Boy’s masculinity. Ngügï ’s Dramas Her intention is to show him through a physical duel that masculinity is all but a myth: men and women are equals and can fight out on level ground. When the Boy’s courage wavers, the Girl reminds him of his masculinity. Toward the end, the play figures the Girl as stronger than the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 Boy; she is even more politically aware than him. According to the Boy, the Girl “was all strength and daring and no fear” (1976:60). However, despite this reversal of the boy/girl hierarchy, the children’s mentor, the Woman, associates tenderness with femininity, but warns Kimathi that such tenderness will weaken their resolve to energetically fight the colonialist on a single front (1976:77). Elder appropriately notes that: “While the Woman has suppressed the ‘woman’ in her, Kimathi succumbs to the ‘woman’ in him” (1995:260). The fighters are androgynous, but their female side is seen as a weakness. While the woman’s androgyny is viewed positively because the male element in her allows her to initiate boys in the struggle (a male role), wear male clothes, and take up arms against colonialism, Kimathi’s “womanish” tenderness is viewed as detrimental to the struggle. At the end of the play, the Woman overcomes gender stereotypes: she leads the peasants in a freedom song, suggesting a more energetic post-Kimathi rebellion against oppressors. But the play, though based on history and events that the audience understands, does not resolve the new conflict it introduces in the dénouement. The vision it seems to espouse is that the struggle goes on because although individuals such as Kimathi are important in a guerrilla movement, they are not the only sources of strength. The Woman becomes the immediate successor of Kimathi, leading a new army of youth. However, the male freedom fighter has overshadowed her to the extent that she cannot step out of Kimathi’s shadow. The focus of the play is Kimathi. He is portrayed as a brave person, around whom many myths have been woven. There is a silent struggle in the Woman to break from being totally eclipsed by Kimathi’s image. When we are supposed to be watching the first scene onstage, Kimathi is captured by the colonial powers while the Woman is free and thus much more active. Kimathi’s actions are limited to powerful speech acts, while the woman can move from one place to another, and even change gender roles. However, despite all this freedom, she is subordinated to the nationalist male figure of Kimathi. Kimathi is portrayed as a multifaceted man: he is a strategist, a demo- crat, and a humorous storyteller. The dialogue employs such adjectives as “wonderful,” “infec- tious,” “humorous,” “human,” and “Great” (62) to enlist the audience’s admiration. The word “Great” is typographically foregrounded by capitalization that is outside grammatical conven- tions. The direct descriptions are reinforced with nouns such as “teacher,” “story teller,” “genius,” “organiser,” “strength,” and “courage” to concretize his multifaceted fortitude. At times the play uses adverbs such as “truly” and “ferociously” to underline the fact that Kimathi is earnest and at the same time pitiless. On the whole, the Woman comes through as an admirable versatile character: like Kimathi, she is a good teacher who inculcates in the youth the values of the struggle. The vacillating loyalty of the Boy and the Girl in the play is shown to have matured into a full-blooded belief in freedom when they confront the colonial forces in the courtroom in their bid to rescue Kimathi. The play figures her as the mother of the struggle, who nurtures the future generations—made up of male and female troops on an equal footing—to fight for their rights. The play uses the Woman to hold up to the reader that some men gave in while women, boys, and girls continued to fight. It is important to remember that the fight is seen as a masculine campaign. The Woman is celebrated because she abandons her female nature to fight with men in the forest. In her advice to the boy, she wants him, first and foremost, to be a man: And you call yourself a man! The day you understand why your father died: the day you ask yourself whether it was right for him to do so; the day you ask yourself whether it was right for him to die so; the day you ask yourself: “What can I do so that another shall not be made to die under such grisly circumstances?” That day, my son, you’ll become a man. (19) EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 The woman is figured in the conventional male role of initiating the youth into maturity, indicating that in emergencies, gender conventions can be shelved for the betterment of the society. The Will to Marry When You Want Despite dramatic lapses, some of which reveal a wavering commitment to gender equality, female characters in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi are positively drawn. This contrasts with their counterparts in I Will Marry When I Want, where although the play is much more conscious of gender, it constantly contradicts the positive image of women it presents. In the latter play, Ngügï wa Thiong’o and Ngügï wa Miriï, together with their peasant collaborators, seek not only to define the post-independence world of the peasantry, but also to fundamentally reconsti- tute that world as a more equitable society. The work is to a large extent reflexive as it plays on not only its own ludic title but also with other cultural artifacts that advertise its fictionality. The Gïküyü version subtitles itself “ithako ria ngerekano” (an allegorical play), which when spoken in Gïküyü foregrounds the ithako (playfulness) and the ngerekano (pretence/performance/fictional/ allegorical) components of the play. Like Ngügï’s novels A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), and Devil on the Cross (1982), I Will Marry When I Want explores the citizens’ disappoint- ment with the direction post-independence African nations have taken. The play is a class-based dissection of the disillusionment with the post-colonial dispensation in Africa and revolves around the experiences of the peasant Kïgüünda (lit., one who belongs to the farm) at the hands of a capitalist landowner Ahab Kïoi wa Kanoru (the grabby son of the fat one), who, with his wife Jezebel, reminds the reader of the Biblical King who grabbed the vineyard of Naboth at the behest of his wife. With heavy biblical resonances and some invocation of folklore in a region that is Christian-dominated, the play laments the exploitation and marginalization of the peasants who fought for Kenya’s liberation by a new group of leaders and financiers who have taken over the country’s economy. In the play, the peasants’ and workers’ fight against their oppressors is the background for the struggles against an unfair social and economic order in present-day Kenya. The key characters’ names are symbolic: “Kïgüünda” connotes farming; “Gathoni,” shyness; and “Gïcaamba,” a cock/rooster or courage.9 Although the male names are the authors’ creation (that is, they are not names one is likely to encounter in the real world), Gathoni is a common Gïküyü female name; this suggests the expectation that a woman should exhibit characteristics of thoni (shyness). It is therefore a shock when Gathoni rejects familial and other social expectations by declaring that she will marry when she wants. The emphasis on marriage in the title and among the characters who, except for Gathoni, appear in heterosexual couples, signifies the society’s reverence for family. Gathoni is a voice of protest against the family structure and a metaphoric protest against capitalist hegemony. Further, land, which is the cite of ideological contestation in the society, is equated to the penis in a translational infelicity in which Ngügï translates the proverb “mündü ainaga na gatiirü gake” (one shows off one’s little possession; 1980:11) as “one brags about his penis / However small it is” (1982:4). “Mündü” in the original is gender-free for person and the proverb’s wording has no gender weight; the translation introduces the gendered noun man and the gendered pronoun his in addition to introducing the male sexual organ into the play. In ordinary conversation, “gatiirü” means “a small piece,” and the proverb metaphorizes Kïgüünda’s pride in his small piece of land, which he acquired honestly, unlike his nemesis Ahab Kiioi wa Kanoru whose Gender in properties are ill gotten and whom Kïgüünda eventually supersedes and humiliates in a struggle between good and evil, forcing the rich man to his knees and ordering him to eat grass like an Ngügï ’s Dramas

9. In Gïküyü culture, the cockerel is a symbol of courage and valor. The word for courage is ücaamba or ürüme. While ucaamba and gïcaamba (cockerel) mutually connote each other as expressions of a masculine quality, ürüme refers directly to manliness and masculinity.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 animal as in the biblical story where King Nebuchadnezzar was turned into an animal. It is telling that “gatiirü,” which metaphorically designates a small piece of land, would be translated as penis, for it reveals the unconscious gendered dimensions of the class struggle that Ngügï wa Thiong’o and Ngügï wa Miriï stage in I Will Marry When I Want. This is the story of a peasant Kïgüünda’s encounter with the rich elite, represented by his employer, the landed Kïoi. The rich man’s son has been involved in a clandestine fling with the peasant’s daughter, despite the unlikelihood of the relationship maturing into marriage. Her sexual exploitation by the rich man’s son parallels Kïgüünda’s exploitation by the rich man for whom he works. His small piece of land is stolen by the rich man and a colleague because they want to set up an insecticide company. They lure Kïgüünda into a trap with a loan to finance a church wedding. With the loss of his land, Kïgüünda tries to take the law into his own hands, forcing the young man to marry his daughter and the rich man and his wife to eat grass like the biblical Ahab. When the play opens, Wangeci, Kïgüünda’s wife, is teasing her husband about his fixation with the land title deed. The teasing gives the play a lighthearted opening and foregrounds the theme of land. However, the light-hearted opening is at the expense of Wangeci, who appears to lack the commitment to the land that her husband displays. Her dialogue is used to give the husband a chance to explain to the audience the land situation in post-independence Kenya. Her perspective is overshadowed, used only as a foil for Kïgüünda’s ideas. For example, she sees a drunk passing the house, “legs astride the road / Doing I don’t know what with his arms.” She is bitter about this drunk without considering the social, political, and economic factors that have led to his degeneration. This drunk is central to the play because it is from his song—an enactment of D.K.’s ballad “Ngaahika Ndeenda”—that the play derives its title.10 Kïgüünda explains: He was a good man; He became the way he is now is [sic] only after he lost his job. He worked with the Securicor company. He was Kïoi’s night watchman. But one day Kïoi finds him dead asleep in the middle of the night. From that moment Kamande lost his job. (1982:5) The playwright sets up Wangeci’s ignorance to allow Kïgüünda to explain the drunk’s situation and to establish the character of Kamande wa Münyui, whose name connotes the “flattened one son of a drunk” and suggests his oppressed and ideologically blind status in the oppressive capitalist society. Wangeci does not sympathize with Kamande, making sarcastic comments about the man’s drunkenness. Overall, the play takes Wangeci’s position against Münyui’s escapism.11 Later

10. D.K. (Daniel Kamau) wa Wanja is a popular Gïküyü-language artist who started releasing sappy hits while still in high school in 1967 and whose popularity reached giddy heights among the Kikuyus in the 1970s. His celebrity was so entrenched in his home area that he easily won an elective local council seat in Murang’a. Sometimes sexually provocative at a time when singing about sex was taboo, D.K. was seen as a rebel against conventional morality. The instrumental climax of “Ngaahika Ndeenda” evokes sexual activity already suggested in the verbal lyrics. In addition to the sexual content, D.K. was not adverse to throwing an ethnocentric line into his songs to garner popularity among his largely Gïküyü consumers at the height of Gïküyü hegemony in Kenya. While taking advantage of D.K.’s status as a rebellious personality, Ngügï and Ngügï cleanse the song of direct ethnocentric references. 11. Ngügï says in an extra-textual comment that one of the achievements of the project in the real world, where the play was performed by the peasants, is that drunkenness among the local population was dramatically reduced because people were positively employed in the Kamïrïïthü Community Education and Cultural Centre (1981:77; 1983:42). EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 in the play, after he is dispossessed of his property by Kïoi, Kïgüünda himself degenerates and comes home drunk, singing the same song as Kamande wa Münyui. Blind to the true cause of his problems, Kïgüünda fights his own wife instead of fighting the dispossessing forces, his violence against her proving her argument that drunkenness cannot solve the peasants’ problems. But the Figure 4. Young men practice songs for a show of Ngaahika Ndeenda. Ngügï woman’s observations (standing in the background) has noted that the community theatre project helped about Münyui are silenced cut down the levels of male drunkenness in the area. The political causes and effects by Kïgüünda’s detailed of drunkenness is a running theme in Ngaahika Ndeenda. (Courtesy of the Nation justification, suggesting Media Group, Nairobi) that reason is an exclu- sively male domain. The play’s unconscious silencing of women characters is seen again in the dialogue when Gïcaamba and his wife Njooki come to visit Kïgüünda and Wangeci. The playwrights exploit the montage technique, where two scenes are presented onstage simultaneously. The dialogue between Njooki and Wangeci is presented at the same time as a conversation between their husbands. This is a complex form of intertextuality where different texts within the text intersect as the drama unfolds on the stage. What is striking is that the women are discussing what they consider domestic issues that touch on marriage but which the audience is called upon to see as a reflection of the wider plunder within the nation. In their discussion, the women underline the exploitation of the poor by the rich: Mühüüni, the son of Kïgüünda’s employer, is sexually exploiting Gathoni, Kïgüünda and Wangeci’s daughter. Njooki is aware that nothing will come of the relationship between Mühüüni and Gathoni because the rich marry only within their class. Thus she is shown as a clever woman who sees beyond the veneer of love that the rich may show to the poor. Her sensibility is contrasted with Wangeci’s imperceptivity; the latter is portrayed as so naive that she longs for Mühüüni to visit her house. It is pertinent to remember that the action is taking place in Wangeci’s house. While Njooki, the visiting woman, is talking sense, the host is speaking nonsense in her own space. Later, Njooki’s perspicacity is subverted when the audience is shown that she is as naïve as Wangeci. When the men are discussing their exploitation she tells them: “You’ll have to shut those mouths of yours! / It hates less he who sights it than he who shouts its presence” (40). She is urging them, against the apparent perspective expressed in the text, to despair because of the force with which their protests will be met by the repressive state. She is almost cynical in her fatalistic

despair as she reminds the men about their rewards for fighting for independence in the 1950s: Gender in Did you get anything Apart from broken limbs?

Your rumour-mongering Ngügï ’s Dramas Will cost you lives. (1982:40)

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 The women’s arguments are invalidated by their call to silence in the male struggle against social evils. Wangeci voices her support of Njooki when she tells the men: “Dwellers in the land of silence were saved by silence!” Although she means to ridicule the men, her argument is unsophisticated in its justification of complacency and compliance with the status quo, and the audience laughs at her, not at the men. Her unsubtle sarcasm toward the men only reinforces her status as an uneducated peasant who is yet to understand the values of the workers’ collective campaign against capitalism. What needs to be interrogated further is the construction of male discourse as a contrast to the women’s talk. The men’s discussion is informed by the important social issues that the playwrights are putting before the audience, in which both Kïgüünda (a peasant farmer) and Gïcaamba (a factory worker) are mutually explaining the exploitation visited on them by capitalism. The dialogue becomes a serious site for the male characters to play out the differ- ences between them yet conclude that they are both victims of exploitation. Gïcaamba comes off as the more politically conscious of the two, and this is captured in the stage directions, which insist that Gïcaamba “uses a lot of movement, gestures, mimicry, miming, imitation, impersonation and every dramatic device to convey his message” (1982:33). The women are not given this kind of attention, this cue toward physical agency; there are no stage directions suggesting how their dialogue is to be carried out. Further, onstage, the difference in importance between the Njooki-Wangeci text and Kïgüünda-Gïcaamba text is clearly seen when the women are silenced to listen to what the men are saying. The audience may be tempted to think that it was a waste of time to listen to the Njooki-Wangeci dialogue, that it has been detracting from the Kïgüünda-Gïcaamba exchange. In the printed text of the play, the hierarchy is clearer. The stage direction, which would have to be translated into action in live performance, characterizes the Njooki-Wangeci dialogue as “chatter” (1982:33),12 giving the impression that their exchange is on unimportant matters. In his translation of the play, Ngügï undermines the weighty topic he and his colleague have developed in the text by relegating the conversation of the women characters to a form of gibberish. Besides being a rehearsal and dramatization of the contestation of national space between the rich and the poor, I Will Marry When I Want, as Gikandi suggests, involves “conflicts between parents and their children, between generations and genders, all struggling to make sense of the postcolony and its phantasms” (2000:191). The conflict between genders is of course subordi- nated to the grand theme of class conflict. As already shown, when Kïgüünda and Wangeci are in conflict, the audiences are drawn to side with the man. Near the end of the play, the struggle is evened out when Kïgüünda and Wangeci, at the behest of Gïcaamba, realize the need for unity as peasants. Through Gïcaamba, the audience is told about the exploitation of women who are paid a meager “five or six shillings a day” (1982:40). Still, it is men who struggle against the oppressor, while the plight of the women is undermined by their cynical and fatalistic comments. There is a sense of harmony between Njooki and Gïcaamba that is missing from Kïgüünda and Wangeci. Though not directly said in the overtly Marxist play, and although Ngügï (1998:108) disagrees with Marx and Engel’s typology that seems to characterize rural communi- ties as inferior, it is suggested in the play that as a factory worker, Gïcaamba is ideologically more advanced than his peasant counterpart. From this perspective, it is possible to infer that Gïcaamba understands better than Kïgüünda and Wangeci that gender parity is an important facet of development in Africa. It is not surprising that Gïcaamba, the clearest ideological voice in the play, tells the audience that culture has been complicit in the exploitation and repression of women:

12. The Gïküyü and Kiswahili editions of the play use “kwaria” and “kuzungumza” respectively. Both would translated into talking, not chattering. EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 Even before colonialism, We oppressed women Giving ourselves numerous justifications. (105) Gïcaamba lists the “justifications” that are encapsulated in proverbs that purport to express enduring wisdom. Through Gïcaamba, the audience can put Gathoni’s situation in perspective: She has not been given an education because she is female. She is exploited by Mühüüni not just because she is poor but because she is a woman; she suffers double oppression as a peasant girl. Gïcaamba is aware that the postcolonial situation is biased against women despite their contribution in the freedom war (105). However, the play’s theme prioritizes the masculine contributions to the nationalist project. The female role comes as an afterthought in what Elleke Boehmer in her 1991 essay “‘The Master’s Dance to Master’s Voice’: Revolutionary Nationalism and Women’s Representation in Ngugi wa Thiong’o” has called a “glib didactic statement” ([1991] 2005:45); Gïcaamba’s statement is not illustrated in the actions of the text and appears as a half-hearted gesture to the rhetoric of gender liberation. Gathoni, doubly an example of the oppression of the peasant women, is only discussed by others. She is shown as a naive girl who is lured by Mühüüni’s riches and comes to grief because of her gullibility. The audience is sorry for her, but she does nothing to redeem herself. As the play ends, Gathoni is, like Wanja in Ngügï’s novel Petals of Blood, in exile as a barmaid. But the audience does not see the new space that she has carved out for herself. The focus remains on the home. Thus the home clearly becomes an exclusionary space, where only those who conform to the masculine authority can stay. Wangeci believes a woman has to be provided for. She does not urge Gathoni to generate wealth and buy herself bedding; rather, she recom- mends that she should get herself a man so that she can break out of the vicious circle of poverty in their home (16). The most Gathoni can do is exchange bitter words with her mother, words that are foregrounded in the title of the play as an expression of her rejection of her mother’s rhetoric of normative family life. Wangeci’s consolation that Gathoni will one day marry and get out of the home also tells the audience that this is a society where women are disinherited; for, according to Wangeci, using a Gïküyü proverb, “There is no maiden who makes a home in her father’s backyard” (17). Gathoni’s plan of action after she protests against being forced into marriage and proclaims that she will marry when she wants is silenced, while the text concen- trates on nationalist politics. The Changes in the Song “Ngaahika Ndeenda” The popular 1970s song from which Ngügï and Ngügï borrow the title of their play is recited in different contexts in the play by politically emasculated individuals. In the source song, the composer creates an aesthetic distance from himself, refashioning himself as a different person and asking the ideal audience whether they have met with Wa Maria (son of Maria; Daniel Kamau’s mother is Maria Wanja). Two “ladies” help the artist-protagonist carry his bag. When they reach a hotel, he offers to buy them tea but they instead ask him for the shilling he would spend on their tea to share it between themselves. Because the protagonist, according to the singer, is “Wa Maria himself,” he offers to give them two shillings instead. When they reach his home, he sleeps with both of them, as is suggested by the context of the lewd interjections accompanying the climactic instrumental guitar-work at the end of the song.

The refrain in which the line “Ngaahika Ndeenda” appears comes late in the plot of the Gender in song and seems an imposition on the evolving narrative about Wa Maria and his two “ladies.” The song’s significance rests in underlining the artist’s advocacy for nonconformity; Wa Maria, the artist-protagonist in the song, engages in group sex, against social expectations. The Ngügï ’s Dramas transformation of the artist-protagonist as androgynous (he will marry who he wants and be married when he wants, according to the refrain) defies normative conventions and is a metaphor for the artist-protagonist’s refusal to conform.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 While the song laughs at those who do not respect marriage, it also celebrates protest against the institution. In the play Ngaahika Ndeenda, Ngügï and Ngügï use the song to signify a people’s refusal to acquiesce to social injustices; the song, as used in the drama, serves to articulate communal protest. The artists have subverted the gender and ethnic chauvinism in the original; in the source text, the first line in the refrain—and which gives the song its title— says “Niï ngarua ndeenda / Wamera nïatüire” (I will get circumcised when I want / Since Wamera is still alive). Remember that Wamera is a Gïküyü corruption of the Luo language word Omera (brother). By Wamera, the source text is derogatorily referring to the political rivals of the Gïküyü ethnic group. It expresses contempt for the Luo as the Other into which the persona can transform himself as a gesture of protest. To offer the threat to society that he will turn himself into a version of the Luo is to suggest that the latter are a less than equal entity. The play suppresses the ethnic chauvinism against the Luo, and partially erases the stereotypes of women Daniel Kamau portrays in his song, subverting the negative elements in their source text. While in the source text the male protagonist-actor brags about his sexual prowess by rhetorically presenting other people praising him as the toast of women, in the play Ngaahika Ndeenda the playwrights use the title primarily to refer to Gathoni’s protest and paradigmatically to express social dissent. From this perspective, the title, which is articulating resistance, offers power to Gathoni. However, in their attempt to express the carnivalesque by using a popular song that is mockingly celebrating strongly antisocial behavior, the artists reduce Gathoni’s agency. The words she voices become an expression of the defeated, like the drunkard and the degenerate Kïgüünda toward the end of the play. The expression “I will marry when I want” thus connotes a defeatist view of life, for it is the characters who utter it who have relapsed to escapism. The effects of the words that form the title of the play and express Gathoni’s agency are watered down by the frivolity within which they are framed. Indeed, her reference to the title, although effective in enhancing textual cohesion, is a repetition of the words of a song sung by a drunkard for comic relief. Her agency is undercut because her words are an edited version of the drunkard’s song. I must point out that Ngügï’s depiction of women improves in his later play Maitü Njugïra (Mother, Sing for Me; 1982), an unpublished experimental play that Ngügï wrote in Gïküyü in 1981 and was never formally performed because the license to mount it on 19 February to 10 March 1982 was suddenly cancelled by the Kenyan government. According to Ingrid Bjorkman and Gïchingiri Ndïgïrïgï, this experiment was so successful in drawing a multiethnic audience to the radical message of the play that the Kenyan government became nervous about the perfor- mance. The rehearsals could not take place at the Kenya National Theatre because the actors found the venue ringed by anti-riot police when they went to do technical and dress rehearsal on 15 February 1982. They resorted to the University of Nairobi’s Educational Theatre II, where a crowd of around 10,000 spectators is reported to have watched the play before 25 February, when the actors were forbidden from using the university premises (Bjorkman 1989:60; Ndïgïrïgï 2007:141). Although the play cannot be described as feminist, it is intensely gendered in its use of language and characterization and addresses the double oppression of women under colonialism. Ngügï uses rape as a metaphor for the plunder of Africa. We witness painful scenes in which mothers suffer miscarriage while they undergo further verbal and physical abuse onstage. Nyathïra is raped by the colonialist plantation owner Kanoru (“the fat one”) and then by his neocolonialist African successor, Mwendanda (“the one who primarily loves his stomach”). Her suffering is so intense that the actor who translated Mwendanda’s role onstage was attacked by the audience during the dress rehearsal. During performances—presented as dress rehearsals at the University of Nairobi’s Education Theater II to elude government censorship at the Kenyan National Theatre—the audiences were so intensely angered by Mwendanda’s behavior that they found it difficult to separate the actual actor from the fictional role he played. He “was nearly EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 run off the stage by the audience, for whom he represented a reprehensible type” (Ndïgïrïgï 2007:184). Using melodramatic techniques, Ngügï was able to whip up the outrage of audiences over the wrongs colonialism has visited upon the people. Unlike Gathoni, who remains politi- cally naïve and a victim of male sexual aggression, Nyathïra is radicalized by her rape. But the wives of colonialists and neocolonialists are presented in a similar way as the wives of capitalists are depicted in the novel Devil on the Cross—as subservient and complicit in the oppression of the people. They do not exhibit any individuality or independence from their husbands. As in Ngaahika Ndeenda, the main song in Maitü Njugïra is changed from the source text to rid it of its negative references to the Maasai, a precolonial rival of the Gïküyü ethnic group. The song in the play does not refer negatively to the screams of “müka wa ükabi” (wife of a Maasai); the woman in the play is a “müka wa coomba” (wife of a European). It is a patriarchal song, part of the müthuü subgenre of Gïküyü folklore that is performed by young men returning from war, asking their mothers for accolades and ululations. Indeed, the title would literally translate as “Mother, Ululate for Me!” In the context of local oral traditions, the song’s wording would change to suit each situation and audience while retaining its general structure and refrain. Ngügï strategically exploits this malleability of oral literature to present a nationalistic theme by addressing the war for independence, not the precolonial cattle raids as in the original. But he ignores the song’s gender-insensitive language. For example, he retains rude Gïküyü words such as nyükwa (impolite form for “your mother”) and müka (impolite word for “wife of”) to describe women. Even if we acknowledge the difficulties of radically changing the lyrics of such a patriarchal song as “Maitü Njugïra” and retain the rhythm in live performance, it is hard to accept the play’s silencing of women outside of the strict metrical pattern of traditional song and dance. Just as the song does not acknowledge the difference between a European’s wife and the European himself, the play also does not distinguish oppressive men from their wives. Ngügï could have made the wives of the oppressor more distinct from their men as he does in Wizard of the Crow (2006). In arguably the most disturbing scene in the play, when Mwendanda rapes Nyathïra offstage, his wife is seen onstage doing nothing despite Nyathïra’s deafening screams. Immediately after the rape, Mwendanda delivers a soliloquy to the audience that is not marked as an aside—and therefore accessible to his wife because she is onstage with him—in which he says that his wife is a money-minded woman to whom material wealth has become a fetish: Money is the Decider […] Do you see her? When I did not have a penny except a tie She would not accept me And now? She sees, hears nothing but money She dresses in money She gets orgasm at the sound of money (1982:114) The Gïküyü draft leaves out this part, probably because the mention of orgasm is taboo, but it highlights Mwendanda’s philosophy that any woman can be bought with money. What is important to note is that the African woman here is portrayed as servile, never protesting against her husband’s sexual peccadilloes, or even speaking at all. She remains silent from the beginning of the play to the end—a wife, never an autonomous individual. Gender in Liberation That Is Not Yet Complete

I must reiterate that there has been a tremendous improvement in the portrayal of women in Ngügï ’s Dramas Ngügï’s theatre. He stands out as one of the most gender-conscious writers in Africa, improving with every new work. The early plays of the 1960s tended to use women as a silent category. In these plays, even when the construction of male characters is not sophisticated, the female

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 characters are almost all the time flat characters and appendages of the male heroes.The Trial of Dedan Kimathi marks a dramatic change in the way women figure in Ngügï’s writing. However, even in this play the female figure is subordinated to the fictionalized nationalist male freedom fighter.I Will Marry When I Want is much more aware of the struggle for gender equality in post-independence Africa and makes overt statements about the need to arrest further marginal- ization of women if the socialist order the playwrights espouse is to be achieved. However, the play contains infelicitous language that binds women to the Gïküyü ethnic habitus. Thus, rather than be seen as an unproblematic solution to oppression, the use of Gïküyü and other African languages needs to be attentive to those moments in the language that go unquestioned and permit women to accept the status quo vis-à-vis men. In Ngügï’s later dramas, there are moments when the presentation of women is no different from the images of female characters in his early theatre in English, but there is a struggle through Ngügï’s oeuvre to liberate his language from assumptions that consign women to a secondary role in society. There is evidence of further progress in Ngügï’s performed oral poetry. Coming late in his artistic career, his attempts at poetry are in the Gïküyü language. The poetry appears in the four issues of the Mütiiri journal published 1994 in efforts to buttress the aims of his Kamïrïïthü indigenous-theatre project and the campaign for use of African languages among intellectuals in the diaspora. Although articulated in the language of Kenyan peasantry, the poems carry images of global communication and transportation in metropolitan cities; indeed, one of the poems, “Naarï Korwo Mwïrï wï Mathagu” (If Only My Body Had Wings; 1994b) describes the protagonist’s desire to perform as an airplane, wishing he could develop wings and fly out of the plane to his heartthrob at home. The poems simulate presence and the immediacy of oral speech, but we are reminded constantly of Derrida’s warning against prioritizing the oral vis-à-vis the scripted as a marker of presence (1976). The poems are the site upon which diverse opposites negotiate; although they are orally transmitted, they experiment with graphic appearance on the printed page to instantiate an interface between the oral and the written. The sequences of poems is entitled “Makundo Ma Wendo” (translating both as “Knots of Love” and “Sips of Love”), and they address the different aspects of love as an intense per- sonal feeling that needs to be nurtured if the lover is to reap the benefits of a romantic union. Eschewing overt politics, the love poems cover the subthemes of romantic jealousy, romantic insecurity, a lover’s longing for his companion, male lust and promiscuity, romantic doubts, fidelity (especially the call for men to avoid extramarital liaisons), and the yearning love for an absent beloved. Ngügï, an openly political figure in his memoirs and polemics, features in the erotic poems as an ordinary individual wracked by the pains and pleasures of love. For the first time in his writing, Ngügï’s poetry instantiates moments of transformation by avoiding the accepted convention of referring to his wife Njeeri as a mütumia (Gïküyü word for “woman,” which connotes “one who should be silent and submissive”), calling her instead ngatha (respectable lady), a term reserved in Ngügï’s writing for the revolutionary woman Wariinga in Devil on the Cross. Although to be “ngatha” a woman might be required to acquiesce to male power and serve the interests of men, Ngügï’s avoidance of the derogative term “mütumia” indicates a desire to use Gïküyü in a more liberating way. In the same poem sequences, Ngügï demands from men responsibility for their actions, suggesting that the Gïküyü word for man (müthuri) should be taken to mean one who chooses faithfulness to his partner, rather than one who is privileged relative to women. The poetry that Ngügï composed for his wife in the early 1990s and performed to live audiences in New Jersey indicates progress toward gender-sensitive language in addressing cosmopolitan themes. Despite the strong personal mooring, the poems indicate the intersection of the personal and political. By not being overtly political they become most politically pointed. The poems are full of punning, especially on words referring to weaving and succor; the title of the sequence and the poems refer to both kunda (sip) and ikundo (knot) to underscore the implication of sexual regeneration on the one hand, and political, aesthetic, and intellectual self- EvanMaina Mwangi

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 sustenance on the other. The poem “Kürï Njeeri” (To Njeeri) addresses Ngügï’s wife Njeeri to commemorate their first meeting at Grand Central Station in New York in 1989. The poem opens with a pun on makundo (knot/sip), drawing attention to the semantic affiliation between the rhyming words, makundo (sips/knots) and wendo (love). In the chaotic setting of metropolitan New York, where according to the speaker taxis are running on the streets like sheep in need of a shepherd, the speaker and his audience are able to discuss “njoho ya üteti” (political detention). The poem praises Njeeri not only as “ngatha yakwa” (my beloved lady), but also as “nyarari ya bürüri” (beauty of the nation). It is from his sexual relationship with this beauty of the nation that Ngügï, according to the poem, will revive in exile the spirit of his Kamïrïïthü community- theatre project and the development of African mother tongues. In a different poem, the persona emphasizes that because exile and distance had at one point kept him awake all night, missing his lover, now that they are together they should agania toro (translating both as “make the sleep naughty” and “make sure neither of us falls asleep”). The punning connotes both making love the night long and keeping one another politically aware, not regressing to ideological ignorance. The use of the figure of Njeeri as national property in the poems indicates Ngügï’s conflation of nationalism and gender in which the woman is seen as the quintessential symbol of nationhood to give succor to intellectual and cultural development in the society. The poetry, dedicated to his wife Njeeri, attempts to emancipate Gïküyü from negative gendered references to women.

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