'Liberated' Kenya National Theatre should fulfil our deferred dreams

President Uhuru Kenyatta listens to Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o during the official opening of the modernised Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi last week. On the right is Ngugi’s wife Njeeri (second right) and Prof Micere Mugo. {PHOTO: [ANDREW KILONZI/ STANDARD]

The occasion of reopening the revamped national theatre is simultaneously a re-enactment of the spirit of our history but also an enactment of its revival. The year 1952, the year this theatre was built, was also the year that Jomo Kenyatta, leader of Kenya African Union (KAU), was put in prison. He had a theatre background. In 1937, he had acted in the film, Sanders of the River alongside the great Paul Robeson, who once sang let my People Go.

It was also the year that Dedan Kimathi, leader of the KAU’s armed wing, Land and Freedom Army, which the colonial State renamed the mumbo-jumbo sounding Mau Mau, fled into the mountains. He, too, had a theatre background: he founded Gichamu Youth Theatre at Karuna-ini, Nyeri. It was a year of theatre.

On the National Theatre stage today, is His Excellency Uhuru, son of Jomo Kenyatta; and Mukami K?mathi, wife of Dedan Kimathi.

So this space, this occasion, is pregnant with memories of the past and the promises of tomorrow. It is also a very emotional moment for me.

The last time that my wife, Njeeri, and I returned to Kenya in 2003, after 23years of forced exile, on a theme, Reviving the Spirit, we were attacked by four armed gunmen in our Norfolk apartment room not far from this theatre building, and we barely escaped with our lives.

We are back, guests of the Ministry of Culture, and we are happy to be part of the launching of this renovated space. In the few days that we have been here, I have felt a sense of a new spirit rising.

When we landed at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on August 24, a 12-year old girl, Urola Rimelo Lusala, presented us with a banquet of roses.

What do you want to be when you grow up, we asked.

Neurosurgeon, she said without any hesitation.

Why? My wife asked her.

I was hardly listening to her detailed response. I was lost in the image of this Kenyan girl with lofty dreams. It is of such dreams that futures are created.

Days later, a very proud and excited ministry official, Saima Ondimu, brought us to this renovated Kenya National Theatre. I was really moved by her excitement at the possibilities opened to the Kenyan youth by this space, because in the 70s this place was literally a battlefield between national and foreign interests.Let me explain.

In 1975, Micere Mugo and I wrote a play, The Trial of Dedan K?mathi.

GREAT LIBERATOR

You would have thought that after Independence Dedan K?mathi would have been hailed as the great liberator. Instead, there was marked silence about him and the heroic guerrilla army he led.

The challenge for us, as we wrote in the preface of the published script, was to depict the masses, symbolised by Kimathi in the only historically correct perspective: heroically and as the true makers of history!

The play was going to represent Kenya in the Second World Black and African Festival and Arts and Culture (Festac) held in Nigeria in 1977, and to be fair, the Ministry of culture of the time, was very supportive. But we thought that Kenyans had the right to be the first to see what was going to represent them abroad.

And what better venue than their own National Theatre?

The KNT, which was founded in 1952 as part of the Kenya Cultural Centre, was part of a whole series of belated attempts by the colonial state and its machinery to create a multiracial class, schooled in British theatrical culture.

In reality, it was part of a larger cultural offensive to nurture a Kenyan black middle class with an English mindset, to replace the earlier nationalist mindset that had been responsible for models of self-help like Githunguri Teachers’ College, of which Jomo Kenyatta was President, and the entire Independent school movement.

These models of what Kenyans could do for themselves were banned the same year the KNT was founded, bearing the name “national”, ironic in that Kenya was still a colonial state.

Perhaps it was an unintended concession to the inevitability of Kenya becoming a national state, which it did in 1963. Whatever the origins and intention of the founders, it was now our space, by the right of independence, or so we assumed!

That was when a nightmare in daytime started.

We could not get a foothold on our national theatre space.

The executives at KNT, representing the directors, nearly all white expatriates except Charles Njonjo, the Attorney General at the time, claimed that Africans could not fill up the theatrical space, even for a day.

But there was plenty of space for such plays as the French Ballet, Jesus Christ Superstar, Anne Get Your Gun, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the [Roman] Forum, and other imports from Broadway and West End.

Eventually after a struggle, and frankly, some press outcry about a handcuff for Kimathi play, we were given three days. Contrary to the dire predictions of our detractors, for the three days allotted to the play, the theatre was packed by men and women, some of whom came from the so-called Africa locations in Nairobi and its environs.

Actually, it was a sight to see: the space which previously had been the exclusive domain of three-piece suited gentlemen and high-heeled ladies bedecked with pearls and imitation diamonds was now occupied by a whole range of people, families, ordinary farmers, workers, students, who after every performance would join the actors for the final procession that spilled from inside the buildings into the streets.

It was amidst this euphoria over the successful run, that I was summoned to the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department, and the first question really startled me: why were we interfering with European theatre?

AFRICAN THEATRE

We were only doing African theatre, Kenyan theatre, and how did that interfere with European theatre? I asked.

Because after K?mathi, there was relatively small attendance at the European comedies that followed.

I told him that Festac ‘77, the name of the company that performed the play, had done their Kenyan act, and left the premises. His parting shot was a warning: he would plant his men inside our group. I began to understand.

Throughout the three days of the Kimathi performance, a police squad, armed with riot gear, was at the ready outside the grounds of the Central Police Station, with the notorious Patrick Shaw, allegedly head of an assassination squad, always on the terraces of the Norfolk hotel.

The scene would repeat itself in 1982, when the men and women of Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre, who in 1977 had performed the Gikuyu language play, Ngaahika Ndeenda/I Will Marry when I want, co-authored with the late Ngugi wa Mirii, and which sent me to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison for most of 1978, wanted to bring another Gikuyu language play, Maitu Njugira/Mother Sing for Me, to this very National Theatre.

We had properly booked the theatre, met all the legal and financial requirements, but on the day of performance, we found the doors into the National Theatre padlocked and armed police patrolling the area.

We were even hounded out of the University of Nairobi premises, which Micere Mugo, as the Dean, had allowed us to use as rehearsal space.

Later, three truckloads of armed police were sent to Kam?r?th? and razed the open-air theatre to the ground.

The Kamirithu Community Education and Cultural Centre was deregistered and theatre in the area banned; I am not sure if the ban was ever officially lifted. This time I was not sent back to Kamiti, but I would be forced into exile, 1982 onwards.

Your Excellency, Maitu Njug?ra, remains a suspended dream, these last 30 years, for I could never bring myself to have it done outside the Kenyan soil.

It is my hope, that one day, hopefully soon, that Maitu Njugira, could be done in this very space from which the play was barred, 35 years ago. It would be like the resumption of a dream interrupted.

I would like to see this National Theatre, by what it does, the tradition it sets up, as always a tribute to the heroism of Kenyan men and women who made our history with their sacrifice of sweat and blood.

This includes all those young men and women, some from the University of Nairobi, and in the country as a whole, who were hounded to prison, exile and death.

Your Excellency, your presence tonight, is itself an important tribute to that history of struggle and sacrifice.

It is also an important nod to the importance of the arts and culture in our national development and more importantly, in forging dreams for the Kenya we want to build under a democracy.