Ngugi wa Thiong'o's play goes back home after 45 years

Professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o during a past interview with 'The Standard'. [Beverlyne Musili, Standard]

The play has also attracted attention from other regions with at least ten towns requesting to have the show taken to them, something Nash said they would like to do.

Just like in May when the play was on stage at the Kenya National Theatre, the troupe is holding performances in both Kikuyu and English.

At the time, Nash said the use of the languages was deliberate: English to reach as many people as possible and Kikuyu because that was the original language the play was written in.

"The play was originally written in Kikuyu, and however good translation is, certain things are not quite the same. Like a lot of the idioms and sayings once translated into English, are not quite the same."

Significantly, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has been at the forefront of championing the use of indigenous languages.

Writing in April before the play went on stage, Ngugi wa Thiong'o said: "The play filters my understanding of Kenya's post-colonial condition, where greed, avarice, and corruption by the political class, was taking root and it anticipates the nightmare what has become something of a national affliction."

The switching languages during the performance was a unique challenge for the cast, some of whom had never done a play in Kikuyu before.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is awarded by Vihiga Cultural Society chairperson Hezron Azelwa in Mbale in June 2022. [Eric Lungai, Standard]

In a previous interview, Nice Githinji, one of the lead actors said it felt like doing two different shows.

The play features a stellar cast of, among others, Mwaura Bilal, Angel Waruinge, Martin Githinji, Martin Kigondu and Veronica Waceke.

When the show went on stage in May, it was perhaps the first complete performance of the play in Kenya to be held without any State interference.

Writing about the play more than 30 years ago, 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, in a piece titled Ngugi's Christ With a Gun, published in a 1989 issue of Index on Censorship said this was not the first time Ngugi was writing on this topic.

"What made this work particularly offensive to the authorities was that it was accessible to a popular audience," he wrote on the play's banning.