/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/THEATRE – KENYA: Playwright to Fight Govt Attempts to Ban his Work

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katy Salmon

NAIROBI, Apr 9 2002 (IPS) - Acclaimed Kenyan playwright, novelist, columnist and actor Wahome Mutahi is vowing to fight government attempts to ban his latest play Ngoma cia aka (The Whirlwind).

The police recently dispersed Mutahi’s touring theatrical troupe when they tried to perform at the White Rhino Hotel in Nyeri, some 100 kilometres north of the capital, Nairobi.

“I intend to go back and perform. I want to go to court and ask for the court’s intervention to protect me from interference in my performances,” Mutahi says.

The playwright is fearful that the government is planning a fresh clampdown on freedom of expression.

“It makes me very worried when I see attempts like this by the police to stop me performing. This could inspire another incident elsewhere.

“Once you have a precedent and it starts again, there’s no stopping it — particularly now that we are having a new KANU which is feeling it has got muscle to flex,” he says.

Kenya’s ruling KANU party has just merged with the opposition National Development Party, greatly strengthening its hand in Parliament and this year’s elections.

“We need to fight any attempts to take us back to where we were, which were very bad days,” says Mutahi.

When he talks about the bad old days, Mutahi is speaking from bitter personal experience. His first novel, ‘Three Days on the Cross’, was inspired by the political repression going on in Kenya in the mid-1980s.

“People were being arrested on charges of sedition and subversion. After disappearing for a month or so, they would re-appear in court and plead guilty.

“I asked myself what happened in between? So I sat down and did a story, tried to fill in the gap between arrest and the production in court.

As soon as Mutahi finished the book, he was himself arrested. “I was charged with the same offences people were being charged with under the crackdown. I spent a month in the heart of special branch incommunicado.”

When he went to court, he “pleaded guilty after a month of torture”. Upon release, Mutahi used his experiences to write his second novel – ‘The Jail Bugs’.

The controversial artist believes that his work can be a powerful tool for change.

“I sincerely feel, as an author, I have a social and political role to play. My satires have a political agenda and what I have done has had an effect on the minds of the people.

“We have been through a very bad time politically in this country. People have been instilled with fear for authority. People have been made to see themselves as subjects. People have been made scared.

“One of the things I have done is to demystify authority and to demystify certain offices, particularly the presidency. Once people begin to see this power in its nakedness, they are able to challenge it.

“They are able to say no when it is time to say no. They are able to make certain judgements that will enable us not to make the same mistakes as in the past,” he explains.

Mutahi believes one of his greatest successes has been to help remove this fear of authority from people’s minds.

“When we did our first play called ‘His Excellency the Hallucinator’, there was more drama in the auditorium than on the stage.

“Whenever the door opened, people turned back in fear. They thought the police were coming for them. They were scared of watching the play.

“By the time I was doing my third play, they were very bold. They were even challenging me to do stronger scripts. I think we have gained substantially in terms of our freedom to perform and write on themes that were taboo six or seven years ago,” he says proudly.

The reasons for the ban on his latest play, ‘The Whirlwind’, are unclear. “When we asked the police why they were stopping us from performing they said they were doing so on security grounds,” says Mutahi.

“It was surprising because we had performed the same play, the same day, in the afternoon in a town 20 kilometres from there.

“I don’t know whose security was threatened – whether it was mine, or whether it was the security of the people, or how I was threatening their security if I was.

‘The Whirlwind’, a satire on family life, is the least controversial of Mutahi’s six plays. “This is my most harmless, my most innocuous. It’s just sheer laughter, a social play without any of the biting satire that I normally do,” he says.

According to the Daily Nation, Kenya’s independent newspaper, the police gave contradicting reasons for the ban. “Nyeri police boss Elijah Shamallah said the play was immoral while his deputy said it had been banned for security reasons, adding that the troupe had not applied for a licence,” the Nation reported.

No one needs a licence to stage a play or film in Kenya since the repeal of the Play and Films Act under the Inter Party Parliamentary Group as part of the wave of liberalisation that accompanied the restoration of multi-party democracy in the early 1990s.

Earlier, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and its vernacular radio station ‘Coro’ made repeated announcements that the play had been outlawed due to public demand for its ban.

However, this failed to deter would-be ticket buyers. About 50 people had already paid and taken their seats by the time the police arrived to stop the performance.

“People were very very angry. Some of them had come from quite far,” says Mutahi.

The playwright believes he knows the real reason. “Shamallah told one of the journalists that the last play I took there had ruined the minds of the people. So he didn’t want to give me the chance to do it again,” he says.

Mutahi’s last play ‘They Shall Cry in the Toilet’ was about a head of state and his three ministers fleeing after they had been overturned by the people.

“They hide in a public toilet and their only contact with the world is a street girl who makes their life pretty difficult through their three day stay in that toilet. They are thoroughly humiliated,” explains Mutahi.

Undeterred by the ban, Mutahi and his theatrical troupe intend to continue touring Kenya for another month.

In June, Mutahi plans to start working on a new play. “This time it has got to be political because we are going towards the elections. There’s already a lot of political drama which can provide very good drama for the stage,” he says.