BARBERSHOP BANTER INJECTS PANAFRICAN FLAVOR INTO LOCAL THEATRE SCENE

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (composed june 16,2023) Esther Kamba may not have a big budget, but she does have a big love for theatre, and an even bigger passion for producing it. That is why she has come up with Play Readings at Goethe Institute which she hopes will be a regular monthly basis. So far, so good. Last month, she successfully produced….costarring 10 brilliant female actors who effectively dramatized words on a page, much like you would do for a radio play. She and her full cast received a standing ovation from a library-ful of fans who, when all the chairs were filled, sat on the floor, on cushions, or stood outside on the GI’s balcony where the doors were opened wide. One month later, which was this past Friday night, the audience was even larger as the word had gone round that Esther’s Play Readings featured fascinating Afro-centric scripts and excellent casts of actors. Plus, the cost of entry was free. No one was let down by seven Kenyan actors seated straight across the library’s makeshift ‘stage’. They flipped from one barber shop to another all over the continent. One minute they were arguing about football teams. The next, the conversation leapt to politics and colonial structures that never got dismantled after Independence. Speaking in accents meant to reflect the homelands of all 15 voices of men, one couldn’t be assured that the accents articulated by the sterling seven actually reflected correctly the sounds and spoken words of authentic countrymen. But there were no expert linguists in the hall to stand up and shout that the Ghanaian accent was flawed or the Zimbabwean in the story spoke with a true tone of someone from Harare. In the end, what mattered most was the energy, vibrancy, and laughter that reverberated throughout the show. Act one was long, but at intermission, very few in the crowd chose to disappear. We all wanted to know how the stories would end. In fact, the barber shop is an immortal institution that one can find all over the world. But for Africans, they’re a venue that thrives as a centre for mixing up a multi-culture that comes closest to being truly Pan-African and places of peace, reconciliation, and shared understanding. It is those qualities that the Nigerian-British playwright Inua Ellams seemed keen to convey without preaching and with a genuine feeling for what African men are thinking about when they speak freely among themselves. Conversing in five African cities, namely Accra, Harare, Johannesburg, Kampala, and Lagos as well as from London, they all featured with their styles of English, a tongue a few begrudgingly used. But more importantly, it seemed, were family matters like the relations between fathers and sons. One son was so fed up with a dad he never knew, he was passionate in his rage, he shouted, ‘Fxxk my father, fxxk Mandela’, Both had let his family down big time. One was like so many African dads who were derelict in their duties to their families, particularly their sons; the other, Mandela also failed as the father of Independent Africa, since all the colonial structures that the colonizers built to benefit themselves and deplete the Africans, were all still standing. So why give Mandela any credit, he wanted to know. Act Two is when the fundamental issue of Masculinity cropped up, particularly the problem of role models. Since so many fathers had fled the family coup, who were the role models for young men to emulate? That query was never answered, but just raising it for further barbershop banter and debate was good enough for now. What was even better was the sterling seven that Esther had assembled. They included Mugambi Ikigara, Dadson Gakenga, Mark Lukyzimuzzi, Arthur Sanya, Tim King’oo, Thuita Mwangi and George Mwaura. And as a preface to the performance, Esther shared a personal reflection on her own state of mind during the dismally dark days of the pandemic lockdown. She’d almost lost hope of there being any possibility of live performances when she heard the National Theatre of London was staging the Barbershop Chronicles on YouTube in 2020. The news and the actual performance by 15 African guys filling the stage and dancing to Afro-beats was a thriller and fresh cause for her to feel hopeful about the new ways that theatre could survive and thrive despite the lockdown. The Barbershop Chronicles became a healing balm for her and she hopes it will have a comparable effect on Kenyan audience as well.