By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 2 October 2019)
Ogutu Muraya is one of those amazing
Kenyans who is more widely known abroad than he is back home.
Having completed a two-year master’s
degree in performance from Amsterdam University of the Arts and another year in
Holland doing an artist’s residency, he has been touring with his commanding one-man
shows all over the world ever since.
Fortunately, he recently chose to come
back home, just in time to perform ‘Because I always feel like Running’ at the
Macondo Literary Festival at National Theatre last Saturday night.
“My shows are still touring without
me, but it was time I came home,” says Ogutu who, in addition to touring the
stories of extraordinary African runners, had also been performing short
stories (which he researched and wrote) based on the First International
Conference of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956.
On Saturday, his ‘Running’ stories,
which also contain elements of history, were staged in a perfect setting since
the Maconda Festival was all about ‘re-imagining Africa’s histories’ through
the lens of literature and the arts.
It was ‘perfect’ in spite the National
Theatre stage being cavernous (both wide and deep). What’s more, he had no
accompaniment, only the man and his chair.
But he didn’t need more since his
presence seemed to fill the entire stage with a quiet, self-contained energy
which he extended graciously to his audience whom he invited to share a series
of interactive calls-and-responses.
From that moment he had us charmed and
captivated by his storytelling about both well-known Kenyan runners like Kipchoge
Keino and the lesser-known Tanzanian runner, John Stephen Ahkwari.
He laced all four of his stories with
fascinating tidbits of history that made us grateful to know more about these remarkable
East African runners. Like the Ethiopian, Abebe Bikila who in 1960 won the
long-distance marathon at the Olympics in Rome.
Yet the thread that wove Ogutu’s stories
altogether wasn’t just that they were all Africans from the east side of the continent.
It was that they all reflected an extraordinary resilience and determination to
win, and for good reasons.
As he noted in his graphic story of
one unnamed runner from Ngong, the main motivation of many young Kenyans who
train is their passionate desire to make runing their way out of poverty.
Ogutu framed his initial story about the
barefoot Ethiopian runner, Abebe Bikila within a wider, historical context. It
began in 1935, the year the fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded
Ethiopian and stole the 160-ton granite Obelisk of Axum. His poignant tale of
‘the Mad King’s’ deliberate dismantling of the 24-meter (79 foot) obelisk also
clarified how painfully devastating Mussolini’s crime must have been to Ethiopians
whose country had been the last independent African country to be conquered and
colonized by the West.
Ogutu even observed with some irony,
the way all the other colonial powers were elated by Mussolini’s conquest,
including his exiling of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. But the most painful
symbol of, not just Ethiopia, but all of Africa’s subordination to Western
colonial power was the theft of the obelisk.
It was within this context that Abebe
Bikila’s gold-medal win of the Olympic marathon was so sweet. He became Africa’s
first runner to win a gold at the Olympics. Plus 1960 was a historic moment
when ‘the winds of change’ were already blowing across the region and Abebe
became a symbol of that sweeping tide of independence.
Kipchoge Keino’s winning at the 1968 Olympics
was equally as sweet since he too was expected to lost against the American
runner Jim Ryan. When his chances began to look better, he was actually
threatened at gun-point to have his brains blown out if he dared to run. Yet Keino
wasn’t intimidated. And when Ogutu took on the persona of a radio broadcaster,
he made us feel like we were right there in Mexico City when the Kenyan crossed
the finish line, a full 20 meters ahead of Ryan.
But when Ogutu finally told Ahkwari’s story of
‘defeat’, reaching the finish line over an hour after the race was officially
won, we were deeply touched by how, in spite of the pain the Tanzanian endured,
he still made it across the finish line. which had been the task his country
had sent him 5000 miles to achieve, and he did.
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