KU STUDENTS CREATE COMPLEX TALES OF MURDER AND GREED

 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (Posted May 31, 2022)

Kenyatta University theatre students had a heyday recently at Kenya National Theatre’s Ukumbi Mdogo where they performed two original plays, The Hoax by Gertrude Liru and Ninevah by Jante Juma.

Staged back-to-back on Sunday, one has to hand it to the student-casts, most of whom acted in both plays, meaning they had to memorize two different characters’ lines.

Acting generally was quite fine, with several stand-outs performances: two by Rahab Nyambura who played two radically different sorts of mama’s in either play; two by Elvis Mambo who played a hypocritical ‘holy man’ twice; two by Edna Kariuki who played the headstrong sister to Sandra Gaturi; and one for Victor Muyekwe who played the drunken de-frocked former Father Juma who howled like the prophet Jeremiah.

The technical side of the show was fair. And under the circumstances, where the cast had to double up as both actor and technician in charge of either lighting, sound, costuming, makeup, music, choreography, or direction, they did their best.

The themes in both plays were somewhat similar, that is, the lust for power and the efforts to acquire it by any means necessary, including murder, rape, extortion, mental manipulation, poison, physical abuse, and 24-hour scheming to steal whatever they wanted.

The other thing the two plays had in common was complexity. Ninevah was easier to follow, but both plays kept one guessing what cruel or duplicitous event would hit us next.

Both plays took advantage of time-travel. In The Hoax, the two sisters, Lynda and Lois get grabbed in the night by a cop who takes them who knows where. Then in the next scene, we meet the same two with their mom, and all seems normal. What happened? It took some time to figure out the rest of the play, until the last scene, was a flashback. This was a bit disconcerting.

Ninevah did something similar, only instead of starting with a flashback, they presented a scene that would be coming soon. It was the baptism of an unlikely character, Neo (Robert Kamau), who would turn out to be the biggest bad guy of the bunch. But then again, in the following scene, we find Neo arriving aggressively at his mother’s (Rahab Nyambura) house. He’s confrontational, but she quickly quashes his ire and throws him out of her house. Theirs is a terribly unhealthy relationship as we soon find out.

Both plays have complicated storylines although The Hoax is more mystifying since a number of issues are raised that never quite get resolved. The biggest one is Which bit is the hoax? It would seem the whole story is a hoax, but that too is unclear.

Ultimately, we do get to find out who the two sisters’ father is, which was the girls’ main concern. But since several loose ends were left dangling, one gathers the script is heading back to the drawing board.

Ninevah’s story is more coherent, but it’s dark and disturbing. The Big Mama (Rahab Nyambura) behaves like a Mafia Godmother, extorting and also using the church a means of controlling people’s souls as well as their bodies.

As in The Hoax where one person is scheming and operating through others behind the scenes with their hidden agendas, so the Big Mama pays off people to lie about Father Juma (Victor Muyekwe) so he’ll get thrown out of church. She wants her daughter to get the top job in the local church hierarchy and gets the green light from one higher power to whom she seems almost reverential, in contrast to the way she treats her son whom she belittles and verbally abuses for being too violent and generally lacking in the skills she needs to pick up the leadership mantle that she plans to hand over to his sis.

The Big Mama has been ill, but she dies suddenly just before her daughter arrives home. She smells a rat and goes sniffing around to figure out who actually poisoned her mom. She figures it out, but before she has a chance to confront her little brother, resolve the mysterious murder, and tie up that story, the play ends abruptly. We’re left at the somber funeral of the autistic child of Neo’s sister. Her murder by Neo is left hanging. So, the play ends without anyone insisting on justice for Big Mama or her grandchild.

Both The Hoax and Ninevah were actually designed to be ‘final exams’ for these fourth year KU students. I pray their plays will pass.

 

DATING KENYAN MEN AT YOUR OWN RISK: ESTHER KAHUHA

 By Margaretta wa Gacheru (May 30,2022

Esther Kahuha gave us the second installment of ‘The Man-Made Woman’ last weekend at Kenya Cultural Centre.

As hilarious as her first-time round was, the stand-up comedian known to some as ‘Madam President’ gave an outrageously funny hour and some minutes, entertaining her audience who were the target of her tall tales.

Speaking directly to us, most of whom were her fans, there were also many who had been following her since her days with Heartstrings Entertainment. She even gave a moment to thank Sammy Mwangi and Victor Ber who she said had taught her so much about storytelling.

She clearly had learned those lessons well, since her Saturday night performance was filled with a myriad of stories, stories which we might believe all came out of her own personal life. But who can know other than Esther.

What those string of tell-all tales featured was a complicated journey through the Kenya dating world as she (or her avatar) had experienced. She made them all feel like true tales.

Starting with a horrifying howling session that every woman in the house knew was meant to express the labor pains that most women go through (if they don’t take the easy route with a Caesarian slice) in the course of delivering a baby. It’s a sound that Esther had mastered, but one she was able to use as a means of digging right into our souls.

That baby’s birth when she was 18 was something she expressed no shame for. Instead, she’d chosen to raise her child and allow her to come along for the ride that Esther was intent on taking, looking for the perfect man to make her complete.

There were many that got chronicled and detailed that night, even as she never lost eye contact with her audience and rarely stopped moving throughout the show.

This woman has mastered physical comedy in a way that corelated beautifully with her stories of Martin and Kioko followed by Sam and finally Nick Ouma. Then there was also Auntie Florence who was the only snooty relation who judged her harshly for having a baby out of wedlock. We actually never find out who the father might be. Instead, all we know is that she went to Mombasa and came back pregnant. No further information was provided.

Where she started naming names was with Martin who was a printer whom she met while working herself in a printer’s place. Their dates were mainly doing his overtime jobs. Otherwise, she was impressed with Martin’s car even though it was old and rusty. He made a point of getting the car painted and buying fancy new seat covers. But then they hit rainy season and the roof leaked so badly, she saw Martin was not the man she’d hope. So she left.

Three days later came Kioko, who she also wasn’t especially impressed with. But for some reason, she got stuck and stayed with him many months. Then he took her to his granny’s funeral and found suddenly, whatever attraction that had made her stay was most likely tied up with spells having been cast on her by the granny in cahoots with Kioko. Once again, she split that scene.

Then came Sam who she met in church. He had baby girl the same age as her daughter so they got together. Believing she was being good by loving her ‘neighbor’, she quickly got bored.

Finally, she met slick Nick while being on a shopping spree. His line was to ask if he could pay for her shopping? It was a query she could hardly resist, especially as Nick had a spiffy car, a white Range Rover which took them to Mombasa, Maasai Mara, and finally to Homa Bay to his family’s place.

That last stop was the killer. That is where she met all of Nick’s many wives. It was they who he was ultimately shopping for and she had effectively guided him to pick up the items every woman would love to have.

So now she recognized she had been very useful to Nick as a ‘manager’ who helped him organize his gift-giving once he got home. Now it was clear, she wasn’t even introduced to the family as a girlfriend since apparently, now she knew she was not one. Any hopes of wedlock with Nick were quickly doused.

Esther had tried making friends irrespective of ethnicity.  After all, she’d made friends with Luo and Kamba and other nationalities. Nonetheless, there is one thing she knew for sure, and that was: “You date a Kikuyu man at your own risk.”  

 

FICTIONS TELL VISUAL TALES IN ALL SIZES AND STYLES

 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (Published 27 May 2022)

Don Hanah has become a first-class curator. Dipping into the store room at Circle Art Gallery where he works as Gallery Manager, he pulled out a wonderful variety of regional artists whose newest works he’d thought of including in a group exhibition, that is, if they were interested.

Naturally, all eleven said yes. So, what is now being shown at Circle Art (through May 31^th) is a diverse collection of paintings, drawings, monoprints, and wall (and ceiling) hangings. They’re mainly by Kenyan artists, but also ones from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and Uganda. They include Gor Soudan, Jonathan Fraser, Maliza Kiasuwa, Tiemar Tegene, Beatrice Wanjiku, Geoffrey Mukasa, Sujay Shah, Nahim Teklehiamanot, Wanyu Brush, Salah Elmur and Tahir Karmali.

 The show didn’t happen overnight. “We had to contact the artists and ask if they could send us several of their latest works,” Hanah told BDLife shortly after the show opened May 11^th.

Soon thereafter, the artworks started streaming in, coming from Naivasha, Siaya, Banana Hill, and Ngong as well as Addis Ababa, Cairo, and New York.

It took time, but the outcome is fascinating. The show, entitled ‘Fictions’, is artistically engaging, up-beat, eclectic and yet, coherent and intriguing to behold.

“It’s titled Fictions because it’s like the literary art form that tells stories. Only now, it’s paintings doing the storytelling,” Hanah said.

Unfortunately, not all the artists are around to give the backstories of their work. Like the Eritrean Tiemar Tegene who’s based in Addis. His painting, entitled ‘’Muddy Waters’ features a river filled with floating blue-black skulls. The river could be anywhere in Africa where we’ve seen war crimes.

At the same time, parts of ‘Fictions’ are simply fun, like the paintings of Sujay Shah. Both his Bathtub piece and ‘Still Life…Denial’ brighten up the walls on which they are hung. And as for ‘Still life..’, it amplifies the joy of color and a surreal-style of fun in an entire room. Hanah had chosen to hang several black and white works to the left and right of Sujay’s. His painting colorfully contrasts the drawings by Gor and Karmali, and Malisa’s wall-hangings which are also mainly black and white but equally graced with hints of color. None of these distract from the room’s main attraction, namely Sujah’s yellow and pink zebra skin on which sit a yellow table and red birdcage. There are other odds and ends painted on the canvas. But on the whole, his surrealist style seems to be a parody of the classical concept of the Still Life.

Other upbeat arrangements by Hanah include his juxtapositions, like placing Wanyu Brush’s two pieces next to one by Jonathan Fraser, Tiemar Tegene’s colored monoprints portraits complimenting Salah Elmur’s contrasting perspective on portraiture. Then there’s the dark (both visually and psychologically) piece by Beatrice Wanjiku which feels uplifted by the ceiling-hanging of Malisa’s green and yellow giant paper beads which hang just next to Bea’s work.

The only works in the show that are not new are by Wanyu Brush. These are two of the finest by one of Kenya’s early visual artists. The two came to the gallery through a collaborative arrangement between Banana Hill Gallery and Circle Art. They are the first two small gems that meet your gaze as you enter the gallery, contrasting well with one of Jonathan Fraser’s newest works. As he is one of the younger artists in the show and Wanyu the oldest, what’s intriguing is they both use a broad range of colors in their art. Fraser’s works are filled with mixed media, including charcoal, pastels, spray paint, and acrylics. His style is experimental, one that’s evolving and in abstract and exciting ways. One other of his pieces has an intuitive connection to its neighbor, the shining black skulls by Tegene.

Among other Kenyan artists, Bea, Maliza, Gor, and Sujay stand out as stunners, offering clearcut views of the wide range of styles developing among Kenyans: an emphasis of the organic in drawings by both Gor and Karmali (who is now based in New York) as well as by Maliza whose wall hangings are elegant tapestries of natural fibers stitched together by the Naivasha-based woman.

One of only three women in the show, Addis- based Tiemar is among the younger generation of artists being shown by Circle Art. The other is Beatrice who is among the earliest Kenyan women to emerge on the scene.

Finally, the other elder artist in show is the wise and wonderful Elmur Salah.

But who is the most entertaining artist, for me, is surrealist Sujay Shah.

 

 

DYSFUNCTIONALITY AS WHIMSICAL DRAMA: THE DYING NEED NO SHOES

 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 27 May 2022)

‘The dying need no shoes’, which opened at Kenya National Theatre May 17^th,  is a deep, dark, delusional drama about an exceedingly dysfunctional relationship between a father (Ben Tekee) and daughter (Clare Wahome).

It’s also an intensely original play that Dr Fred Mbogo conjured up out of a mental space that serves us well during this Mental Health Awareness Month.

For both of Dr. Mbogo’s characters have been mentally disfigured, he by his past, and she by him who has had an incestuous relationship with her since she was an infant.

Now 21, she has grown up and he wants her dead. Is it because she is no longer a child, and he, a university professor, likes to mess with younger women? Also, she’s old enough now to see what he does and could be dangerous to his career. So, possibly out of self-preservation, he needs her out of the way.

Or is it merely that he’s obsessed with death, both theoretically (he writes scholarly tomes on the topic) and as a practice he wants to put to the test.

Either way, theirs is an intense and often violent relationship. On opening night, when we were invited by director Alacoque Tome to sit up on stage to watch the performance, we got a chance to get up close and personal with the stars.

Clare Wahome had already come on stage in character, behaving like a sleep-walking zombie whose condition we later learn is drug-induced. She looks lost and desperate, so much so that she nearly drowns in a bathtub, saved only when her father arrives in the nick of time.

He saves her and yet, he preaches to her about the virtues of death as the pathway to liberty. Apparently, those moments in the tub roused her from the drug-induced stupor that she’d been in since dad insisted she take the drugs that turned her mind into soup.

Theirs has been a terribly unhealthy relationship virtually all her life. But when her mother was still alive, she may have had a protector. But Esther suggests that early on, she was sexually abused.

The Dying is a complicated tale that boils down to the Prof being a pedophile who also enjoys picking fresh ‘fruit’, meaning his most innocent female students and ‘introducing’ them to sex.

Among those he has abused is one of Esther’s best friends, a young woman who mysteriously disappeared. We find this out after Esther gets lucid and begins to fight back with bitter truths that her dad doesn’t want to hear.

Like her accusation that he had a hand in her best friend’s disappearance. And that he’s also responsible for her mother’s death. Technically, she died of cancer but Esther can’t help correlating her mother’s demise and his abuses of her and other young women.

But the other fact that doesn’t come out until Clare regains her clarity of mind is that he is mentally tortured by his past and the fact that his parentage is beyond incestuous. His dad had set the precedent for pedophilia in the family by having his own incestuous history with his daughter who then turns out to be the Prof’s own mom! What that means is that his dad fathered both his daughter (Prof’s mom) and the professor as well.

One can’t help feeling the playwright, who himself is a university lecturer, had an underlying bone to pick with senior profs who (both locally and globally) have affairs with their students. This professor is a manipulative monster and egotistic academic who turns young women into ‘his toys’ as Esther puts it.

By the time her father's drugs wear off, Esther is ready for revenge. It takes the form of her announcing that she knows about his unnatural parentage. But even more painful for the man is the way, after he brings out the sisal rope for lynching his own child, she turns the scene around and seizes it to commit her own suicide.

She almost succeeds but for some reason, this man who’d claimed Death desirable, decides to jump in and save her life.

It is a problematic ending that raised many questions during the ‘Q and A’ that followed the play. Having the playwright on hand helped since some were not satisfied with the show ending as it did.

Ironically, Dr Mbogo admitted the story was unfinished; but in his self-effacing style, he added he couldn’t decide what came next. So, it’s technically a cliff hanger. But that might change the next time we see the show.

 

 

BACKSTREET BRIMMING WITH TALENT

                          Clare Wahome, Terry Munyeria, Tasha Leila, and Faiz Ouma in Backstreet

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 16 may 2020)

Clare Wahome has been wearing many hats these days. The CEO of one of Nairobi’s finest theatre groups, Millaz Productions, is also an actress in her own right. She is currently in rehearsal to co-star with Ben Tekee in Fred Mbogo’s gripping drama, ‘The Dead need no Shoes’ which is coming to Kenya Nation Theatre May 26^th.

More to the point, Clare had also been rehearsing to play a leading role in Millaz’ ensemble production of Backstreets, which premiered this past weekend at Kenya Cultural Centre.

Scripted by Emmanuel Chindla and Saumu Kombo who also directed the play, Clare played Sarah, a young lawyer in mourning with her friends over the tragic demise of her former lover, Justin (Ken Aswani). Their meeting ground is Kare’s bar where Sarah refuses drinks while her banker friend Ude (Terry Munyeria) chooses to drown her grief by drinking vodka as if it were water. She’s advised against her indulgence by Freddie (Francis Ouma) who we discover late in the play has been having a covert romantic rendezvous that he’s been keeping under taps even among his bar friends.

This script is intriguing since it’s made up of interwoven stories that unfold gradually and are full of surprises. They start with the opening moments when Freddie is alone calling out for his friend Sponge who never responds. Instead, we only hear an explosion which seems to foreshadow another bomb blast in the play.

Justin had supposedly died in an explosion in Somalia where he’d been stationed. But when Abdala (Allan Lumumba) shows up with eyes glazed in shock, only Sarah has the tender touch to draw him out of his trance. It isn’t long before everyone at Kare’s believes, like Abdala, that they’ve seen a ghost.

They’re all terrified when Justin walks into the bar. To them, he’s either a dead man walking or a ghost since all ha been convinced by Justin’s dad that his son is dead. Once they believe that Justin never died, that yes, there had been a bomb blast in Mogadishu but another solder died, not him.

Now the plot thickens and the scene gets dark. You’d think there would be celebrations over Justin’s return, but instead there’s melodrama as relationships unravel before our eyes.

For instance, there’s the relationship between Justin and Sarah that he’d hopes to revive after their five-year lapse; but that gets messy. Then there’s the troubled relations between Justin and his dad (Robinson Mudavadi). They had never been close, but it’s the dad who has to tell him his mother (who Justin adored) died on the same day she heard her son was dead. Justin blames his dad for her death and other things.

Then there’s Ude who’s been drinking heavily, and turns into a mean-spirited drunkard who attacks her former best friend Stella (Leila Tasha) for lots of petty things which are deeply hurtful to the girlfriend. But Ude doesn’t stop there. She attacks Abdala for his hypocrisy, claiming to be madly in love with his wife but having countless affairs. She also exposes delivery service.

And during those five years of Justin’s absence, he and Sarah got together. Sarah only tells Justin how she suffered in his absence. We might assume her revealed pregnancy was the result of her time with Justin. But then, after there’s a flashback and we find Sarah having a ‘backstreet’ abortion (graphically orchestrated on stage), we learn that Sarah has been with Freddie on intimate terms for who knows how long!

To cut through the heaviness of all this emotive truth-telling, there’s an egg-man who arrives at Kare’s to sell his hard-boiled eggs and ground nuts.  

Finally, after exposing all the group’s dirty linen, they decide to reconcile, sit down together, drink and play cards.

But it’s Sarah who has the last word. She can’t drink booze ‘cause she’s pregnant again, this time it’s clear the paternity is Fred. But no hard feelings since they’re all friends again.

Backstreet tackles a number of touchy subjects, like backstreet abortions, alcoholism, war and its psychological effects on veterans like Justin. But the script-writers don’t pass judgement on anyone. They might be faulted for not taking a stand on any contentious topic, say on abortion. But that’s not Millaz’s style.

 

 

 

INTIMATE STORIES OF AFRICAN WOMEN AMPLIFIED

 By Margaretta wa Gacheru (Posted May 11,2022, written April 28, 2022)

Kaz and eight other elegantly-dressed Kenyans recently celebrated the Ghanaian feminist writer and researcher Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah by staging passages from her revelatory book, ‘The Sex Lives of African Women’.

It was a week night at Alliance Francaise, but still, the show attracted a massive crowd, many of whom had to be turned away since there was a house-full of Sekyiamah-enthusiasts and Kaz fans who didn’t mind waiting till nearly 9pm for the selected readings to begin.

The attraction might have been partially due to the provocative title of the production and the book (which quickly sold out that night). It further could have been that the niche market of feminists and LGBTQ+ persons is much larger in the city than was previously known. Additionally, it might have been that many had heard about this singular production while listening to Kaz’s weekly podcast, ‘The Spread’ which, like Nana’s book, explores intimate issues affecting African women and LGBTQ+’s. In any case, this audience apparently had no problem forking out the pricey ticket fee of Sh5000, a cost prohibitive to many Kenyan theatre-lovers.

                                                                             Kaz

They all settled down fast once Kaz came to the mic and introduced the eight lovely persons who paraded onto the stage, prepared to read juicy passages from Nana’s book. These were no ordinary readings, since several in the cast had a theatrical background. And all had met to rehearse with Kaz for several weeks before their performance. So the drama of every story came through their sonorous voices and emotional inflections as they took turns sitting before the main microphone on centre stage.

The readers included Anna Mitaru, Aston Laurence, Julia Gaitho, Majic, Nice Githinji, Patricia Kihoro, and Silsyio.

The stories themselves were all selected from Nana’s book which contains a total of 32 true tales drawn during interviews in 31 countries across Africa and the Diaspora. All were based on ethnographic research that Nana did between 2014 and 2020, according to Kaz who had scheduled their performance to coincide with the author’s trip to Kenya where she was the keynote speaker at the recent Moto Books and Arts Festival at Village Market.

“I heard she was coming to Kenya for the Book Festival, so based on my previous experience with ‘The Vagina Monologues’, I assembled the show and timed it so Nana could be there,” Kaz told BDLife several days after the show.

Sekyiamah was indeed in the audience that night and stayed after the show to respond to questions from an audience appreciative of the quality of her research as well as her quest to build a collective consciousness around the politics of pleasure and sex.

Having conducted in-depth interviews with mainly members of LGBTQ+ communities all the way from Canada to Cameroon, UK to Zimbabwe, Germany to Rwanda, the author had encouraged her subjects to speak freely and candidly about their experience of sex. What she collected was a rich reservoir of information which she hoped would serve African women who’ve previously been deprived of in-depth sex education.

What we heard on Thursday night was at once weep-able and revelatory. Most weep-able was the true story of the five-year child who was raped multiple times by her own relations. What was revelatory was the way women and LGBTQ+’s could speak so freely about the most intimate aspects of their sex lives, including the sexual pleasures they’ve enjoyed as well as the threats of physical violence, including murder, that especially ‘trans’ people lived with practically every day. Terms like transphobia, polyamorous, and feminocentric or just ‘femcentric’ were new to me. But they all made sense since they were spoken in a broader context.

For instance, a term like transphobia referred to the phenomenon of fear, prejudice against, or even open hostility towards persons who are transgender or, as the dictionary puts it, “people whose gender identity is different from the gender they were thought to be at birth.”

And polyamorous is pretty obvious. Poly refers to many and amorous relates to sexual desire, so the term refers to being involved in multiple sexual relationships at the same time. And then, femocentric is just a fancy term for being attracted to woman.

The Sex Lives of African Women wasn’t a show for the Puritanical or fanatical Christian moralists since Nana had a knack for getting her subjects to speak freely about the most intimate aspects of their lives. But as for the rest of us, we applaud Nana Darkoa for her courage, intellectual curiosity, and rich insights. And Kaz for her production which amplified the beauty, depth, and diversity of African women.

 

BABY SHOWER HAS A SURPRISING MESSAGE

 By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted May 5, 2022)

Baby Shower has an intricate plot which had several confusing bits. Staged on May Day at Ukumbi Mdogo, it was produced, directed, and scripted by Martin Odongo.

The main source of confusion is Bobo (Faith Lavenda), whose identity isn’t clarified until almost the end of the play. Fortunately, I was able to meet Mr. Odongo after the show and ask if Bobo was meant to represent the unborn child of Amy (Nyambura Mwangi) whose paternity is contested. It’s either Amos (Jacob Odero) or Johnteh  (Joseph Okunga) or possibly even Oga (Henry Ebuka).

He says yes; but we didn’t have time for me to tell him Bobo’s identity was the most mystifying aspect of his play.

When we initially meet Bobo, it’s right before we are introduced to Amy and her precious newborn baby girl whom she cuddles and promises to cherish, and keep distanced from two despicable men. Only later do we realize she means Amos and Johnteh.

After that, Bobo introduces herself as someone deeply fearful of the future. The cause of her angst isn’t specified, but we assume she’s the same child that Amy has embraced, just a bit older.

Bobo’s refrain of ‘fear for her future’ is frequently accompanied by singers feeling sorry for the poor girl. But why? Then, to compound the mystery, Bobo appears in another scene where Amos and Amy are still together despite their professed hatred for one another. Amos is especially aggrieved, having discovered Amy is unfaithful to him.

It’s within this context that Bobo appears again to express her love for both parents, so what’s up? How could we have guessed she is meant to be an avatar for an unborn child whose future is threatened by everything from being aborted to being brought up in a loveless home.

We don’t yet know that the little girl could’ve been fathered by someone other than Amos, especially when he flashes back to their first night together where he demonstrates crudely, using a hammer, how he hit his peak with his new bride.

‘Wonk’! He slams the bedroom table, and the men in the audience laugh, since they know that means he has ‘scored’. But in so doing, he’s left his new wife unsatisfied and angry that he’s totally neglected her in the process.

Then comes Emelda (Charity Mwangi) who is wife to Johnteh (Joseph Mukunga). She meets Amos in a bar and provides him with a listening ear. She offers advice, and then takes him to her bed. (Marvin Gaye called it ‘Sexual Healing’). This is strange since Johnteh has described his wife as being almost saintly.

Meanwhile, Emelda has discovered Amos’s ‘bad sex’ and accuses him of it. But he can’t understand bad sex might be a factor in his wife’s unhappiness with him and her infidelity. He believes she only married him for his money, which apparently is true.

Finally, we get around to preparations for Amy’s baby shower, which Amos has forgotten. The plot thickens when we learn he has ordered ‘dawa’ meant to abort Amy’s baby. He plans to have Emelda, (whom he introduces to Amy as her new house help) mix the drug (provided by Oga who’s also one of Amy’s lovers) in her drink.

It's only now that we start to see the reason for Bobo’s fear for the future. We also get an inkling that her identity is that of Amy’s unborn baby. But Odongo also seems to suggest Bobo represents every fetus facing the threat of abortion.

More confusion ensues when Amy drinks the dawa and falls deathly ill. Emelda plays dumb and suggests Amy must’ve miscarried. But then, Amy rises from the floor as if nothing happened. She apparently hasn’t lost the baby.

Ultimately, we discover Amos is not responsible for the pregnancies of either Amy or Emelda. Instead, it’s Johnteh who was with Amy, and Oga who was with Emelda. This is not cool. But rather than deal with the infidelity issue, Odongo seems ultimately concerned with the abortion issue and the plight of all unborn babies who, like Bobo, might have a consciousness inside their mother’s womb to think about their future in the same way as Bobo does.

Ultimately however, the message proclaimed at the end of the play brushes over all these unresolved issues and calls for ‘forgiveness’. The live music in Baby Shower is beautiful as the singers’ finale song is all about forgiveness. But we’re left not knowing even the fate of Bobo, still mystified.

 

 

LITTLE GIRL’S WORTH LOST UNTIL THE SHOW’S END

 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (composed 24 April 2022)

Derrick Waswa’s play, ‘A Little Girl’s Worth’, which was staged last Sunday at Kenya National Theatre, was full of surprises.

One was the discovery on arrival that we would be watching two plays, not just one. The announcer said we would see the same cast but playing different roles. We were left wondering which one would be about that ‘little girl’, only to discover that neither one introduced us to her.

We did meet Rose, Jezebel, and Aquila in the second ‘act’, but none of them were ‘little’ apart from Rose who, at 20, was already contemplating marriage. We also met older, professional women, Natalia and Hilda in act one. Hilda actually had a little girl, but Angel was mute and died after having an allergic reaction to food her mother brought her supposedly as a treat.

So it wasn’t very clear why Waswa would have titled his play with that name, especially as the first segment of the show was all about a young man, Alex who was raised by a single mom to be a pediatrician despite his passion being for music and dance, two dimensions of the performing arts that popped up frequently in the show.

In both acts, there’s a man that is put on trial, and in both cases, he is convicted of harsh charges. In the first, Alex is found guilty of the murder of a young girl after being newly appointed to work at the Royal Pediatric Hospital, where he’s called to an emergency to save Angel’s life. But he is so enamored with his own voice that he totally neglects the needs of the child.

In act two, it’s Daniel who is charged with treating women as sexual objects, a crime that is the gist of women’s complaint against him and all men who benefit from patriarchy and the cultural beliefs associated with notions of male superiority, dominance, sexual violence. 

It's in the last scene of the second act that we finally get the underlying theme of the play. it is when all the women in the show, many of whom are dancers, step into the play to both enliven the proceedings and inadvertently distract us from grasping that theme.

Waswa, who also directed the show, probably didn’t understand how his theme may have gotten muddled as his audience got transfixed by these young agile [mainly] students, most of whom were in their 20s and regularly reminding us of the Kenyan women’s chant, ‘my dress, my choice’.

It was in the last scene of ‘A Little Girl’s Worth’ that the young women made a series of clearcut statements against patriarchy. It also allowed every woman to voice her antithetical views of what a ‘real man’ is and is not. He is not a sexist or someone who believes he’s superior to a woman. He is not someone who believes he can own a woman as if she were a piece of property. But a real man is one who respects women and acknowledges their ability and right to make choices for themselves.

Clearly, these women and the playwright himself implicitly acknowledge the equality of women and men, irrespective of what ordinary men might believe. They also emphatically reject the objectification of women’s bodies

What was confusing about the play is that up until this last point in the second act, one didn’t see either a ‘little girl’ or a grown women who expressed the ‘worth’ that this younger generation of women seemed to demand. That is not to say there were not many strong-willed women in the show. In fact, there were quite a few, including Jezebel who had an advanced degree in law, and Hilda who was a nurse wholly committed to her career, and Aquila who ran a children’s home and also raised her adopted son, Daniel.

Daniel was a young man who exemplified the type of confusion that the playwright created by trying to juggle too many sub-plots all at once. For at one point in the second act, he bullies his girlfriend Rose (who we discover is actually her step-sister since Jezebel is both of their mothers). He also tries to boss her around and make her change her style of dress. But then, after he’s arrested and charged with the ‘crime’ of being a male supremacist, he pleads guilty.

Fortunately, the show finally ends with a sense of clarity as the women shamelessly identify as ‘feminist’ meaning they’re all for gender equality.

 

 

 

WOMEN ARTISTS SHARE NEW SKILLS, INSIGHTS AT RIKA

 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted May 3,2022)

Young Kenyan women artists had a richly rewarding week at the Rika Artists Residency and Workshop run by Dream Cona, the arts community launched by TICAH (Trust for Indigenous Culture and Health) in 2017. The residency had run from April 25th through May 2^nd at the GoDown Art Centre.

Words like amazing, enriching, awesome, and inspirational were among the terms used by the women to describe their experiences at the training, according to Workshop host and Master mentor Patrick Mukabi who ran the daily sessions like clockwork, starting from before 9am and running straight through to 5pm.

The seven-day training culminated last Sunday with an exhibition of all the items created by the women during their busy week. All 26 women had pieces to hang, especially colorful batiks, the technique they had learned from Ngeche artist Chain Muhandi, who said he'd made his living for years selling his batiks before he became a full-time painter.

Young Kenyatta University students like Wanjiru ‘Shee’ Kimathi and Teresa Obiri were also keen on encaustic painting which they and the group were shown by Smoke art specialist Evanson Kang’ethe half-way through the residency.

“We loved the idea of working with wax pencils and heat as a new way of painting,” says Shee who normally specializes in weaving and woodcut print-making. Both Shee and Teresa are currently ‘attached’ through Kenyatta University to the GoDown-based artist Peterson Kamwathi.

“Wax was the mainstay of our week’s work,” says Eric Menya, who as Rika co-curator with Suzanne Mieke Wambua has organized all the Rikas.

“Both batik and encaustic art work with wax,” says Eric. “But so did the wax casting that sculptor Kevin Oduor shared during his day with the women,” he adds.

A few of the castings went on display on Sunday as were the sculpture of Wanjiku Nderitu, body jewelry of Sharon Wendo, fashion design of Eunice Ayako, photography of Nduta Kariuki, and music provided by musicians, Nyatiti player Judith Bwire and guitarist-singer Barbara Guantai who serenaded the women throughout the week.

“The idea was to bring women artists involved in a variety of genres together to have them work as a Rika,” says Eric who tells BDLife that multiple generations were also included.

“We mostly looked for students [which he found through BIFA, Kenyatta University, and Kenya Youth Empowerment Program],” he continues. But he also invited women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, so there was representation from several epochs of the ever-expanding Kenyan contemporary art scene.

The group didn’t spend much time exploring the question of why so few Kenyan women have appeared in public spaces, such as the galleries, which are invariably male-dominated. But they were encouraged during the training to be more assertive and to claim more of the public domain since that public is where their prospective collectors and clients will come from.

What they did have time for was listening, every day (after a hot meal) to women speakers who shared pearls of insight and experience. They included Joy Mboya, founder-mother of The GoDown, painter Tabitha wa Thuku and sculptor Maggie Otieno, two of Kenya’s veteran women artists, and artist-gallerists Rahab Njambi Tani of Banana Hill Art Gallery and Phillda Njau of Paa ya Paa Art Centre, one a painter, the other a retired professional photographer.

During their one trip outside the GoDown, the women managed to visit both Banana Hill and Paa ya Paa. At Banana, they met both Rahab and her fellow artist and spouse Shine Tani, the founding parents of the gallery. Then at PYP, they found Phillda and the acclaimed sculptor, painter, muralist Elimo Njau, 89, who co-founded PYP back in 1965, creating Kenya’s first African-owned art gallery.

The fact that this Rika was the first women’s art residency that TICAH has overseen since the Trust was started by Mary Ann Burris back in the latter days of the last century is surprising. But the women participants expressed the hope it would not be the last. Each woman shared her appreciation for what she had gained during the seven-day sojourn. They all said their gratitude wasn’t just for the skills they had acquired, but also for the friendships created and cemented like the solid substance Kevin Oduor made as the base of his wax castings.

“In the past, we have had Rika workshops in everything from sculpture, painting and printmaking to mental health,” says Eric who is a practicing artist himself.

“The women’s Rika took some time to warm up, but by Sunday we saw solid bonding among them,” he adds.