THE WALKING ARCHIVE

My Legacy Proposal

 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (private March 10, 2022)

Thank you so much Nazim for suggesting I take seriously the issue of my own Legacy. What will I leave behind that I am proud to report? What role do I feel I have played in the Kenyan arts scene over the past 45 years? Why should I consider myself a ‘walking archive’? These are valid questions that I believe my proposal and my legacy should address.

‘THE WALKING ARCHIVE’

Having come to Kenya in 1974 on a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Fellowship for a year of study at the University of Nairobi, that year has stretched into more than 45 years of learning about Kenyan culture and the arts.

I felt humbled and honored to be a student of the world acclaimed novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o at UON, and even more humbled when I got my first major journalistic job with a man I call the ‘grandfather of Kenyan journalism’, Hilary Ng’weno. Hilary hired me to write for his brand new Sunday newspaper, The Nairobi Times. I was hired specifically to write about African arts, and more specifically, Kenyan arts such as theatre, visual art, books, music, festivals, dance, and so on. I have been largely doing that ever since, with several years off for family reasons and for further studies in the US. I was also hired to write Personality Profiles on notable Kenyan (and international) figures such as Professor Wangari Maathai.

THE book proposal: ‘The Walking Archives’

My knowledge of Kenyan contemporary culture and art is not comprehensive, by any means. But I have been writing about artists in a wide variety of fields since 1976 when I first got a job with the publication, Target, owned by the National Christian Council of Kenya. I was still a graduate student at UON, but I also needed a job since I was almost exhausting the generous stipend I had been given by the Rotarians.

I propose writing an autobiographical book that focused more specifically on my relationship as a writer with the Kenyan arts. In order to write this book, some research would be required. I (or an assistant) would need to do the following:

1.     1970s: Find the articles I wrote for The Nairobi Times and Weekly Review where I began working from August 1977. Back issues are in McMillan Library although the library’s collection could be incomplete. There might be need to get in touch with the family of Hilary Ng’weno who would know how to access Hilary’s early publications.

2.     1980s: I worked for The Nairobi Times until 1983, until the paper was bought by President Daniel arap Moi. Our name was changed to Kenya Times. But I continued writing about the Kenyan arts and artists. I worked at Kenya Times with intermittent departures, first working for UNESCO as a communication consultant, then at Women’s World Banking, the Africa Regional Office.

3.   My UN and NGO days. I was disillusioned with UNESCO but it was an opportunity I went with for several months. I worked for Women’s World Banking following the 1985 International Conference on Women held in Nairobi that year. I went to WWB out of my appreciation for the hard work of African women and I remained there until 1991, when I went back to Nation Media.

4.     1990s: At the Daily Nation, I had three weekly columns which I would like to retrieve. I had one on film, another on visual arts, and another on theatre. I also wrote feature stories for the Sunday Nation. This went on throughout the 1990s until late 1999 when I got a distress call from my mother in the US. Her need of assistance compelled me to return to Chicago, where I stayed for almost a decade with periodical return trips to Kenya when I would go straight back to writing for Nation during the month that I stayed in Nairobi.

5.     2000s: While in the US, I obtained a Masters degree in Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, another Masters in Sociology from Loyola University Chicago and a Doctorate in the same also from Loyola. I had studied Sociology and Comparative Religions as an undergraduate at DePauw University in Indiana, which is why I felt it best to continue in that field though I focused on Globalization and the Sociology of Media for the Ph.D.

6.     2010’s: I returned to Kenya to do my field research for the doctorate in 2009 and 2010 after which I received the Ph.D in 2011 and came back straight to Kenya at the end of that year. During my days as a grad student, I occasionally wrote a column for the Nation entitled ‘Letter from America’, reminiscent of one of my journalistic idols, Alister Cook. Following my Masters in journalism, I also got a job writing for a suburban newspaper for the Lerner Publications.

7.     2012 to now: Once I returned to Nairobi, I started working straight away. Initially, I wrote for The Star as a feature writer, and then at Business Daily of the Nation Media Group which is where I have been up until now. And for better or worse, I am still doing what Hilary Ng’weno asked me to do, namely to write about the Kenyan arts from a Kenyan point of view.

8.  The blog: In 2016 I began keeping a blog-archive of almost all of my published stories entitled Kenyan Arts Review. I had kept an earlier blog called Margaretta’s Jua Kali Diary, but I wasn’t as consistent with it so it still hangs on Facebook, where I rarely posted any stories. I wish I had begun keeping that blog much earlier, but I have never taken a computer course and am slightly techie-shy when it comes to knowing how to do clever things on the internet. My blog also includes my photography which got relatively good.

9.      My life: I have started several times to write my story for my granddaughters, but my life has been so busy, I have never kept it up. I also started ‘journaling’ at the suggestion of my fellow Rotarian Mike Eldon. I became a Rotarian in late 2018 out the realization that I deserved to pay Rotary back for their bringing me to Kenya in the first place. I am not quite ‘Rotary material’ as I don’t have a big bank account or a booming business. But I was invited by a sweet Indian artist who is also a financial consultant with a prosperous family business. I’m happy to support Rotary values of ‘service above self’ but my main area of focus has to be The Arts Collecting some or all of these publications could be a daunting task. I have a few of these articles from my early days, but very few.

Ideally, I could get some funding in order to devote myself to that research work.

Calling myself a ‘Walking Archive’ has to do with my having been on the spot for so many events that are now part of Kenyan contemporary history. Few people are around who have consistently (or inconsistently) written about Kenyan culture as I have done. One exception is Zarina Patel, who I revere. But otherwise, my friend Alan Donovan who came to Kenya in 1970 and worked closely with Joseph Murumbi just died several months ago.

I will be happy to discuss this further and consider the possibilities of such a Legacy project.

KAMWATHI NEVER FAILS TO FASCINATE

KAMWATHI PROJECTS PRECARIOUS POSSIBILITIES 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted March 7, 2022)

Peterson Kamwathti’s current exhibition entitled P(a)lace, which opened last weekend at One Off Gallery quickly revealed the artist hadn’t slacked off during the COVID curfew. On the contrary, he used the lockdown to reflect on his own personal experience and interrogate concepts of time and space (or place) in the broadest  philosophical sense.

In this body of work, Kamwathi, one of Kenya’s most acclaimed conceptual artists, examines time and space at both the individual and collective levels as well as at the local and the global. And he does so in ways that are inventive yet disturbing as he taps into inexplicable feelings of aloneness or even angst that some may have felt during those difficult days.

Kamwathi also experiments and innovates using many of the techniques in his artistic tool box, from drawing, painting, printing and stenciling to air brushing and blending subtle hues into his works. He also employs a broad mix of media, including charcoal, colored pencils, carbon paper, and pastels as he works his way through a complex set of concepts, layer by layer. He even works with maps to interrogate the notions of boundaries, borders, confinement as they have existed in Kenya’s present and in the past.

A few of Kamwathi’s ‘experiments’ appear in the exhibition as ‘Studies’ for the larger work, ‘Dunia Wiki Hii II’. One is of a man doing a handstand on a pair of skulls. In another the man does his handstand atop a big buffalo skull which the artist tells BDLife is significant in that the living buffalo is commonly seen as a tourist attraction, and if manifest in art gets classified as mere ‘souvenir art’.

“But no one can say the same about a buffalo skull,” Kamwathi says. “It carries different significance altogether,” he adds with a smile.

“I don’t actually paint,’ he tells one collector of his art. “I assemble,” which may be a way of saying his art is layered both in terms of his techniques as well as in the meanings infused into every layer.

It’s no wonder some people find Kamwathi’s art inscrutable. Others simply describe it as surrealist, which may be saying the same thing. He works on various levels of meaning, made apparent in one of the most complex, colorful and engaging paintings in the show. In ‘Frames of Reference II’, he pays attention to both the individual and the group, each confined to their own portion of the painting, their portion being delineated with specific lines of confinement that shoot out across the painting in geometric style.

The piece uses specific images as symbols of time. From the pre-colonial, there is a section devoted to fossilized rocks like ones found in archeological digs near Lake Magadi.

In another section of the work is a group of squatting individuals who might be migrants or even Mau Mau detainees. The ambiguity of the image is part of what disturbs. Then just next to the squatters is a chess piece. It’s the Queen, a reference (he suggests) to the Queen who presided over the British Empire when Kenya suddenly got confined by colonial boundaries. Then in the foreground of the work is a boy doing a backward stretch, his fingers just below another layer of meaning in which a woman bends over as if to almost touch her toes or carry an invisible burden.

In all of Kamwathi’s works in P(a)laces, the issue of confinement is apparent, whether the individual is standing alone on a pedestal as in ‘Beacon III’, or bending over his own separate carpet as in ‘Frame of Reference II’ or squatting as in ‘Untitled/Noble Savage’. In almost every work, there’s an awkwardness to the individual’s form, apart from the acrobats who seem to have some control over their body movement.

There’s one of his paintings that suggests the possibility of freedom from the entrapments that we see expressed either as chicken wire or cobwebs or road barracks, all of which are visible in one or the other of his works. And that is of a baby boy standing alone, aloof, above a mountain top, as if he was floating and free. Yet when I express curiosity about the upside-down table above the little boy’s head, Kamwathi admits the table could also be seen as a confining object capable of limiting the boy’s freedom of movement.

P(a)laces is a sobering show, but it once again reveals Kamwathi is an artist psychically attuned to the soulful rhythms and tempo of our times.

                                                        Peterson Kamwathi with Wilson Mwangi at One Off 

 

TAKA TAKA: WHEN GARBAGE TURNED INTO GOLD

                                    Mataka the politician meets Sam, the demented thief in Millaz' Players 'Taka Takas

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted March 9, 2022

Takataka, one word in Swahili, stands for garbage. But taka taka, two words, takes on a totally different meaning. It’s ‘I want, I want’.

Millaz’s Players’ production of ‘Taka taka’ which was staged this past weekend at Kenya Cultural Centre, made clever use of this linguistic twist. It also got to the essence of the script that Howard Lumumba wrote. Yet Lumumba himself says he didn’t do it alone.

“We developed the story together and then I was given the job of developing the dialogue. I directed as well,” he told the audience who attended the show on Sunday afternoon.

Lumumba clearly rose to the occasion. Millaz’s full-house fan-base loved the play about a corrupt politician named Mataka (Andrew Esirom) who receives a sack of so-called ‘dirty laundry’ (possibly dirty money?) which has come to him inside a large plastic garbage bag. The sack goes missing after being found by a mentally challenged man named Sam (Brian Irungu) who’s been sent by his sister to collect it. But he is not fit to handle such a large task in his fearful frame of mind.

Nonetheless, Sam finds the sack that his sister wants, but then gets stuck in Mataka’s kitchen once everybody wakes up. From then on, the story gets frenetic since almost everyone that shows up wants something from the sack. The most threatening one is Clifford (Ken Aswani) who gave the laundry bag to Mataka in the first place. As it turns out, Clifford seems to have Mafia-styled connections which put Mataka on edge once the bag disappears.

Apparently, it is the house help Clementine (Terry Munyeria) who disposed of the bag. But that is one of the many confusions that bring levity to the play.  In fact, it is Sam who found it, then stashed it in his backpack, and finally had to hide, first in the fridge, then in the oven, and finally in a cupboard.

Sam, in his dementia, lends a marvelous feeling of suspense to the play. We never quite learn who he is or what he’s after. But his paranoia keeps him stranded in Mataka’s house.

Mataka, like Sam, is also gripped with fears, only his are related to Cliff and the missing bag. Once it’s decided that Clementine must be the one who disposed of the sack, the whole family makes a run to follow the garbage truck that supposedly holds the precious garbage bag.

The content of the sack is never explicitly revealed. But the two garbage collectors who claim they found the bag come home alongside the family. They’re bluffing, but negotiations begin nonetheless. One collector, Machingli (Robinson Mudavadi) wants to squeeze Mataka for all he’s worth, while his partner, Mathao (Ted Munene) only wants a chance to get close to Mataka’s ‘Baby Girl’, Leila (Saum Kombo).

Others with desires associated with the sack are Sam’s sister Samantha (Shirleen Ishenyi) who, towards the end of the play, finally shows herself since she has lost contact with Sam and wants to bring him home safely. She also claims she wants what is hers, which is left unidentified. One can guess that she and Sam are Mataka’s kids by another ‘wife’. But before we can find out, Clifford returns.

He’s come for the sack, asking Mataka for the last time. Fortunately, he gets distracted by a ‘reality TV’ producer (Shirleen Kadilo) who inexplicably arrives at Mataka’s and Mama Leila’s (Boera Bisieri) kitchen with her photographer (Mike Ndeda) unannounced. But once Cliff realizes the bag is gone for good, he knows that he too is finished since his Mafia pals are now gunning for him. That’s what leads Cliff to his unthinkable end.

Observers have questioned the play’s ending, asking why Cliff had to finish off everyone, including himself. Was it to reflect on the futility of wanting material things since nobody got what they wanted, apart from the two survivors of Cliff’s murderous deed? The play’s ending left many unanswered questions, like what point was there in the garbage guys being the ones to find the stash? Mathao doesn’t want whatever wealth is stashed in the sack anyway. He just wanted to write poetry. And Machinyli is a would-be swindler who would have taken Mataka for all he could when he had the chance.

So was there a message to Taka Taka? Could it be with Mathao, the poet whose poetry, (as a symbol of Art generally) will survive when everything else turns to dust, or rather, to garbage? Maybe that’s the point.

 

LAMU SPACE STATION IN ORBIT ON SHELA

                                                   Artstronauts who built the Lamu Space Station in Shela Village

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted March 9, 2022)

Artists and would-be astronauts (call them Artstronauts) from the Lamu Space Station jetted into town last week, landing at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI).

That is where BDLife found Abdul Kipruto, Lincoln Mwangi, and Ajax Axe prepared to share their news and views about their imaginative, futuristic project which has taken off in Lamu since March of last year.

The threesome took turns tells how they obviously couldn’t bring the whole Space Station with them from Shela village where they have built the station from scratch over the course of nearly a year. But they were able to carry their raffia grass space helmets and goggles with them, which gave one a feel for which direction their fantasy space station has gone. They have largely relied on recycled trash picked off the beach and other local materials, like raffia grass to develop their ingenious project.

The trio represents less than half of their ‘artstonautic’ team of seven. The rest are local activist artists who got recruited to come on board to help build the space station. They are an eclectic set of islanders who were just as intrigued as Abdul and Lincoln with Ajax’s proposal to think creatively and futuristically about what they could bring to a brand new Lamu space station. The other four include Anna Mokeira, 21, an orphan trained in art at the Anidan Children’s Home, M.T. Shariff, 30, a business man, Shizemonize, a local rapper, and Patrick Mwangi who sadly got COVID and was with the project a few days. All have had a hand in constructing the space station which started as a fertile idea in Ajax’s head.

The energetic young American photojournalist who’s been visiting Lamu periodically since 2010 first met members of the Brush tu Artists Collective back in 2017. It wasn’t until 2019, during the darkest days of the pandemic, that she met several of them again at the Coast and shared her idea of creating a large installation to be called the Lamu Space Station. They were quick to come on board.

                                                   Lincoln Mwangi, Abdul Kipruto, and Ajax Axe at NCAI, Nairobi

Explaining how she came up with the project, she told BDLife the idea had been percolating in her head ever since she was in Sudan on a study grant from National Geographic.

“It was there in Khartoum that I saw artists protesting against Omar al-Bashir. They were actively thinking about what they wanted their future to look like. It got me thinking along the same lines,” she said.

The idea of building a futuristic space station further evolved out of a writers’ conference that she attended in Aspen, Colorado, home to family members of both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two billionaire proponents of space travel. She had already been thinking about something like a fantasy space station in Lamu. She managed to talk about her concept during the Conference and roused substantial interest. The possibility of gaining some support for the space station was even raised. But Ajax couldn’t say whether Mr Musk or Mr Bezos have become Patrons of the project. But the future will tell.

It was when she met up with Abdul and Lincoln, artist members of Brush tu that things began to take shape. They were working at Anidan, sharing their artistic skills with children there when Ajax invited them to join her. They embraced the idea enthusiastically. So did the other four.

But before the project could get off the ground, the team had to find a base of operations. “We searched all over Shela and finally found an abandoned lot behind the dhow boat builders where we could begin building the space station,” says Ajax. She adds that the deal struck with the lot owner involved clearing and cleaning it up since over the past 25 years, it had become a garbage dump.

“We cleared 60 bags of trash so we could create a gallery inside the old house and an installation area outside it,” she says. The seven have been busy ever since.

                       Ajax's space station huts, 11 Ft or 3.5 metres tall made out of raffia grass and welded scrap metal 

“All of us have created installations,” says Ajax, who has used raffia grass to create several giant huts which are nearly 10 feet tall. Having learned welding while studying for a Master’s degree in Colorado, Ajax had initially welded her structures and then covered them with raffia (makutu) grass. “While is Sudan, I’d begun thinking about how to construct housing for internally displaced people using local materials,” she said.

One needs to visit Lamu to see how the Space Ship is flying and how the futuristic ideas are taking fresh forms, reflecting one more imaginative way to recycle trash that both tourists and locals leave mindlessly along Kenya’s most beautiful beach.

 

 

 

 

 

NEW ARTS ORGS' FELLOWSHIPS TO AID ARTISTS

 PANGA SANAA AIMS TO ARM CREATIVES WITH NEW SKILLS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (Posted March 7, 2022)

(L-R) Alix Masson, Susan Gerhard, Marion Op ht Veld, Joyce Nzovu, and Greg Mwendwa of Panga Sanaa at Sarakasi Dome

Panga Sanaa is a brand new cultural project which sets out to achieve what, up to now, has been an impossible task, that of organizing Kenya’s creative sector.

Artists are notorious for being free spirits who in the past, haven’t wanted to be organized. Many haven’t wanted to be corralled or limited by anyone or anything. To them, rules created by organizations can feel like infringements on their freedom.

But the Panga Sanaa Fellowship, which was launched March 1^st at the Sarakasi Dome, aims to get around those roadblocks. “Rather than work with individual artists, our plan is to mobilize arts organizations,” Panga Sanaa’s media man Ken Kuyu tells BDLife.

When the call went out last December inviting arts organizations to apply to participate in an eight-month fellowship project aimed at building stronger associations by giving them skills to strengthen their structures of leadership and build their capacity to serve their members, Kuyu says the response was swift.

“We received 70 applicants, but we could only select ten. Now we’ll be training three [fellows] from each organization,” he adds.

Initially, the fellowship training was planned to focus on specific creative sectors, namely digital arts, fashion, and music. But the focus shifted once the applications came in. “There were few from the fashion sector and more from the visual arts,” says Marion Op het Veld, Sarakasi Trust’s managing director who, as the project director, will be hosting project activities at the Dome during its eight-month life-span.

According to Alex Masson, one of the two curriculum designers of the project, the first [‘incubator’] phase of the training will be once a week for three months. It will take place at the Dome and focus on four main areas, namely Governance and Leadership, Membership models, Organization development, and Policy and Advocacy.

“There will be a lot of peer-to-peer learning in class,” says David Muriithi, the project’s other curriculum designer, underscoring the participatory nature of the training.

Then, during the second five-month phase, the fellows will be back in their respective fields where there will be more mentoring and follow up on the implementing of the skills shared in the first phase of the training. Describing phase two as a time of consolidation, Muriithi adds it will be a time when the trainers will be checking in on the fellows to see how best they can be supported as they implement some of the ideas they’ve acquired.

The Kenya government was represented at the launch by the Director of Culture in the Ministry of Sports, Culture, and Heritage, Dr Lagat Kiprop who expressed his full support for the project.

Panga Sanaa is being assisted by German Cooperation, GIZ, and Goethe Institute, all of which have been consistently supportive of Kenyan creatives. In this instance, GIZ’s Joyce Kanze Nzovu noted that one of the advantages of Kenyan creatives getting organized is there might be less duplication of efforts on the creatives’ part.

Prof

                 Professor Kimani Njogu speaks to Panga Sanaa moderator Greg Mwendwa at PSF launch at Sarakasi Dom

That is the hope as the creatives begin, through the training, to start working more closely together. Another benefit of the training, says Masson is that creatives will gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the roles of policy and advocacy.

Prof. Kimani Njogu, who will be addressing those topics during the training, spoke briefly about how he gained his practical skills in advocacy, particularly advocacy for culture. He explained how policy is critical to having a framework through which creatives can address the Government with their concerns. He noted that at Independence, there was no Culture policy because lawmakers thought of culture as traditional dance and nothing more. Yet by the time the new Constitution of 2010 was being crafted, he and a small number of committed creatives insisted Culture had to be included. Otherwise, creatives would be in danger of having no grounds to defend themselves against pirates, con artists, and crooks. The knowledge, practical skills and strategic tools that he will be sharing during the training will be among the most relevant that artists will need to serve their organizations well.

As the launch was coming to a close, the list of ten (minus one) organizations whose members will take part in Panga Sanaa was shared. They include the Photographers Association of Kenya, Art Society of Kenya, Kenya National Visual Artists Association, Alliance of Slum Media Organizations (Africa Grassroots Media Alliance), Association of Animation Artistes Kenya, Filmmakers in Kenya Association, Kenya Association of Music Producers, Kenya Musicians and Performers Association, and Association of Visual Artists and Collectives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BLOOD AND WATER' EXPLORES DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES

 PARENTING AND THE PROBLEM OF KIDS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (published March 3, 2022)

‘Blood and Water’ by Stewardz Production is apparently a sequel to an earlier play staged last year entitled ‘I Will Not Marry’ which unfortunately I did not see.

The director and playwright Malvin Idachi was good enough to start his show with a short scene which I think was meant to give us the gist of what happened in ‘I will not marry’ Part one. We would then be prepared to watch Part two.

Issuing a disclaimer at the outset, I confess I would be better equipped to comment on this play if I had seen part one before last Sunday afternoon when ‘Blood and Water’ was staged at Kenya National Theatre.

We are introduced to Amanda (Selina) and Ted (Joel Mureithi) who at one time were a happy couple very much in love. ‘It was out of love that Ted got a vasectomy since he didn’t want to have any children,’ Mureithi told The Weekender shortly after coming off stage last Sunday afternoon.

‘But Amanda had cheated on Ted [in ‘I will not marry’], and got pregnant with Morgan’s (Felix Mtetezi) child,” Mureithi adds. That first play ended with no one knowing if Ted would forgive Amanda who apparently preferred Ted to Morgan in any case.

Now comes ‘Blood and Water’ which seems to be a story about retribution among other issues related to youth and parenting. The production addresses problems that young people are facing today. Those include things like bullying, premarital sex among teens, corporal punishment of children in schools, and parental favoring of one sibling over another.

The issue of incest is quite overt. It made me wonder whether the play, which at times felt almost pornographic (for Kenya, that is), was well-suited for small children to watch. There is a veneer of slap-stick humor that made the little ones seated next to me at Kenya National Theatre laugh. That happened when, for instance, the two secondary school girls, Delilah (Alicia Muthoni) and Sonny (Lindsay Andika) fought physically, simultaneously with Delilah’s brother Samson (Wayne Mukhweso) fighting raucously with Butita (Alex Muange).

There were a few loose ends that never get fully explained in ‘Blood and Water’. For instance, how did Amanda end up raising two kids, not just one? She was accused by Ted of favoring her daughter over her son. But then in the end, we find out Samson has a different mother who only shows up in the last scene. Could that be the reason Amanda isn’t kind to him? She suffers from that the syndrome of only caring about one’s own ‘blood’ or family relations, and not so much anyone else’s.

Sam already has major mental problems before he discovers Ted isn’t his dad, and nobody can tell him who his actual father is. Maybe even his new ‘blood’ mother Auko (Ruth Kagia) doesn’t know.

Sam has a drinking problem, which looks symptomatic of a deeper personal dilemma. The script suggests that Sam might be intersexual, meaning neither fully male nor female, but a mix of both. This is a major issue in gender studies, but I have never seen it portrayed on the Kenya stage before. It is just unfortunate that the topic wasn’t more clearly explored in the play. Instead, it was sidelined when Sam discovers he has the hots for his ‘sister’ Delilah and acts on that incestuous desire.

Sam’s curiosity about who his father is mainly due to his being raised to believe his dad was Ted. In the last scene, Amanda and Morgan come clean and reveal who his father is. But their ‘cleansing’ doesn’t come like a healing balm. Instead, one is led to see why it doesn’t pay to keep secrets or to let lies fester. The consequences play out when the children grow up and similar issues repeat themselves.

Take for instance, Sam’s alcoholism and incestuous feelings as well as Delilah’s inexplicable pregnancy (another question of whodunit?) since there are apparently several candidates for patronage, including her own brother.

One incident that brings these complications to light is Sam’s decision to do some investigations of his own. He looks into the issue of his family’s DNA, apparently to find out more about his own background. He apparently has had an inkling that people other than Amanda and Ted are his real parents. And he’s right!

But one isn’t sure what the playwright is trying to say. It’s a tragedy that all these people seem to be confused. Perhaps it’s an accurate reflection of Kenyan society today.

WANJIRU WAS SPOT-ON WITH HAVOC OF CHOICE

 BOOK REVIEW: THE HAVOC OF CHOICE

Reviewed by Margaretta wa Gacheru (wrote it February 14, 2022)

With the General Election coming around in just a few months, this could be a good time for Kenyans to pick up Wanjiru Koinange’s 2021 book, ‘The Havoc of Choice’.

Koinange’s book is a novel, and thus, it can pass for fiction. But there is so much that feels accurate about the eye-witness accounts of her characters who actually live through the 2007 election and its aftermath that it seems particularly timely for us to remember how we never want to repeat the havoc and horrors of 2007-2008’s post-election violence.

Koinange’s book is centered around two families, the Mwangi’s and the Muli’s. Kavata Muli is married to Ngugi Mwangi, and they have two kids, Wanja a university student and Amani, a charming eight-year-old who is the apple of everybody’s eye.

The crisis in the Mwangi household has to do with politics and the corruption associated with it. Both Ngugi and Kavata are well-educated, but out of his joblessness and consequent frustration, he decides to team up with Kavata’s father who is the outgoing Member of Parliament for Machakos. Kavata is appalled since she despises corruption and her father’s flagrant brand of political corruption. She warns Ngugi she will leave him if he agrees to run for her father’s seat since she knows he will become just as corrupt as her dad. He doesn’t listen, and so, she takes off for the US without giving notice, not even to her precious son.

The Mwangi household falls apart without Kavata. Their driver, Thuo, gets jailed since he is the last one to have seen Kavata before she ‘disappeared’. Meanwhile, the election takes place and MP Muli’s Fixer Jane fails to buy off enough voters to give Ngugi the win Muli expected. But Ngugi’s loss is not the biggest issue of the hour.

We witness the country explode as news of the incumbent’s win is emotionally received by the Opposition voters. All manner of gruesome and grizzly violence is witnessed first-hand by Thuo’s wife, a Kalenjin mama, Cheptoo, who is advised to get back to Eldoret before something dire happens to her as she awaits the return of her husband.  The Mwangi’s cook Schola also experiences the violence, first when witnessing the church, packed with parishioners, being burnt to the ground, and then when she gets raped by a Kenyan policeman.

Kavata doesn’t experience the volatile situation first hand, but once she sees it in the media and hears Ngugi lost, she’s determined to get back home. So while most people are trying to flee from the violence which erupts all over the land, Kavata is intent on getting home by any means necessary. By the time she finally arrives, she experiences a different level of personal pain that I won’t disclose because I don’t want to spoil this page-turner of a novel for readers.

The Havoc of Choice may seem to start slowly and focus on family affairs. But it quickly opens out into a global story that even features the Kenya Diaspora. Koinange explores issues of class and culture, including ethnicity, as well as corruption and the crisis of post-election violence. What’s stunning is how much more violent the immediate aftermath of the election was than we might have wanted to believe. Koinange does not shy away from explaining how the burning of houses, businesses, and even churches wasn’t hyperbolic. One feels she has carefully done her homework and depicts actual events, events that nobody wants to see repeated. Yet this is the beauty of fiction. One might even believe the story is a dark fantasy that Koinange made up. But we know that she did not.

“Kenya burning’ was a headline that got repeated for many days in the international and national media. There was even a book of gruesome photographs under that title, taken mainly by Boniface Mwangi and funded by Ford Foundation. But reading The Havoc of Choice will give you a more intimate feeling of what that period was like. Koinange does an excellent job creating characters who are credible and complex. It is their witnessing the PEV in very personal terms that will make you recall why you truly do not want that kind of uncontrollable flare-up of emotions. And if it is true that some or much of the violence has been paid for by greedy politicians, let us pray that those who take the cash don’t follow through. We want the elections to be free and fair, and Kenyans accepting election results peacefully.