Advertisement

The curtain falls, tribalism is loosed upon the world

Wednesday January 18 2017

After many weeks spent researching East African novelists and playwrights from the 1960s through into the mid-1980s, something significant began to emerge.

The two decades were the golden age of the travelling theatre in East Africa, as elsewhere on the continent.

Nearly all the travelling theatres were based in universities, and they became incubators for a generation of radical playwrights and actors. As the tradition faded around the region, especially in Uganda, as a result of repression and economic breakdown, it remained strong in Kenya.

Its power was dramatically illustrated by the Ngugi wa Thing’o play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) that was first performed in in his home village of Kamiriithu.

Seen as a criticism of the corruption and political repression of the period, it led to the writer’s detention without trial in 1977.

The theatres just didn’t travel in-country. They crossed borders. It was also another unique feature of 1970s East Africa.

Advertisement

In the early 80s, Uganda was in the middle of a bleak period. The military ruler Idi Amin had been ousted in 1979 by a combined force of the Tanzanian army and Ugandan dissidents. But the good life that was hoped for hadn’t come, as the country remained mired in strife.

An election in December 1980 had gone like every Uganda election since Independence – it had been brazenly stolen.

Partly in anger at that, Yoweri Museveni had taken to the bush in 1981 with his comrades to start a guerrilla war. The war and the counterinsurgency had bred a crisis in, especially, Kampala.

In 1982, a travelling theatre group from the University of Nairobi came to Kampala to perform The Island, a play by South Africa’s Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona.

It was set in a prison, thought to be Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was being detained.

It was a silent play, with just two actors – one of them marvellously dreadlocked – on stage, moving about, gesturing, and contorting. It was a harrowing show.

The great man, Okot p’Bitek, he of Song of Lawino fame, had been instrumental in the play’s coming to Kampala, and he was in the modest auditorium.

He got up to speak at the end. Bitek was a tough cookie, but he was emotional and tearing up. He thanked the cast, and walked off the stage.
We all left in emotional turmoil.

How could a play that featured two people saying nothing, have that effect on an audience?

The answer speaks to the powerfully democratic element of socially conscious drama, and why travelling theatre was a disruptive tool.

It was an exchange between the intellectuals in the big cities and ivory towers, and the masses, which worked on the assumption that the latter were smart enough to make meaning of the plays based on their daily experiences.

Today this relationship is based on a one-way exchange, in which our countries mostly only consume stuff from the city – Sim cards, beer, TV, newspapers, magazines, bootleg music CDs, bootleg DVDs, plastics, and counterfeit goods.

Its death speaks to one of the ways our countries have changed. It’s the end of a particular form of conversation, which partly explains the rise of tribalism and parochial politics nearly everywhere.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3

Advertisement