He fought for the soul of Kenyan theatre

The basic biographical facts of my just departed comrade can be easily gleaned from the public domain.

What I want to do here is to recall the courageous Kenyan activist, thespian, father, and cultural theorist in my own way — how I came to know and appreciate him.

The very first time I saw Bantu Mwaura was in a photograph. This way back in the mid 1990s.

I was living in Toronto at the time, but had come back to the country to bury my father.

While in Nairobi I ran into Njeri Kabeberi, who was then chairperson of the Release Political Prisoners group.

One day, as she was walking me through a sheaf of photos from RPP events, one picture in particular caught my attention.

In it, a burly militant with fire blazing from his eyes was pumping the air with one clenched fist while the other hand held a banner.

Next to him were Njeri and other members of RPP marching against police brutality.

Who is that, I asked.

Bantu Mwaura, one of our most dedicated members, I was told.

Over the next decade or so I came across Bantu online and via political activist folklore, with many admirers enthusing about his extreme courage in facing off against adversaries.

I also came to know, secondhand, about his theatrical talents both as a performance artist and a director /producer of original works.

It was not until July 2003 that we had our first encounter, during the annual meeting of the Kenya Community Abroad convened in Whippany, New Jersey, in the United States.

The Bantu I met was full of energy, humour and beaming with intelligence.

We struck up an immediate rapport.

At that time, he was doing his doctoral studies in New York while still engaged with the Kenyan struggle — cultural, political and personal.

Henceforth, we encountered each other frequently online — sending one-liners to each other on the list servers, where we often locked horns in non-violent ideological combat.

But it was never personal and of course when we met offline again sometime in 2006, when we had both relocated more or less permanently to Kenya from our diasporic lairs in North America, it was all hugs and hearty handshakes.

That was the year where I got to know and respect Bantu even more in the process of working with him on a year long project of global proportions unfolding right here in Nairobi, Kenya.

I am referring to the preparations for the World Social Forum, which eventually took place in January 2007.

Bantu joined us in the East Africa-wide secretariat co-ordinating the work of the WSF Nairobi 2007 organising committee.

What impressed me about Bantu’s intervention was both the depth of his theoretical rigour and his ideological clarity about arts and culture on the one hand and on the other, his hands-on knowledge of the practical, logistical and human dimensions of bringing a work of art to life, to the stage.

He could expound on the imperialist and neo-colonial underpinnings that bedevilled mainstream Kenyan theatre on one afternoon while on the next evening you would find him taking a theatre troupe through a punishing rehearsal — Bantu was a perfectionist who did not suffer fools gladly when it came to the theatre.

In November 2006, Bantu was part of the Kenyan delegation that went to New Delhi to participate in that year’s India Social Forum, one of the build-up activities to the Nairobi World Social Forum.

Together with Mueni Lundi, Bantu did a brilliant direction of an original work produced by him and the WSF Cultural Ensemble.

The piece, a searing retrospective on Kenya’s five centuries-long resistance to foreign rule, received a thunderous standing ovation, with the troupe being urged to do encores of some of the stand out songs.

There in New Delhi, at the Jawaharlal Nehru National Stadium, I saw Bantu in his element: Progressive politics, international solidarity and above all, music, theatre and dance.

Over the past year and a half, the Nairobi-based writer and editor Rasna Warah brought us together again when she invited us to contribute to the anthology titled Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits — an indictment of the international development industry and its main toxin, foreign aid.

Bantu wrote a brilliant chapter on how donor funding had stultified original drama and theatre production in Kenya. It is one of the seminal pieces in that volume.

For the past few months, Bantu had been on the radio, on television, doing readings in restaurants, speaking at forums, generally reminding us of who he was and more importantly what he stood for.

In the week leading up to his death, he was prominently featured on at least two major television channels.

A mutual friend and fellow thespian Sophie Dola told me she ran into Bantu and his family at the Kenyatta Market on Saturday afternoon, and he was his usual boisterous, good-natured self.

I was having lunch at a restaurant last Monday when the one o’clock news came on.

When I saw the image of Bantu fill the screen, I thought it was a report from yet another forum — and indeed it was. It was the news anchor’s voice that chilled my blood.

He was saying that Bantu’s body had been recovered from a Nairobi suburb the previous night and that the police were investigating his death.

People at the restaurant must have thought I was deranged because I rushed to peer at the overhead monitor repeating over and over to no one is particular: “That guy was my friend! What could have killed him?”

Information trickling in indicates that Bantu was killed through chemical poisoning and that it could very well be suicide.

As I write this I am unable to come to terms with the possibility that a comrade who seemed to have been the embodiment of vivaciousness, vigour and vitality is physically no longer with us.

Let me echo what the South Africans say when they are bidding kwaheri to a shujaa, a hero:

Hamba Kahle, Bantu Mwaura!