Dear Readers: Below we provide an excerpt (with some minor edits) of Ketu H. Katrak’s article “The Making of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo at the University of California, Irvine: A Personal Reflection,” which focuses on a play co-authored by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCI and Micere Githae Mugo, Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University. The play was produced at UCI earlier this year by the Department of Drama and directed by Visiting Assistant Professor at UCI, Jaye Austin Williams. Ngugi was able to meet with students and share stories from his own life experiences, which informed this work. Some of the themes presented in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi continue to have reverberations in Kenya as well as other post-colonial societies – witness the police killings in the U.S. of the unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, the unarmed twelve-year old Tamir Rice, as well as Eric Garner and many others.
by Ketu H. Katrak
The student performers at the University of California, Irvine’s Department of Drama, along with the design and creative team of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi effectively presented, under director Dr. Jaye Austin Williams, the colonial world of Kenya in the 1950s with its atmosphere of fear, threat, arrests of entire villages and fear of detentions at the whim of Colonial officers. The students engaged with this history by reading a packet of materials compiled by myself as dramaturg along with two assistant dramaturgs, doctoral students in the Department of Drama, Allison Rotstein and Sonia Desai. The readings included classic essays on colonialism, neo-colonialism, race, culture by Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Githae Mugo, Orlando Patterson, theoretical readings on slavery, on Black being, British propaganda about Kimathi including a documentary that we screened as part of our four-day intense table work.[i] We provided the readings to the cast and creative team as a “gift” for the holidays in December 2013, so that by the time the table work began in January they were equipped with some basic information on colonialism, and Kenya’s history.
Our purpose in sharing these materials with the actors and creative team was to layer their understanding of the play, to grasp its political purpose. We aimed to equip the actors to take the next challenge of inhabiting these ideas in their bodies as they enacted their roles on stage. The Director, Dr. Jaye (as we fondly call her) who has worked as a Literary Dramaturg welcomed this engagement of ideas with actors and designers.
Ngugi himself attended all four days and enlightened the students with many fine insights into interpreting the text, and historical details of the colonial situation in Kenya from his own research and life experience. He told us that this is a very personal play for him and that although he has published many novels, and volumes of essays, including his recent memoirs, drama has had the most impact on his life. It was, after all, his co-written play, I Will Marry when I Want (with Ngugi wa Mirii) at Kamiriithu community center with collaboration from local peasants and workers on the script, production, including building a 2000 seat theater that proved so threatening to the Kenyan State under Jomo Kenyatta that Ngugi was imprisoned for a whole year (1977-78) at Kamiti Maximum security prison. During his long days in prison, he recognized the power of using not English but the peasants’ local language, and telling the stories significant to their lives. Ngugi also asserted to the students that physical incarceration, difficult as it undoubtedly is, did not imprison his imagination; hence, he managed to write his first Gikuyu novel entitled, Caitini Muthrabaini (later translated in English as Devil on the Cross) on toilet paper while in prison.
Ngugi, with his characteristic acumen and clarity in getting to the heart of any issue explained to the students that the play primarily explores the relationship, and often the disjuncture between law and justice, and that such issues are still with us. He asked whether one can have justice under criminal laws such as during Colonial times, and recently, under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law that freed the white perpetrator of the cold-blooded murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin? The production ended with the freedom song by the Ensemble and then as the stage went to black, the projected images on the walls included dark renderings of “justice” to blacks in the US–Rodney King, beaten brutally by Los Angeles police officers (March 2,1991) whose unconscionable acquittal led to the Los Angeles Riots, and more recently (February 26, 2012) the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, shot down in cold blood by a white murderer supposedly “standing his ground” in Florida.
Ngugi shared the daily threat that Kenyans faced under the British and the specific fight over land in Kenya since this became a settle colony where the Whites appropriated the best land, dispossessed the indigenous owners of the fertile Highland (renaming them the White Highlands) and on top of that, forced the local people to labor on the land for the colonizers’ profit. Much of this history was new for the student-actors to learn.
Further, it was important for the actors to understand that although the play takes us into the heart of this segment of Kenyan history during the British imposed Emergency (1952-1960), it recreates an imaginative history as in what might have transpired if the British had actually held a trial for Kimathi. As a black man, he is already guilty before the trial even begins. Ngugi and Mugo excavate a misrepresented segment of Kenyan history, “reconstructing it imaginatively”, even “resurrecting Dedan Kimathi” as a hero of the Kenyan people, disrupting British propagated negative myths about Kimathi.
A central exchange about law and justice takes place between Judge Henderson enacting the charade of “even-handed justice”, and Kimathi’s challenge to the lie that “There is only one law, one justice”. Rather, Kimathi retorts that there are “Two laws. Two justices. One law and one justice protects the man of property, the man of wealth, the foreign exploiter. Another law, another justice, silences the poor, the hungry, our people” (25-26).
Ngugi pointed out to the students that since Kenya was the first among the African colonies to confront the British via an armed struggle, the colonizers were determined to denigrate the movement as inhuman, as driven by primitive oath-taking ceremonies, by barbaric killing sprees all of which totally belied the organization and discipline of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army led by charismatic figures such as Dedan Kimathi. If the armed resistance succeeded in Kenya, this would be a dangerous precedent for other British colonies. Indeed, in a battle over naming, the British misnamed the struggle as “Mau Mau” indicating mumbo jumbo pervaded by dark deeds and motives. The Mau Mau put a high price on loyalty, inducting members into the movement through a secret oath ritual. The British were hell-bent to get these oaths out of the captured Mau Mau; the ones who were captured were taken to “reeducation camps”, often subjected to physical and psychological torture. Throughout the struggle, the British lost less than 100, whereas 11,000 Mau Mau were killed. Along with physical killings, the British demonized Mau Mau as terrorists; hence Kenyans themselves, mainly the neo-colonial elite who came to power after independence, despised the movement as demonic and wanted to wipe it out. The British colonial tactic of divide and rule effectively divided Kenyans who were loyal to the British from their kinsmen belonging to the Mau Mau.
Ngugi narrated a personal incident when he and Micere Githae Mugo, both colleagues at the University of Nairobi in 1971 saw a play with completely false and negative portrayals of Kimathi. As they left the theater, they both felt compelled to write a play correcting these falsehoods, and indeed they felt responsible to “resurrect Kimathi” as Ngugi noted in our table work, from such disparaging myths. As they note in their Preface to the text, “There was no single historical work written by a Kenyan telling of the grandeur of the heroic struggle of Kenyan people fighting foreign forces of exploitation and domination . . . We agreed to co-author a play on Kimthai . . . a hero of the Kenyan masses.”
Read Katrak’s article (which originally appeared in the journal African Theatre, 13 [2014], published in the UK) in its entirety here.
Ketu H. Katrak is Professor in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in African Drama, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Women Writers and Feminist Theory.
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[i] Some of the readings in the packet included: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (trans. R. Philcox, NY: Grove Press, 1961, Repr., 2004); Ngugi wa Thiong’o, from Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann, 1981); Ngugi wa Thiong’o, from, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Micere Githae Mugo, from Art, Artists and the Flowering of Pan-Africana Liberated Zones, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Distinguished Lecture, 2012 (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam, 2013); Micere Githae Mugo, Speaking and Writing from the Heart of My Mind: Selected Essays and Speeches (Trenton, New Jersey, London etc.: Africa World Press, 2012); British Colonial Office, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Colonies by Command of Her Majesty, May 1960 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office); Ian Henderson and Philip Goodhart, The Hunt for Kimathi (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958); Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within: Autobiography and Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1966); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1982).