You can't stop quest for genuine reforms by outlawing creativity

Kipchumba Murkomen was not yet born in 1977, when the Jomo Kenyatta regime detained Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. He had dramatised his play titled ‘Ngahika Ndeenda’. And CS Murkomen was less than three years old when, in 1982, the Kanu government banned the performance of Muntu, by Joe de Graft.  

President William Ruto was certainly around in 1977, an 11-year old stripling, in primary school, somewhere in his village. And although the government had recently jailed his MP, the charismatic Chelagat Mutai, over trumped up charges of “incitement,” he probably could not join the dots.

Given the philistine monologues that he often engages the country with, it is possible that the President is still unaware of the two plays, and their import. Ngahika Ndeenda, co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii, was considered a controversial, even radical, piece of art. It was later translated into English as ‘I Will Marry When I want’. A Kiswahili version titled ‘Nitaolewa Nikipenda’ also exists. Now this play is an artistic rendition of the social scene in post-colonial Kenya. It is a man-eat-man society, in which greed rules the nation. 

Focus is on themes that still trouble us today, nearly half-a-century later. Land grabbing by greedy political and economic power barons, oppression of women in a gender-insensitive society, theft in high places in government, arrogance and impunity, and all that. It is as if Kenya has not made any movement since 1977, when I was a young man in “A” Level, in Cardinal Otunga High School, Mosocho. The only difference between then and now is the brazen new class that does not even know how to steal with modesty. Muntu is a telescope of the African condition through the centuries. It goes to the back of beyond, to examine the disruption of African tranquility, both under external forces, and local dictators. Slavery, colonialism, extractive foreign resource exploitation by foreigners, in cahoots with a local comprador class of rulers, as well as emperor worship.

Academic xenophobe

These are some of the themes. Can anyone save us, especially from ourselves? Can the kowtowing class of courtiers in the royal palaces save us? What is the learned professor doing, valorising the political reptile in the African State House? How does he accept to be the siren that amplifies and gentrifies the non-thoughts of the intellectual dwarfs around power?  

The Kanu government stopped the performance of the two plays, which of course Mr Murkomen, Kenya’s Minister for Interior, has no idea of. Less still, his boss, President Ruto, an avowed academic xenophobe. On the authority of his own repeated words, he believes that botany is everything. That is why they are today having trouble with youth from my village school, Butere Girls, staging a stinging play at this year’s apex schools drama event, in Nakuru.  

Scripted by the mercurial ex-Senator Cleophas Malala, the play adroitly captures Kenya under the William Ruto watch. It is rankling in its refrain. For the country to move forward Ruto, who epitomises all that has gone wrong, must go. The “must go” phrase has, in point of fact, been demonised by the Chief of the Defence Forces Gen Charles Kahariri, and the DCI boss, Noordin Haji. Yet, Kenyans remain as voluble as ever in the call that Ruto must go! They even call him “Must Go!” Hence, “Must Go, Must go!” they say.

Gen Kahariri is President Ruto’s age mate, at 58, or shall we say basically a few months younger? And Noor Haji, born in 1973, was not even aware of the 1978 and 1980 happenings. Murkomen had not happened.

Haji, Ruto and Kahariri were blank slates; veritable tabula rasas. On account of this, they imagine that they can stop the wave of unhappiness against the Ruto regime, simply by clamping down on dissenters.

That if State House operatives will take close up photos of recalcitrant youth and afterwards hunt them down for incarceration, they could stem unrest. The bad news for them is that they cannot stop this wave.

Incarcerations of the 1970s and the ’80s snowballed into the pluralistic and comparatively open society that Kenya is today. It was less difficult to stop them then. History teaches us that a people who have tasted a modicum of freedom are impossible to stop in their quest for more.

State House will fail in its present effort to clamp down on Kenyans. For their own good, and their families, those in power today will do well to embrace genuine reform. If not, they will someday be recalling these tales in miserable exile, as refugees.  

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser