Much ado about nothing? Why Malala drama echoes petty politics

Because so few Kenyans have had a chance to watch ‘Echoes of War’ by Cleophas Malala, after its staging was sanctioned before the High Court torpedoed that decision and policemen tear-gassed students in rehearsal in Nakuru, we run the risk of inventing what the play is, and what it is not about.

That’s the nature of drama, especially Kenyan drama, as the joy is in the re-telling and the attendant embellishments.

In that vein, the violent impulse by the State teargassing girls performing a play about an imaginary kingdom in the UAE was actuated by nothing more than the desire to create drama.

For one would be hard pressed to comprehend the anxieties that the State is seeking to apprehend.

After all, more searing critiques have been delivered by thousands of Kenyans online with their satirical interpretations of the Kenya Kwanza misadventures, replete with monikers that humanise and humiliate President William Ruto in equal measure.

In any case, the targeting of Malala’s play seems misguided as plays that were considered “subversive” two generations ago have returned to the stage without incident.

I have in Ngaahika Ndeenda (‘‘I Will Marry When I Want’’) by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, which returned to the stage in June 2022, exactly 45 years after its ban and the subsequent detention of Ngugi wa Thiong’o at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, and exiling of Mirii, to Zimbabwe.

Ngugi’s Gikuyu musical, Maitu Njugira (‘‘Mother, Sing for Me’’), which was dismantled during its rehearsal at the University of Nairobi in early 1980s, is being staged for the first time, after a 50-year hiatus.

‘‘The Trial of Dedan Kimathi’’ by Ngugi and Micere Mugo, which presaged Ngugi’s move to his Kamiriithu village in Limuru, is regularly staged around the country.

 Other plays that were banned in the 1970s include Joe de Graft’s Muntu, a sweeping tale of a continent in throes of turmoil, hurtling through slavery and colonialism to post-independence disillusionment, before giving way to civilian and military dictatorships—a fate that faced many African States.

 Now that Malala’s play has been elevated to the pantheon of Kenyan theatre for social change, a close reading of the script reveals it is embarrassingly rough, and that’s a gentle way of putting it. ‘‘Echoes of War’’ is an assembly of inchoate fragments of disconnected story threads that dissipate in incoherence.

 But that does not take away Malala’s right to present his vision of the world because our Constitution permits it.

What I can infer is that the subjugation of ‘‘Echoes of War’’ is about petty politics because fragile egos have been bruised.

 He is, after all, the ousted Secretary-General of the ruling coalition, UDA, and he has since switched sides to support impeached Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua. And, of course, First Lady Rachel Ruto attended Butere Girls, so she may have easily pulled the plug on Malala’s play, whatever her motivations.

 But since we’re not in the business of speculation, it behoves us to demonstrate fidelity to the script that Malala wrote, a copy of which is now widely in circulation as part of his legal challenge, and in the people’s court.

 The crux of the story, set in a fictitious nation in the Middle East is on the brink of social conflagration. The youth, bursting with vigour and innovation, are suffocating under the crushing weight of religious conservatism.

 The Sultan of the territory, impossibly named as the Royal Velvet Emirates, has organised a (presumably national) contest to harness ideas from the young — the very lot that claims exclusion. A young man, Mustafa Ali, is picked as winner.

 “I have decided to incorporate these young people into the decision-making process of our country. Mustafa as the winner, you will receive this (palace),” the Sultan commits. But before the process is concluded, the authorities screen Mustafa’s social media platforms. They find he was instrumental in stoking social unrest, a crime so grave he’s sent to the gallows!

 Mustafa’s girlfriend, Anifa, who is reportedly pregnant with Mustafa’s “biological atomic bomb,” a rare malady that only affects the brain, rather the womb, instigates cyber warfare to rescue her lover from the clutches of the Sultan.

 The cyber warfare precipitates a deluge of protesters in the streets, not too dissimilar to the Gen-Z protests that roiled the nation last June. What the protesters don’t seem to know is that Mustafa has been coerced into a “State witness,” while the Sultan’s son, Xavier, has joined the protestors in the streets, where he suffers a near-fatal injury.

 Thankfully, there is telemedicine, which Mustafa has invented, so Xavier is saved and the Sultan commits to roll out the programme nationally, delivering a happy ending for all. Actually, the Sultan had embraced the technology in the play’s denouement, but the playwright probably forgot to clean up the script.

 Perhaps it’s pointless to clean up the draft; for that would necessitate a complete rewrite: A chopper flying above is “roaring like the lion of the dessert (sic),” a woman is “oozing with excitement,” teenagers converse in slung (sic).

 Even entire dialogues are incoherent: “These are not mere lenses but a prism — a bridge between your fossilised perceptions and seven-dimensional tapestry of tomorrow,” Anifa, the cyber expert, rumbles at her mother.

 What’s most difficult to follow in ‘‘Echoes of War’’ are transitions from scene to scene, and how the characters relate to each other on the stage. Particularly jarring is voice simply identified as “Police.”  It’s unclear if this is an individual or the collective identity of all policemen and women in the Royal Velvet Emirates.

 Other youths deliver a litany of meaningless chants: “Expectations of good governance — roots unyielding, branches heavy with fruit of justice and not the rot of corruption! Expectations of universal healthcare; a shield guarding every life, from cradle to grave…” chants Jamal.

The play is described as a “hyperbole”— I have no idea what this means, so one is constrained from reading the script as an allegory, which it masquerades as. After all, the life blood of theatre is symbolism and subtlety.

Malala delivers his blows directly, which could mean “hyperbole” is an inventive literary trope. His 2013 play, ‘‘Shackles of Doom’’, which was presented as an allegory of the oil find in Turkana (the true People of Kana), but who stood to lose their inheritance to the machinations of identified as dwellers of Central Kenya, which was seen as a crude case of ethnic profiling. It also elicited State censure.

To be clear, ‘‘Echoes of War’’ was not censored at zonal or sub-County levels, even though adjudicators had power to do that, and the Butere Girls’ administration’s intervention was swiftly overturned by High Court.

It should be remembered, moreover, that official censorship that required a licence from the government for directors to stage plays was repealed in the 2010 Constitution to entrench artistic freedom.

The crude and crass force applied by State agents, unnecessary and unacceptable as it was, however, tells a different story. Kenyans should be apprehensive that the theatre of war on display in Nakuru and elsewhere could be a rehearsal of sorts of the violence that the government is ready and willing to dispense in the run-up to the 2027 General Election.

That’s not a fictive construct. The social conditions that produced the 2007 pogrom are being stoked by those in power in their primitive accumulation of capital, punitive taxes that consign citizens to the margins of destitution, and brute force being dispensed to suppress dissent.

-Prof Kimani, a former Standard Group editor and columnist, is an author, and literary and cultural critic.