Power Of Drama In The Play By John Kimathi

Great Essays
According to Ngugi, “literature is a reflection on the aesthetic and imaginative planes, of a community’s wrestling with its total environment to produce the basic means of life… and in the process creating and re-creating itself in history.” This is also the basic premise of the play which sensitively registers the account of the Mau Mau, which had effectively sublimated in the documented history of the Jomo Kenyatta regime. It is noteworthy that the play opens with a song by a crowd of peasants and also the enactment of the Black people’s History. Through the song, they exhibit their solidarity, demand “uhuru” or complete freedom and glorify the power of resistance. This also penetrates into Ngugi’s project of “people’s theatre” which proposes …show more content…
The heated debate about Kenyan history and the dogged determination to deconstruct the traditional discourse, led to the inception of the play. In the Preface, the writers state, “… indeed all African Literature and its writers is on trial…the challenge was to truly depict the masses (symbolized by Kimathi) in the only historically correct perspective : positively, heroically and as the true makers of history.” The exercise is of reacting against Western episteme, envisioning the world of Mau Mau in terms of the worker’s struggle and producing an alternative to the state-sanctioned memory of the defiance. Kimathi becomes a mouth-piece for the liberation movement whose agenda is voiced by the woman as “…. [to] unite, drive out the enemy and control your own riches, enjoy the fruit of your won sweat.” He is a progressive individual who stands for the unequivocal critique of colonialism and the subjugation of the African culture. The political underpinning on the part of the dramatist is explicit: to charge the masses to activism, recasting historical records and make the readers reflect on their place in the continuum of history. Ngugi states, “Kenyan intellectuals must be able to tell these stories, or histories, or history of heroic resistance to foreign domination by Kenyan …show more content…
He uses he vocabulary of dramaturgy to redefine and rehistoricize the perspicacity of his people in a forward looking narrative structure that blurs the distinctions between past, present and future. Ann Laura Stoler defines this as “the meeting of practice and ideology and art and politics is not often represented in this sort of ideological shift, but Ngugi speaking from a position on the cultural frontier exemplifies this intellectual journey from art to politics and back again, seamlessly weaving into one another.” Thus by melting art and politics in his play, Ngugi was able to “examine class co-ordinates of Kenyan National history, define the role of language in a re-emerging national culture, situate the Mau Mau rebellion within the theoretical structure of Kenyan politics and to assist in the emergence of new forms of cultural activism”, to conclude in the words to G. Odera

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