thy sword of peace

Gĩcaamba (factory worker) to his friend Kĩgũũnda

[GĨCAAMBA:]
    ... Do you, son of Gathoni, call this a house?
    Would you mind living in a more spacious house?
    And remember the majority are those
    Who are like me and you!
    We are without clothes.
    We are without shelter.
    The power of our hands goes to feed three people:
    Imperialists from Europe,
    Imperialists from America,
    Imperialists from Japan,
    And of course their local watchmen.
    But son of Gathoni think hard
    So that you may see the truth of the saying
    That a fool's walking stick supports the clever . . .

NJOOKI [GĨCAAMBA'S wife] [Sings Gĩtiiro*]
    Let me tell you
    For nobody is born wise
    So although it has been said that
    The antelope hates less he who sees it
    Than he who shouts its presence,
    I'll sing this once,
    For even a loved one can be discussed.
    I'll sing this once:
    When we fought for freedom
    I'd thought that we the poor would milk grade cows.
    In the past I used to eat wild spinach.
    Today I am eating the same.
GĨCAAMBA: [Continuing as if he does not want his thoughts to wander away from the subject of foreign-owned companies and industries]
    Yes,
    What did this factory bring to our village?
    Twenty-five cents a fortnight.
    And the profits, to Europe!
    What else?
    An open drainage that pollutes the air in the whole country!
    An open drainage that brings diseases unknown before!
    We end up with the foul smell and the diseases
    While the foreigners and the local bosses of the company,
    Live in palaces on green hills, with wide tree-lined avenues,
    Where they'll never get a whiff of the smell
    Or contract any of the diseases!


* Gĩtiiro: name of a dance song, a form of opera



The rich neighbours deign to visit Kĩgũũnda and his wife Wangeci.

JEZEBEL: [To NDUGĨRE but loud enough for everybody to hear]
    That tractor driver is very mature.
    He does not argue back.
    He does not demand higher wages.
    He just believes in hard work,
    Praising our Lord all the time.
    He is a true brother-in-Christ.
NDUGĨRE:
    You have spoken nothing but the truth.
    If all people were to be saved,
    And accepted Jesus as their personal saviour,
    The conflicts you find in the land would all end.
    For everybody,
    Whether he does or does not have property,
    Whether an employee or an employer,
    Would be contented
    To remain in his place.
WANGECI scoops out rice on plates and hands a plateful to everyone.
JEZEBEL: [Looks at the food as if she is finding fault with the cooking]
    You know, with me, when lunch time is over,
    However hungry I might have been,
    I am not able to swallow anything!
KĨOI:
    I am also the same,
    But I could do with a cup of tea.
WANGECI:
    I'll make tea for you.
    But you can't come into my house
    And fail to bite something.
KĨGŨŨNDA starts to eat heartily. WANGECI is busy putting water for tea on the firestones.
KĨOI:
    Let's say grace.
    Sister-in-Christ!
    Say grace before we eat!
HELEN: [Eyeing the KĨGŨŨNDAS with ferocious disapproval]
    Let's all pray . . .
    God, Creator of Heaven and Earth,
    You the owner of all things on earth and in heaven,
    We pray you bring to an end
    The current wickedness in the land:
    Breaking into banks and other people's shops,
    Stealing other people's coffee,
    Placing obstructions on highways,
    All this being Satan's work to bring ruin to your true servants.
    Oh God our Father
    Tame the souls of the wicked
    With thy sword of peace,
    For we your servants are unable to sleep
    Because of the terror inflicted on us by the wicked.
    You to whom all the things on earth do belong
    Show the wicked that everybody's share comes from Heaven,
    Be it poverty or riches.
    Let us all be contented with our lot.
    We ask you to bless this food,
    And add unto us that of the Holy Spirit;
    We ask you in the name of your only Son,
    Jesus Christ, our Lord.
ALL:
    Amen

(from Act I of I Will Marry When I Want)

The complete text (English translation by the authors), along with many other writings by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, can be accessed here: http://www.socialiststories.com/writers/ngugi-wa-thiong'o/

Ngũgĩ's play is among many other things a classic of left populism: it conceives a nativist "people" unjustly oppressed by a local elite in league with foreigners.

It's uncomfortable to meet this familiar populist myth in a context where it was perfectly true. Successful colonizers have always appointed a local elite to manage things on the ground; the "homeguards" in Kenya's case.

Kamĩrĩĩthũ is a suburb of Limuru in the central uplands of Kenya.

The Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre was formed in 1976.

The novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was invited to write a play in the Gĩkũyũ language (this was his first work in his mother tongue; his earlier novels had been written in English). Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want)  was created jointly, with input from Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ (educator and social worker involved with the centre) and also the large cast of villagers, especially in connection with the play's many songs and dances. (The title itself was the name of a popular song of that time.)

The four acres reserved for the Youth Centre had at that time, in 1977, only a falling-apart mud-walled barrack of four rooms which we used for adult literacy. The rest was grass. Nothing more. It was the peasants and workers from the village who built the stage: just a raised semi-circular platform backed by a semi-circular bamboo wall behind which was a small three-roomed house which served as the store and changing room. The stage and the auditorium -- fixed long wooden seats arranged like stairs -- were almost an extension of each other. It had no roof. It was an open air theatre with large empty spaces surrounding the stage and the auditorium. The flow of actors and people between the auditorium and the stage, and around the stage and the entire auditorium was uninhibited. Behind the auditorium were some tall eucalyptus trees. Birds could watch performances from these or from the top of the outer bamboo fence. And during one performance some actors, unrehearsed, had the idea of climbing up the trees and joining the singing from up there. They were performing not only to those seated before them, but to whoever could now see them and hear them -- the entire village of 10,000 people was their audience. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in Decolonising the Mind (1986)). 

[This anecdote has been misunderstood as implying that the theatre itself had an audience of 10,000 -- a claim that can be found on Wikipedia and elsewhere.]

The Kamĩrĩĩthũ performances ran for six weeks from 2nd October 1977 into November 1977, when the government withdrew the centre's license for public performance. The authors were arrested in December 1977 and detained without trial for a year. In March 1982 (when their second play, Mother, Cry for Me, was being rehearsed at Kamĩrĩĩthũ in preparation for performance in Nairobi) the government placed a ban on all further theatre activities and razed the theatre to the ground (it would be replaced by a polytechnic). Both authors went into exile.

I've found just two online photographs of the Kamĩrĩĩthũ community in action, the ones shown on the book jackets above.

*

The issues that the play raised were based on the actors' real live experiences and so the relationship between reality and fiction was collapsed. He [Choru wa Mũirũrĩ, one of the lead actors] gives examples of men and women who had taken part in the struggle for independence reliving the pains of betrayal, while the wounds of their experience in the same were quite visible: women with partial fingers, limping men, those with crutches etc. He claims that some did not even need the playwright's words: they would re-enact the reality of their experiences on stage using their own words. One of the play's protagonists, Gĩcaamba (Kamau wa Wakaba) and his co-actor (Karanja wa Fred), were actually workers at the Bata Shoe company and the sounding of the siren on stage mirrored the reality of their day-to-day working experience. Some of the characters were so real that one of the directors had to remind them that this was a play, not reality, and sometimes the audience's hatred of characters like Ikuua was visible.

(Mũgo Mũhĩa, "Choru wa Mũirũrĩ: Reflections on Kamĩrĩĩthũ", in African Theatre: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o & Wole Soyinka, ed. Martin Banham, James Gibbs, Kimani Njogu, Femi Osofisan (2014).

*

Eucalyptus is widely grown in Kenya, but its environmental impacts have gradually become more apparent.

https://wrm.org.uy/articles-from-the-wrm-bulletin/section2/mounting-pressure-against-eucalyptus-in-kenya-described-as-the-water-guzzler/