Kenyan Popular Theatre and the Search for Social Justice

Abstract

Critics have for long noted the possibilities of using popular theatre to play different functions, including political mobilisation and entrenchment of social justice ideals. Acknowledging this, I sought to explore how popular theatre created social awareness of the theme of social (in)justice in Kenya from the mid-1980s to early 2000s. This period coincided with the peak of the single party-political dictatorship associated with former President Daniel arap Moi and, conversely, the agitation for multiparty democracy. At the turn of the millennium, however, the idea of political freedoms as social justice had taken root, thanks in part to the work of popular artistry that dominated Kenya’s public imaginaries. During this period, a number of popular theatrical works associated with mainstream and scholar-activists were written, even though some barely attracted worthwhile critical attention in respect to social justice. I selected some of these for my study. These were Francis Imbuga’s Aminata, Kithaka wa Mberia’s Maua Kwenye Jua la Asubuhi, and Natala; Kivutha Kibwana’s Kanzala, Kang’aara wa Njambi’s Paukwa, Legal Resources Foundation’s Shamba la Mfukeri, Constitution and Reform Education Consortium’s Uraia, and Wakanyote Njuguna’s Before the Storm. The objectives of this study were threefold: to interrogate the theme of social justice in selected popular theatre texts in Kenya; to analyse the style of popular theatre in search of social justice in Kenya; and, to evaluate the use-value of popular theatre in Kenya’s contemporary struggles with social justice. To achieve these objectives, I applied methodological approaches of textual analysis and semi-structured interviews in conducting the study, while enlisting interpretative tools drawn from Performance Theory, the Sociological Theory, the theory of the Carnivalesque, aspects of Post-colonial Theory and the social justice postulations of James Dawes. The study made three fundamental findings. First, that the global trends towards inclusivity influenced the growth and development of social justice in Kenya through popular theatre that mainstreamed themes of gender equality

and democracy. Second, the study established that the texts under study employed diverse elements of oral performance, including idioms, riddles and storytelling to familiarize their audiences and readers with the main thematic concerns. In so doing, the playwrights and artists innovated discursive safe spaces using other techniques of defamiliarization – notably humour, distancing irony, ambiguity and metaphor – to evade state censorship and other mechanisms of control. Ultimately, I argue that the texts under study and those of the same orientation constitute a subgenre of theatre that I call “civic theatre”, and suggest that future preoccupation with social justice will likely find civic theatre an inevitable tool.