‘Kaggia’: Play immortalises forgotten hero

John Sibi-Okumu takes on Kenya’s towering revolutionary Bildad Kaggia as the subject of his robust new activist play about empowerment — how personal strength and honesty can transcend a destructive social system and the lure of material wealth.

Against insuperable odds, a few gutsy men and women chose honour — remaining true to an alternative moral universe despite the consequences.

In the play, directed by Nick Njache at Nairobi’s Professional Centre, with a running narrative structure illuminated by flashbacks, Sibi-Okumu casts his net over the wide expanse of later 20th century Kenya politics.

He navigates the turbulent political waters of Mau Mau and the equally tempestuous Independence era in a gripping drama that merits first place as the best serious play of 2014 (if there were such a prize).

His dramatis personae include four members of the Phoenix Players — lumpy, cerebral Harry Ebale, perfectly suited to the role of Kaggia; quietly reflective, Lydiah Gitachu as his quietly introspective wife, Wambui, with serious but ditsy Yriimo Mwaura and Bruce Makau as the narrators/script-writers of a film on Kaggia.

SEVERAL ROLES

These two actors also play several other roles. Among these are Mwaura as Njoki, the Kaggias’ inquisitive young daughter and irritating journalist Michaela.

Makau is cast as a brutal Turkana askari during Kaggia’s years of detention as well as former presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, to chilling effect.

Although well-known to older Kenyans, Bildad Kaggia’s life trajectory may be less familiar to post-Independence generations. Kaggia was born into a dystopic world of European imperialism in 1932 in Murang’a (Fort Hall) to subsistence farmers.

He grew up under Britain’s toxic system of colonial capitalism whose economy, ideology and social norms often, if inadvertently, turned ordinary men and women into monsters.

As the same system was carried over into the post-Independence era, it produced the same kind of people.

During Kenya’s anti-colonial struggle, Kaggia’s active part as a strategist in the resistance — the Mau Mau insurgency — led to his long incarceration alongside Kenyatta, Paul Ngei, Achieng Oneko, Fred Kubai and Kungu Karumba.

Sentenced together to hard labour in remote northern Kapenguria, Lodwar and Lokitaung outposts, these liberation leaders became known as the famous Kapenguria Six.

After Independence, Kaggia served as a Member of Parliament but refused to join the new African scramble for land and self-aggrandisement. With his deeply embedded socialist convictions, turning on land for the landless, genuine care for the underserved and seductive oratorical skills, this popular leader might well have become Kenya’s second president.

How does one undertake the extremely difficult task of translating into theatre the existential dilemma of a principled individual finding himself in a rotten system?

As Kaggia was with us until recently — he died in 2005 — a mountain of material exists on his life. Most germane is his own autobiography, Roots of Freedom. Although self-censored to suit the 1970s political climate, it is a vivid depiction of his remarkable life to 1963.

The article was first published in the East African.