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Battle over school play is an attack on youth creativity
A cheering crowd escorts a school bus carrying Butere Girls from Melvin Jones Academy in Nakuru during the Kenya National Drama and Film Festival on April 10, 2025.
What you need to know:
- When Butere Girls High School tried to stage their play at the National Drama Festivals in Nakuru, they were stopped cold by riot police who tear-gassed them.
- Respected lawyer Nelson Havi correctly pointed out that the action against Butere Girls shows that “this administration has crossed all educational red lines.”
“By the click of a single button I will stir the pot and make flames rise.
Enough content to trigger public anger (as) everything has gone viral.” (Anifa in “Echoes of War” by former Senator Cleophas Malala).
We may never know whether former UDA Secretary General Cleophas Malala intended to stir the pot when he wrote the play that is now on the nation’s lips, “Echoes of War.”
What we know is that the play’s plot boiled in its creative pot, and when Butere Girls High School tried to serve it hot at the National Drama Festivals in Nakuru, they were stopped cold by riot police who tear-gassed them, had earlier clobbered media and arrested the playwright Cleophas Malala for the “Crime of Creativity” that our Penal Code does not recognise.
And everything did go viral – the image of our teenage daughters being chased and harassed by grown men in helmets and boots and teargas canisters and clubs – and mass indignation and public anger was triggered across the length and breadth of the country.
The ODM (Orange Democratic Movement) through its Secretary General Senator Edwin Sifuna was fast in its break with the “police” regime, with a strong statement that captured the disbelief the unfolding drama at the Nakuru Drama Festival where “the government is seemingly running scared of a play by (Butere High) school girls.”
Senator Sifuna pointed out how the government was shooting itself in the foot by “harassing and attempting to dim the voices of young girls in school uniform …”
“Serious questions arise when a government is scared of children’s art,” the Senator continued. “Mere expression of talent in a high school festival.”
In reality, this isn’t just a mere moment of crisis for high school creativity!
It is a fundamental question about our ‘Bill of Rights,’ as enshrined in the 2010 Constitution of Kenya.
Section 32 of our sacred Katiba enshrines the Freedom of Conscience, belief, religion as well as opinion – and that is exactly what Mr Malala was exercising – never mind that EALA legislator Hassan Omar seems a far more measured UDA Secretary General, the post that Mr Malala was deposed from.
Motive doesn’t matter!
The fact is that he has a right to his beliefs and opinions, and had a court order allowing the play to proceed on merit. The work of our police isn’t to make judicial decisions, otherwise they ought to exchange their caps for wigs, put down their guns and rungus; and pick thick Law books and gavels.
Respected lawyer Nelson ‘Duke’ Havi correctly pointed out that the action against Butere Girls shows that “this administration has crossed all educational red lines.”
Constitutional ones, too!
These barbaric banning actions clearly violate our ‘Freedom of Expression’ clauses that we all have “freedom of artistic creativity” and the freedom to “seek, receive or impart information and ideas.”
In “Echoes of War,” there is a part in the play where four friends – Jamal, Fatma, Lennah and Malik – are standing around saying that they must “rise against the tyranny and liberate (their) generation (in a generational war) no matter the cost.”
I read this as their generation recognising that all sovereignty belongs to Kenyans.
“The nation will bulge with fury, the streets will swell with unrest, walls of patience will collapse, and the Sultan will be rattled …”
All these had echoes of ‘Sarafina,’ the wildly popular South African movie that the Moi regime banned from cinemas back in 1992, perhaps because even an ogre does not like what it sees in the mirror, so it seeks to cover or even smash it.
But art is a mirror that can also reflect a leader, and a light unto the general public.
So is the media, whose Freedoms are protected under Section 34 of our Constitution, but who were still barred and banned from the Butere Girls’ play.
In the end, with their director detained, their props confiscated and in the eye of a national storm, those brave girls of Butere – with whom PEN Kenya (through the late literature professor Chris Wanjala and current PEN Kenya president Khainga O) is proud to be associated – didn’t perform their play on stage at the Melvin Jones Hall, there in Nakuru.
Instead, they sang the national anthem, tears silently streaming down their cheeks – then left in their school bus; leaving an indelible iconic creative mark forever in our hearts (as memorable as when Ngugi’s ‘Ngaahika Ndeenda’ was banned in 1977 as being critical of the State); even as statements of condemnation flowed from all quarters against the government’s brutal over-reach as the ICJ’s Protas Saende, EAJAC’s Boniface Mwalii, Amnesty International’s Irungu Houghton and myriad other organisations raised their voices for our children and creativity.
My teen-daughter forwarded me a meme from the aptly named Lameprotagonist: ‘Why is a whole president beefing with Form 2 West of Butere? ’
The recently deceased poet, lawyer and civil activist Pheroze Nowrojee wrote this:
“The survival, the defence and the flourishing of all these ideas - the freedom of conscience, the freedom of the Press, the Freedom of Expression - it is this infrastructure of all these ideas that restrains tyrants, underpins national institutions, and generates Constitutional rule as opposed to a personal dictatorship.”
Then he exited the stage & with his words, the curtain comes down on the drama.
Tony Mochama is the PEN International’s (Kenya Chapter) Secretary General that defends writers’ rights to freedom of expression.
