Censorship and Revolution: Memory as Liberation
Dedan Kimathi Waciuri’s Statue, Kimathi Street, Nairobi. Photo by Pompeychucks via Flickr.
Following the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, a newly independent Kenya, led by its “founding father” Jomo Kenyatta, wrestled with the question of how best to foster a sense of Kenyan identity. Kenyatta’s government, chaffing under the pressure of its economic and diplomatic needs, took care not to offend the sensibilities of Britain and the white settlers who remained within its borders. The official Kenyan account of the Mau Mau rebellion depicted Mau Mau veterans as “hooligans” who had no place in Kenyan politics. Consequently, the many Kenyans who identified themselves with the struggle for freedom from imperial rule embodied by the Mau Mau found themselves disenfranchised, without a satisfactory historical narrative to endow their lives with meaning.
Reacting against this climate of despondency fostered by the West’s monopoly on historical truth in regards to the Mau Mau rebellion, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae-Mugo wrote The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. Drawn from historical material and filtered through their imaginations, the play seeks to illustrate and extol the virtues of Kenya’s collective will. For this reason, one cannot analyse the play’s effectiveness in terms of accuracy. Rather, one must understand this, and all other historical narratives, as agents of power.
Kenya’s historians, politicians, and writers were “too busy spewing out, elaborating, and trying to document the same old colonial myths,” writes wa Thiong’o; “why not a play on these neglected heroes and heroines of the Kenyan masses?” As their subject, the authors chose Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi, leader of the Mau Mau, whose trial and execution in 1957 caused a sensation on both sides. By crafting a story granting the Kenyan people a definitive narrative of resistance, wa Thiong’o and Githae-Mugo would produce an alternative to the state-sanctioned memory. The play would imaginatively reconstruct the history of the Mau Mau uprising, “envisioning the world of the Mau Mau and Kimathi in terms of the peasants’ and workers’ struggle”. The play aimed to serve as an “interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan workers and peasants”.
How could a “creative reimagining” of history, wishing to interpret the collective will of “the people” claim to provide a historically correct account of a complex political conflict? A successful play, he says in the preface, lays the whole truth before the audience, including the mistakes and weaknesses of its protagonists. Nonetheless, it will inevitably side with “the people” and their cause. Therefore, in the words of wa Thiong’o, an accurate depiction of any historical event means depicting the masses “positively, heroically and as the true makers of history”.
In a number of scenes, the authors expose their audience to the darker side of the Mau Mau insurrection. When Kimathi’s forces capture a group of soldiers belonging to the King’s African Rifles, he shows them no mercy; Kimathi orders that they be shot in the forest as an example to other potential traitors. Later, during Kimathi’s trial, an enraged white settler confronts Kimathi about the suffering inflicted on him by the Mau Mau. “I had a wife and daughter, where are they now?” asks the settler in a sardonic growl; “killed, burned, maimed,” is his horrifying answer.
Still, wa Thiong’o and Githae-Mugo justify these exhibitions of Mau Mau cruelty as historical necessities. After so many years of exploitation at the hands of imperialism, resistance could only end in violence. In the words of Dedan Kimathi, “when the hunted has truly learnt to hunt the hunter, then the hunting game will be no more”.
Finally, it is important to recognize that historical accuracy has little relevance to the play’s objectives. wa Thiong’o and Githae-Mugo understand that knowledge is never impartial, always influenced by the needs of those in power.
The sublimation of the Mau Mau in post-independence Kenyan society is a prime example of this phenomenon; by bombarding the Kenyan people with an anti-Mau Mau perspective, Kenyatta’s government successfully marginalized Mau Mau sympathizers. Only a radical shift can undermine this power structure. Colonized people could only achieve true freedom with the birth of an entirely new world order, one in which they were no longer the subjects of empires, but citizens of their own nations. This utopian desire for absolute freedom from the past requires total revolution against the source of colonial oppression, a process marked less by compromise than violence.
It is precisely this kind of revolution that we see enacted by the Mau Mau. Parallel to this historical event, wa Thiong’o initiates a quieter revolution, one imbued with its own implicit violence. At first, a revolution fought with paper and ink may appear as an ineffective –perhaps, even cowardly- imitation of real social change. Yet, one cannot ignore the power of knowledge. By endowing the peasants with their own narrative, wa Thiong’o’s play acts as a bulwark against the political marginalization of Mau Mau sympathizers. In the preface to the play, wa Thiong’o explains that writing The Trial of Dedan Kimathi caused him to realize that Dedan Kimathi “was still a hero of the Kenyan masses”. Here, wa Thiong’o follows the same logic applied by Howard Zinn in his A People’s History of the United States. People, according to Zinn, should not accept the conditions of official state histories. States will never be more than artificial communities, whose official histories conceal barbarism in the name of strategic interests. Like Zinn, wa Thiong’o chooses to lift this veil. Less a balanced account of a historical event than an exercise in populist myth-making, wa Thiong’o offers a total rejection of the then-dominant historical narrative.
