By Peter Amuka
A lot has been said about Echoes of War, a play that was to be showcased at the National Drama and Film Festival (NDFF) in Nakuru on Thursday.
The play has been authored by playwright and politician Cleo Malala.
The piece of art has caused division in the literary, political and social spaces- online and offline due, with politics saturating the otherwise important annual education ritual.
Unexpectedly, the play continues to elicit reactions and counter reactions.
Frankly, I am yet to come across innocent art.
Did Achebe say that art for art’s sake is deodorised dog shit?
That kind of art is unEATable.
If Malala had an axe or axes to grind with fellow politicians, he did it eloquently and the message cut deep into their bellies.
They ate it, swallowed it, and are still trying to spit it today long after the girls refused to act without props.
A Cabinet Secretary (SC) has just commented that a play by school children/girls can’t shake the government or words to that effect.
He hasn’t vomited all of it.
It’s very much like Wole Soyinka’s Segi in Kongis Harvest: (she is like the strand of sweet meat that gets stuck between the teeth and refuses to go).
“The cud of ‘echoes’ is still being chewed today and the chewing might go on for some time.”
–Peter Amuka
As a student of creative literature, I can only enjoy the irony in the tear gas that exploded in the night of Wednesday and the harassment of Malala by armed police unleashed by a government that is not shaken or is unbwogable.
I know a grade 5 who is pursuing her future through the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC).
She is so politically conscious that I can’t doubt the awareness and intelligence of 15 yr olds and above at Butere Girls High School.
Check out Joe de Graft’s small essay on African theatre and acting and how an actor has to swim in the spirit of the play he/she is performing as if it is real and not imagined (African Literature Today, No.7/8).
In other words, the imagined and the real coalesce and transmute into the ethereal world in serious acting.
The young or youthful do it best and I have no doubt that those Butere girls knew what they were doing and weren’t mere empty vessels or zombies for Malala’s political interests against his political adversaries.
That misconception/misreading belongs to old style politics where the elderly arrogantly believe that the old are always intellectually superior to and wiser than the young.
There is even the retrogressive gender bias that girls can’t possibly have imagined or thought like Malala the man did.
Let’s not destroy a good play with our partisan political lenses.
Let’s remain UDA, ODM, KK, AZIMIO, BROAD/BREAD BASED, and whatever else, and worship our normally unfulfillable manifestos but please don’t reduce “Echoes of War” to a mere political pamphlet that it’s not.
- Prof. Amuka is a literary scholar and author.