Uzinduzi

 Uzinduzi--A Play by Vaclav Havel.
Translated by Alena Retova and Abdilatif Abdalla
Performed at the Alliance Française de Nairobi, September 18th and 20th, 2009.
Directed by Guy Lenoir, assistant director Sammy Mwangi
Performed in Kiswahili by Caroline Tharau, Victor Ber and Ken Waudo
Costumes by John Kaveke
Music by Juma Tutu and Rajab Said


I.
The Kiswahili version of this play by Vaclav Havel was performed for the first time at the Alliance Francaise during Jukwaani, the Festival of Performance Literature.  Translated by  Alena Retova and our own Abdilatif Abdalla, the play is an exploration of the senseless materialism used to paper over the abyss of meaningless lives.  The performance I watched, on the second day of the Jukwaani Festival, had everybody laughing in appreciation. The acting by our Caroline Tharau, Victor Ber and Ken Waudo was skilful and deft, and the live music by Juma Tutu and Rajab Said, beguiling.  All around, it was a very good production.

However, it was not so much the content of the play that I was wondering about, but its context: here is a play in Kiswahili, by a famous former Czech dissident turned president, Vaclav Havel, translated into Kiswahili by another famous dissident, Abdilatif Abdalla, and directed by a French director, Guy Lenoir, who could not possibly have understood the words his actors were saying in Kiswahili, although of course he probably knew the play in a variety of other languages, performed in a French cultural space for Nairobi denizens.  Quite a journey this, that these words have undertaken all the way from Prague, and quite a dense series of associations these words are nestled in.

As the actors (from Heartstrings) and the director, Guy Lenoir, of Uzinduzi insisted to me, it is not only a testament to the universality of Havel’s issues and the genius of his writing that these words have meaning here in Nairobi, but also a sign of the care and creativity of the translators.  All of this is true.  However, given my earlier ruminations on the intriguing inflections and issues raised by the concurrence of African cultural forms being celebrated in Western cultural spaces (to mark a Treaty endorsing the cessation of hostilities and more strongly, supporting the increase of co-operation in ‘core’ Europe), I thought a closer look might be indicated.

II.
Just before I attended Jukwaani, and in an attempt to orient myself more stringently to the issues at hand, I had borrowed a copy of Getting Heard: [Re] claiming Performance Space in Kenya, the second volume of Art, Culture and Society, edited by Kimani Njogu.  I wanted to see what scholars whose job it is to think about these things had to say about performativity and performance in Kenya.  While I am at it, I unashamedly recommend that everyone purchase and reads this collection—it is extremely rewarding.   Unsurprisingly, the first of the works in this volume is “Njia Panda: Kenyan Theatre in Search of Identity,” by none other than Mshaï S. Mwangola ( I am forced to keep revealing that she is my friend and colleague) in which she discusses not only the historically dense signification of the architecture on Harry Thuku  Road, but also the intertwined histories of the University of Nairobi’s Department of Language and Literature and the Kenya National Theatre, which, like the contentious siblings they are, have followed different paths in their exploration of cultural expression. 

The volume has several excellent entries, including a piece on “ The Task of the African Translator” by Mukoma wa Ngugi (another friend) and by several other people who are not my friends, but whose work I enjoyed reading very much.  One of my favourites was the impassioned Amadi kwas Atsiayaa’s “Sigana and the fight for Performance Space in Kenya: A Case for Indigenous Theatre in Kenya,” in which the author discusses the continuing colonial influences in Kenyan performance spaces and quotes Birihanze in Viewpoints: Essays on Literature and Drama as arguing that “the stage auditorium arrangement must be discarded.  But that in itself is not enough to change the basis of the performer-spectator relationship completely.  There must be a conscious change in the methods of acting…” That gave me pause, for whatever else is true about Jukwaani, it is unavoidable that the performance spaces at the Alliance Francaise and the Goethe-Institut are fairly conventional, with the usual arrangement of a raised stage at the front of an auditorium, while the audiences sit in obediently attentive rows.

III.
This is certainly a Western influence at work, and in thinking about the ways in which form influences content, it is true that whatever is expressed about African culture will necessarily have been shaped by the physical language it is forced to assume by the Western origins of the performance space.  Does it lose its value as a result? And if so, what can be said about the even more Western-inflected play by Vaclav Havel, notwithstanding its skilfully adaptation into the Kiswahili language?  On this point, I ponder again what it might mean that the director, Guy Lenoir, did not understand the words his actors were speaking in the language of the performance. 

To complicate even this observation, however, Guy Lenoir has previously directed Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and is thus no stranger to African theatre.  Moreover, someone told me that Lenoir has training as a mime, and it showed in the attention to bodily expression in the actors’ performances.  A friend who watched the performance and does not understand Kiswahili even a bit later told me she understood most of the action on stage.  Of course, my questioning mind merely followed this thought to inquire about the importance of the spoken words themselves, which, given the attention being accorded this particular translation by these particular translators, was much of the point for those attentive to such issues.

To return to the issues discussed in Getting Heard, Mshaï Mwangola, in discussing the development of the theatre in Kenya, explains that at the University of Nairobi’s department of Languages and Literature, minds such as Ngugi wa Thiongo and Micere Mugo early started the debate on decolonising the mind and initiated several enduring investigations into theatre’s ability to speak to the concerns of the people, against the tendency by the Kenya National Theatre to reproduce colonial art forms specifically intended for the neo-colonial elite.   These differences in perspective on the purpose and performance of Kenyan theatre eventually led to the now infamous exiling of both Ngugi wa Thiongo and Micere Mugo and the partial loss of their edifying influence on local cultural developments, although of course, in many ways their exile only made their work more popular,and more widely read in Kenya and abroad.  Thus, one of the points of interrogation would not only be the meaning of the performance space itself, but also the origin of the performance—neither of which is particularly African.

From another perspective, however,  Mukoma wa Ngugi, also in Getting Heard, writes of the task of the African translator as including “translating from European languages into African languages—so that other forms of knowledge be stored and accessed in an African language.  There is of course a crucial point here which relates to how we choose to translate and what not to translate….thus the translator will translate different people’s literatures that include that belonging to African Americans, Native Americans, Women writers—a people’s literature.”  Indisputably, Vaclav Havel’s work, written in opposition to communist totalitarianism, belongs to this category of  liberation literature in the sense that Mukoma intends to mean it as affirming progressive political movements in society.   Mukoma wa Ngugi asserts, “The act of translating African literature is a political act.  The task of the African translator is therefore political.”  Which brings us back to Retova and Abdalla who have rendered Havel into Kiswahili.  

Furthermore, I noticed  that during the performance, the actors engaged in berating their friend Beldrich for his unsavoury associations speak scornfully of his dissident socialist friends “Lumumba,” and, a little later, “Ngugi wa Thiong’o.”  Astonished by this, I looked up these lines in the text I had just bought (they were selling the translation by Retova and Abdalla at the door), and failed to find Lumumba and Ngugi wa Thiong’o mentioned therein. Instead, the text, probably faithful to the original, contains names that would be more familiar to Czech audiences than to Kenyan ones, such as Landovsky.  This suggested that the Nairobi performance had been modified even more than the previous act of translation would suggest.   Thus, the Kenyan reference is part of the spoken performance, but not part of the published text.  I wondered what this might mean about the relative permanence and influence of performance literature, and remembered again that the director did not understand these particular words.  What then, was the relative importance of these fleeting references of local significance?

It is clear that Retova and Abdalla have brought many of us into the global conversation about this work, a conversation that perhaps we would not have entered had we not heard the issues performed for us in Kiswahili.  To the extent that Havel’s work has universal significance, the act of translation as well as the content of the translated ideas is, as Mukoma wa Ngugi suggests, stringently political. But whose politics, and to what end?

IV.
In Kenya, radical intellectuals get much mileage from speaking dismissively of “the bourgeoisie”—the despised middle class.  It is the cool thing to do, proving at once that one has a) read Marx and b) read either or both the German and the French Marxists in this tradition and c) is down with “the peeps,” the masses, the popular class.  The fact that such intellectuals are often of the middle class itself (hence their capacity to read the European Marxists and declaim along with them) seems never to have given any of them pause—but it does me.  It is after all, no small thing to wish for one’s own non-existence and perhaps should be done with some care.  

Moreover, it has never been either theoretically or empirically clear to me that the African middle classes behave in the same ways and from the same motivations as their European counterparts; nor that they enjoy the same structural relationships to the rest of society as the European middle classes do to their societies.  In Europe, the middle class is the ruling class.  In Africa, it is not. In Europe, the middle class is the majority class—there are simply more middle class people than either very rich or very poor people.  In Africa, the poor win the numbers game hands down.     What these two complicating factors might mean to our understanding of class issues in Africa in the midst of our emerging contestations over power and legitimacy has not yet been investigated to anyone’s satisfaction, but it does suggest, at least, that there is more to the issue than immediately meets the eye, and at the very least indicates some caution exercised in the otherwise uncritical reading of an interchangeable class analysis.

 It is important here only because Havel’s play is in essence a scorching repudiation of middle class values and pretensions, no doubt well-deserved and stringently revealing of the contradictions in European societies.  In light of the issues raised by the scholars in Getting Heard, however, which cumulatively amount to a rigorous argument for the importance of contextualisation and the recuperation of organic African expression—for the decolonisation of our minds, to wit—it may be useful to ask questions not only about what universal truths, as apt here in East Africa as anywhere else, Uzinduzi reveals, but also what specificities of being and what configurations of society it does not reveal, because it  is fundamentally unable to do so (even when by Vaclav Havel, with all his genius).  Fleeting references to Ngugi wa Thiongo and (more confusingly) to Lumumba, do not so much clarify this question as render it yet more ambiguous.

Having said all this, the play was a delightful experience, even more valuable to me for having raised these questions whether intentionally or not.  What it showed fairly unambiguously is the continuing flexibility and adaptability of the Kiswahili language, which emerges on the global stage as being more than equal to the universal investigation into the human condition.  Moreover, in portraying Africans in these roles, the play raises important questions about the emerging forms of African identities and the social relationships to which they give rise and by which they are shaped, as well as drawing our attention to the universe of possibilities which, merely by existing, these identities and their representations repress.  The proper work of meaningful art is precisely to provide the spaces in which such questions arise; the answers will be as variable as the historical contexts in which the questions are asked.


Images by Jerry Riley.

See also two of my favourite bloggers on these events: Harvest Tone and Mentalacrobatics