EXPLORING THE RIFT.
A VL Despatch from Kenya
by Oliver Langdon
([email protected])KENYA SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES NATIONAL DRAMA FESTIVAL
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology presents 'Kenya Schools and Colleges National Drama Festival' every year, though the involvement of the Ministry itself is largely nominal. The giant scheme is also supported by various corporate bodies who's collective design is "to tap, nurture and exploit the hidden potential of the Kenyan youth".
Unfortunately, the varying levels of success amongst the many participants is partly determined by their ability to raise sufficient capital to fund the most costly scenario of becoming champion. Beginning at a very local level, thousands of village schools are either eliminated from the competition by panels of increasingly prestigious experts or forced to retire by the increasing expense of travel requirements. The first, 'zonal round' is followed by a 'divisional round' and then a 'provincial round', which precedes a week-long marathon affair to select the winners. Schools that qualify for this event need to find board, lodging and travel expenses for their cast, crew and administrative support team for a ten-day period. This sort of proposition would be daunting for most western companies considering a theatre festival and for many in Kenya it is insurmountable. All ticket-sale proceeds are lost in red tape so even 'breaking even' is not an option. However, more than a dozen schools overcome the unfavorable conditions and make it to finals day, driven by prestige and honour. On the last day of the festival, a gala of selected items plays to a board of adjudicators, educational ministers and the School's Inspectorate. This is where the pride and determination that have fuelled the festival thus far begin to pay off.
The finals change location each year so that less well-off enthusiasts from each of the eight provinces stand a better chance of surviving the competition when it 'comes home'. This year the finals and the gala event were held in a mammoth void of a hall at Chebisaas High School, near Eldoret in Rift Valley Province. Proving the rotary design to be a success, the overall winner was Western Province, which immediately borders Rift Valley. Their jubilation was enormous. Albert Wandago, Headmaster and playwright for one of the winning schools voiced "a general consensus that if we had the opportunity, we would win every year." He fearfully recognises that "while one team is celebrating, the others are preparing for next time." The fierce competition on display superficially indicates a healthy and flourishing drama scene amongst the Kenyan youth. However, Wandago believes that it is tainted with allegations of bribery and corruption. He believes, like many others, that performances are too often a display of affluence rather than acting. Consequently, economic viability casts a shadow over the future of the festival.
To quell this culture of doubt and cynicism, over three hundred and fifty prizes were donated to the competition this year in a demonstration of corporate munificence. Few schools that made it as far as the finals were left unrewarded. However, for the most part the prizes were tokens of appreciation rather than material incentives for schools to enter. In a speech that closed the festival, the Chairman, Mr. Job Osiako, pleaded with the assembled sponsors "to find means of providing material assistance to groups from an early level". He credited one company that had offered a television set; another a prize heifer. Mr. Wandago meanwhile wondered how his dozen red rosettes were going to fuel the hire-bus home.
Despite this, the level of interest in the festival is so great throughout the country that the competition grows every year. When it was staged for the first time in 1959 "it featured only one genre, the play, which centred around the works of William Shakespeare, GB Shaw, Bertholt Brecht and other accomplished playwrights." Now there are four major categories - the one-act play, the narrative, the verse (either solo or choral) and the cultural creative dance. Furthermore, each category must be written and produced independently from conception to curtain-call. The plethora of titles to be won now ranges from 'Overall Winning Province' and 'Most Disciplined Institution' to 'Best Narrative Verse on the Safe Use of Pesticides', in which category there are still few enough entries to dispense of the ubiquitous status of 'Runner-up'.
It seems that there is enough enthusiasm amongst young Kenyan dramatists to enable the National Festival to continue to grow despite inadequate financial support and the refusal of the Kenyan Chief Inspector of Schools, Mr. Daniel Rono, to consider incorporating drama into the schools curriculum. He recently disclosed to the press that it was "too heavy an assignment for the ministry to undertake."
In any case, official supporters of the event do not see money as a key factor in the production of high-class theatre. The adjudicators, most of whom have been judging the festival for over a decade, have standardized this view in a 'thin blue book', specifying various guidelines and outlining hard-line rules and regulations. Additionally, each year the adjudicators speak at some length on their observations. In 2001 the overall trend in these speeches was to reject financial dependence in an attempt to curb western materialism.
The play category provoked especially heavy criticism. Many entrants surpassed their minimal facilities and funding to produce magnificently designed sets with decorative flats and occasional special effects such as flashing lights. However, the adjudicators found that this contravened the 'thin blue book' and detracted from the point of the exercise: "theatre is very much the manipulation of body and voice in the space provided on stage". They requested producers to ask themselves "when I take away all the gadgetry, the music and elements of cinematography, can all my actors still produce the same emotions effectively, would I still have a script that has a literary message?" They broadly dismissed scripts that depended on "snakes, music, ghosts and physicalisation of all the action on stage." As a corollary to modern technological advances they preferred entries that employed a chorus of narrators' voices for amplification of key points. In the absence of props, they heralded the personification of physical entities. This was frequently done to great affect: a group of actors dressed in fiery red danced about four more actors as rigid as fence-posts until they eventually sunk to their knees, a burned-out wreck. Whilst recognising such physical inventiveness, the adjudicators were disappointed in the lack of linguistic creativity: "we strongly object to the use of dirty, obscene language and sex symbols. We know the power of Art to make converts and we wonder what our producers think we as a society will achieve by going down that path." There is no theatrical censorship in Kenya but the adjudicators clearly frowned upon what they considered morally misguiding plays: "We must give society hope and beat a path for it to follow. What happened to laughter?"
The narrative category escaped more lightly, being a fairly unique performance genre somehow relatively unscathed by western hybridisation. Appearing only for the second year, it demanded a ten minute, one or two-handed monologue that fulfilled the audience's appetite for entertainment as well as satiating the adjudicators desire for didacticism. This was achieved in very fast, very funny polemics on various pertinent issues such as "HIV-Aids, land-grabbing, child neglect and abuse, girl-child education, the effect of under-age smoking, governance, love, hypocrisy in the church among others." According to Kenna Claude, a reporter present throughout the competition, a few pieces that were too overtly critical of the present government were discreetly sidelined early in the qualification process. Narrators that were allowed to grace the stage indulged in the African oral tradition to the hilt, moving about the auditorium, taking in the huge crowds with confident exaggerated gestures and ad lib ad infinitum.
The third category of verse was largely lost between the narrative category on the one hand and the cultural creative dance on the other. It was this latter profusion of traditional dance routines, combined with a poetic choral overlay that totally stole the show though. Not for one moment in each of the twenty-minute sets did the energy and enthusiasm of the companies subside. This was evidently a most relished opportunity for showing off and the effort was not lost on the teeming, two thousand strong auditorium. This most popular choice for the pupils was also the most identifiably African. When it came to constructive criticism, the adjudicators were able to be far more exacting than in the other categories. There was no ghost of the West to be exorcised so they concentrated on separate tribal idiosyncrasies within the complex choreography. They also noted the use of indigenous dialects, which "only remained satisfactorily abundant in this area".
English predominated throughout the festival in productions that by and large adhered religiously to the proscenium arch stage. Some characters freely took advantage of their bilingualism, whilst elsewhere English was used only in formal situations. However, when English evaporated altogether it was for performances that returned to traditional cultural forms. Here, there was also a transgression of the imposed performance space. Troupes spilled off the front of the stage to facilitate the expansive circular motion that many of the dances demanded. As the adjudicators observed, Kenyans populated the entire festival and every performer was Kenyan, however the vast majority of practice on display was imbued with western tradition. Even the spectators' attempts to interact were quelled with large hand-held official signboards demanding 'Silence'. Whilst colonialism remains a definite chapter in Kenyan history, only the one performance genre of dance seemed to allow a thoroughbred Kenyan heritage to be truly expressed. Whilst, all aspects of the festival deserve more financial provision, it is in this category that most headway could be made on the Chairman's vision: "to respect, foster and develop Kenya's rich and diverse cultural heritage."