Getting Heard: [Re]claiming Performance Space in Kenya: [Re]claiming Performance Space in Kenya

2. From Intellectual Space(s) to Performance Space(s): Strategies of Speaking ‘Truth to Power’ in Bole Butake’s Drama

Getting Heard 25 CHAPTER TWO From Intellectual Space(s) to Performance Space(s): Strategies of Speaking ‘Truth to Power’ in Bole Butake’s Drama Christopher Odhiambo Joseph From idea/ knowledge industry to performance spaces This chapter, in various ways, attempts not only to exhibit Bole Butake’s deployment of body and space as sites of performing and undermining power, but more importantly, his location within the black intellectual traditions. Similar to other black intellectual artists’engagements, Butake’s is also interventionist. His plays and their actual performances in defined spaces gesture towards an explicit putative agency: the struggle against oppression, repression, subjugation, power abuse and exploitation. But perhaps what is interesting about Butake, is that like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka and Femi Osofisan, to mention a few, he seems to recognize the vast opportunities that the performance space provides to engage with the larger public outside the confinement of universities, those intellectual prison houses. In a paper, ‘Home and Exile: TheAfrican Writer’s Dilemma” Butake shares intimately what led to his choice of drama and theatre medium disseminating and communicating his ideas especially among the masses. He states: Having found the effectiveness of drama and theatre as a communication medium especially for the disadvantaged grassroots people, I have been able to continue to influence the latter through the organization of numerous theatre workshops in urban slums and villages on such diverse issues as women’s and children’s rights (including property ownership, widow, female genital mutilation, early marriages and pregnancies, etc), human rights and democracy, minority rights, corruption in public life, environmental sustainability, good governance, conflict resolution, HIV/ AIDS, etc. Thus, I have been able to continue with my teaching at the university while using theatre for development techniques through what I call ‘People Theatre’and ‘People Cinema’to influence and awaken grassroots people to problems with which they deal on a daily basis. (p.9) 26 (Re)claiming Performance Space in Kenya This pronouncement situates, in its proper perspective, Butake’s shift from the more restrictive intellectual spaces to the more fluid public performance spaces. Historically speaking, intellectuals and in particular the black, have with obsessive frequency played a critical and significant role through the knowledge and idea industry in the transformation of the world and more so significantly in the struggle against inequality, exploitation, discrimination and oppression of the underprivileged in the African continent and its Diaspora. The Negritude movement for instance exemplifies the very active participation of black intellectuals in the assertion of black identity, culture and aesthetics. Butake’s shift to work directly in community spaces can be interpreted as part of the larger pluralistic and mutative black intellectual traditions, ever dynamic and responsive to particular historical circumstances. For instance, the Pan African movement, as an intellectual project engaged not only in the agency of liberating theAfrican continent but also more importantly in confronting and contesting the ideological discourses and paradigms of the colonizing west. As Eddy Maloka- the president of African Association of Political science (AAPS)-argues: The Pan-African project evolved in the context of the anti-colonial struggles, and came to entail four elements: sense among Africans on the continent and those in the Diaspora of themselves as ‘one’people because of common historical experience and destiny, the quest for the generation; ‘awakening’ or ‘renaissance’ of Africa on the social, culture and economic fronts as well as in global affairs; the ‘dream’ of an Africa united in the social, culture, economic and political spheres; and spirit of solidarity among people of African descent (2006:1). Butake’s drama and theatre practice so to speak can be located within that continuum of black intellectual tradition that emerged during the colonial period but which still remains relevant long after colonialism. But the role of the black intellectuals, such as Butake, in the post-colonial period appears to be more complicated and intricate; leading to deliberate shifts to the more public performance spaces. Indeed during this period, the African intellectual has had to frequently redefine his roles, functions and responsibilities to correspond with the dynamics of post colony. For example, in the new political, social and economic order, the black intellectual finds his responsibilities to be much wider as he must, not only engage with the past, but must also engage with the present Getting Heard 27 transforming society if his knowledge and ideas are to remain relevant. The intellectual must also...