Songs and Politics in Eastern Africa

9. Orature of Combat: Cultural Aesthetics of Song as Political Action in the Performance of the Mau Mau Songs

201 9 Orature of Combat: Cultural Aesthetics of Song as Political Action in the Performance of the Mau Mau Songs Bantu MWAURA PhD. Candidate, New York University When Carothers (1954) wrote that: Social conformity was not here so dominant a note, and it is perhaps significant in this connexion that Tracey, in a study of African music several years ago, found less music among the Kikuyu than in any other East African tribe he studied… (1954: 5) … it was part of his duty as a hired anti-Mau Mau propagandist of the colonial government. As such, it was in total disregard of the reality and of what other White settlers had hitherto recorded. Scoresby and Routledge had, 44 years earlier, recorded their observations about the Gikuyu community and their musicality: The Akikuyu as a race are gifted with the musical ear. Their songs are almost always improvised solos with a chorus sung to a well-known air. Some hundreds of persons, strangers to one another, will join in a song with a dash and precision of a trained choir. The rhythmical movements of their dances, too, show their marked sense of musical time. By song and dance they give expression to their emotions with a spontaneity that is quite foreign to us. (Routledge and Routledge, 1910: 111) It is evident that music was an important anchor in Gikuyu orature and performance art, and a preferred way of social comment and analysis. In this analysis, the term ‘performance’ as opposed to ‘theatre’ is used because, in my view, it is inclusive of extra-Aristotlean criteria for tragedy as a dramatic frame. In this sense ‘performance’ is not restricted to the lineal narrative flow with a tragic ‘hero’, and with the aim of effecting a carthasis on the part of the audience. Rather, 202 performance is a response to stimuli in life experience with a conscious aim of arousing the consciousness of the intended ‘audience’ to respond to the stimuli both reactively and proactively. The ‘audience’ in this respect is not therefore the passive group of a theatric presentation, but a group deliberately expected to particiapte in the encompassing experience. As Frances Harding says of the Tiv (of Nigeria) performance as political action during the years of colonial rule, “…There is very little fictionalisation in such performances and any conceptual line dividing the ordinary everyday action and reaction from the performed action is deliberately interwoven.” (1990: 17) The view expressed in this paper is that the non-fictionalised function of the Mau Mau songs has attributes of both ritual and drama—efficacious and entertaining. Ritual and drama is referred to in the Soyinkan sense of ‘cleansing, binding, communal, re-creative force’ that encapsulates dramatic representation of experience as ‘a communal evolution of the dramatic mode of expression’ (1976). It is an expression of communal history, morality, affirmation, challenges and aspirations, and an expression with a conscious aspiration towards a re-constructive efficacy. In reference to the performability of the Mau Mau songs, the argument here is that the choice of song as an artistic genre and as a performance mode clearly underlines the conscious intention of an entertainment quality. By the virtue of the form, a functional aesthetics is targeted, which appeals to both the rational and emotive senses. No meaningful cultural-historical reconstruction (the essence of anticolonial struggles) can occur without the conscious involvement of the body, mind and soul. The aesthetics in the Mau Mau songs functioned as a carrier of hope, and a celebration of a triumphal future. The sanguine rendition of threnody in this artistic respect is therefore nothing but a conviction of triumph. Another important aspect of the performability of the Mau Mau songs is the relation of the performance to the meaning and use of space. As with the Tiv, so with the Mau Mau freedom fighters, “it is not possible […] to consider the use of performance […] as political action displayed or transformed into ‘play’” (Harding, 1990: 174). And if the reason for this is partly the fact that the Mau Mau songs were modelled along Gikuyu traditional art forms like the Rwimbo—which translates both as, ‘to sing’ and ‘to dance’, “In Gikuyu the verb ‘kuina’ 203 means to sing, to dance, to perform a dance. In the Gikuyu cultural milieu song and dance are, generally speaking, not separable, so even the phrase ‘kuina rwimbo’ translates as both to sing (a song) and...