Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Drama and the Kamiriithu Popular Theater Experiment

This is the first in-depth study of Ngugi’s drama and the Kamiriithu experiment in popular theater. Combining historical criticism, postcolonial and gender theory, Gicingiri Ndigirigi probes the dramatic texts for literary meaning while presenting them as the enactments and records of their respective socio-political milieu. He also locates the dramatic texts within their performance settings and discusses the politics associated with the performance of the major plays, Ngaahika Ndeenda, which were co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii and Maitu Njugira.

This book also reveals how Ngugi’s art becomes progressively people-centered through the incorporation of traditional Gikuyu performance modes in both the drama and fiction. The two Kamiriithu plays are presented here as a logical confluence of artistic and ideological motives in which the lives of the underprivileged of Kenya are made both the subjects and objects of the drama.

Unlike other commentators and critics of the Kamiriithu experiment, Ndigirigi also talked to the former Kamiriithu participants themselves in their own language and visited them in their homes and social environments. This gave him deep insight into the Kamiriithu itself and the people behind it—and he uses this knowledge to analyze the theater project and its critics. The book closes with a critical examination of developments in Kenyan theater since Kamiriithu.