It is deeply ironic that at a time when Kenyans are contracting and dying of cholera, the government found itself embroiled in a controversy regarding the cancellation of a mostly benign school play.
There is reason to believe that the play was cancelled solely because of the identity of the playwright, former Senator Cleophas Malala – a former official of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) who has since fallen out with the party’s leadership.
If the government’s intention was to bury the play, they should have learned about the logics of the Streisand effect – whereby the attempt to censor information leads to greater public awareness of the information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysDLz05ITOw
Echoes of War now has national notoriety simply because it was stopped from being staged at the national drama festivals. The play itself is fairly benign. I read all 41 pages of the document that rippled through WhatsApp groups on Wednesday night and found nothing that warranted the government’s heavy-handed reaction.
At its core, the play is an intergenerational conversation interspersed with the dilemmas facing an authoritarian ruler who nonetheless wants to please and pacify the same restive population that he oppresses.
One of the characters, Anifa, represents the youth who have sky-high expectations about their future. They want safety. They want jobs.
They want working education and health systems. They want a working society. The same young generation declares war (hence the title). They are out to fight their parents’ generation for clinging onto outmoded ways of ordering society. A war against religious leaders who protect the status quo.
And a war against society itself for impeding them from realising their dreams. There is nothing in the play that incites students to violence.
But as the Americans say, hit dogs holler. The government’s reaction is a dead giveaway that very senior thin-skinned people felt that the play touched on their failures. Instead of acting like grown-ups, they then had to subject the entire country to the drama of teargassing school children, summoning the playwright to a police station, attacking journalists covering the unintended drama and preventing the play from being staged.
All this is an affront to the freedom of speech that should not be allowed to stand. Kenyans of all stripes must not let themselves be distracted by arguments about protecting children from politics.
Not when a politics of low ambition is destroying our education and health systems, and robbing the same children of their future. Finally, I would like to congratulate the Butere Girls drama team for their bravery.
-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University
It is deeply ironic that at a time when Kenyans are contracting and dying of cholera, the government found itself embroiled in a controversy regarding the cancellation of a mostly benign school play.
There is reason to believe that the play was cancelled solely because of the identity of the playwright, former Senator Cleophas Malala – a former official of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) who has since fallen out with the party’s leadership.
If the government’s intention was to bury the play, they should have learned about the logics of the Streisand effect – whereby the attempt to censor information leads to greater public awareness of the information.
Echoes of War now has national notoriety simply because it was stopped from being staged at the national drama festivals. The play itself is fairly benign. I read all 41 pages of the document that rippled through WhatsApp groups on Wednesday night and found nothing that warranted the government’s heavy-handed reaction.
At its core, the play is an intergenerational conversation interspersed with the dilemmas facing an authoritarian ruler who nonetheless wants to please and pacify the same restive population that he oppresses.
One of the characters, Anifa, represents the youth who have sky-high expectations about their future. They want safety. They want jobs.
They want working education and health systems. They want a working society. The same young generation declares war (hence the title). They are out to fight their parents’ generation for clinging onto outmoded ways of ordering society. A war against religious leaders who protect the status quo.
And a war against society itself for impeding them from realising their dreams. There is nothing in the play that incites students to violence.
But as the Americans say, hit dogs holler. The government’s reaction is a dead giveaway that very senior thin-skinned people felt that the play touched on their failures. Instead of acting like grown-ups, they then had to subject the entire country to the drama of teargassing school children, summoning the playwright to a police station, attacking journalists covering the unintended drama and preventing the play from being staged.
All this is an affront to the freedom of speech that should not be allowed to stand. Kenyans of all stripes must not let themselves be distracted by arguments about protecting children from politics.
Not when a politics of low ambition is destroying our education and health systems, and robbing the same children of their future. Finally, I would like to congratulate the Butere Girls drama team for their bravery.
-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysDLz05ITOw
By Ken Opalo