Fare thee well Mulwa, champion of Kenya’s literature and arts

Veteran writer and thespian David Mulwa, who died on December 5 aged 80, was, no doubt, a true colossus of Kenyan literature.

Not only was he a teacher under whose watch many of Kenya’s leading writers—and editors— honed their craft, but he was also an immensely gifted writer and award-winning actor whose work and roles made a lasting mark on the country’s literary, theatrical and cinematic landscapes.

His death, following those of Athol Fugard (South Africa), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya), Morabo Morojele (Lesotho), Sonallah Ibrahim (Egypt), John Habwe (Kenya) and Thomas Stoppard (Britain),deepens the sense that 2025 has been a bleak year, on in which the loss of literary giants, more than State-driven persecution, censorship and book bans, has fulled the despair felt by book lovers in Kenya and across the world.

At a moment like this, when Kenya and the world appear seized by a Gen Z wave of revolutionary energy, the loss of writers and more so that of Mulwa, strikes a painful blow at the very purpose of art: truth-telling, nurturing hope, expanding our collective imagination and uplifting the human spirit. 

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At the height of the Gen Z-led anti-tax protests of June-July last year, my friend Adipo Sidang’s play Parliament of Owls became a rallying point of the movement. And in the early 1960s, during Uganda’s first Independence Day celebrations, it was Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ‘The Black Hermit’ that actors brought to life on stage as a vivid expression of the era’s zeitgeist. 

In these times, when leaders in our region grow even more authoritarian, the artist’s place becomes even more vital. As an exemplar, an enabler and a torchbearer of political consciousness, the artists role can only rise toward near-messiah stature. As we have seen recently in the US, where tens of thousands of books have been banned, autocratic rulers feel “safe” and firmly rooted in their supposed, divinely sanctioned tyranny only when the public is dulled into a state of mindless submission, an endless, starless midnight of cultural darkness where art is absent and enlightenment suppressed. It is the silencing of memory-keepers that makes writer deaths and even book bans, so tragic. The values embedded in art are the true casualties.
Fare thee well, David Mulwa.

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