The secondary school music curriculum under 8-4-4 made traditional Kenyan music a core part of the syllabus through all four years. Students learned about music’s cultural significance and the musical practices of various communities across the country. While everyone had well-developed forms of musical expression, the peoples of Western Kenya took up more pages in the textbooks. The instruments of the Isukha and the Teso were numerous and varied in material and style of play, made for complex melodies. The pictures of the performers in the books showed elaborate costumes and ensembles. It all spoke to a heritage of craftsmanship and artistry channeled through musical performance. Which brings me to my main point. Where can you realistically expect to see a culturally accurate performance of a traditional Idakho wedding song complete with accompanying instruments?

The National Drama and Film Festivals. That’s where.

Once a year (twice if you were a debate/choral verse kid or the cooler variant of choir/drama club kid) the country holds drama and music festivals where all schools are welcome to enter and compete in various artistic categories. With the support of teachers and trainers, the students battle it out with the goal of making it to the national level and winning.

The nationals are an extravaganza. For a whole week, scores of school buses clog the host institution’s field, rooms to rehearse in are fought over, teachers engage in Machiavelli-level politics over who performs when, lifelong friendships are made and careers are born. 

The place to be is the halls. It is going to be a crush but you want to get right up front or find a nice high vantage point in the back. You want to be there when Chavakali High get on stage. You do not want to miss Bunyore girls or Friends School Kamusinga. It is not just the shoulders and drums, although those are very cool too. It is the sound, the energy, the presence. And yes, this is not just some unnameable magic passed down through the centuries. It is also the result of consistent investment by the schools – setting aside budgets, finding trainers and coaches, providing clubs with the time and resources needed to become champions. 

We can assume that this is how the Butere Girls drama club, performing the play Echoes of War qualified for the 2025 National Drama Festival. A distinguished playwright wrote and directed the play. He also happens to be a politician who has found himself amongst the ever growing pile of key players who have fallen out of favour with the top brass of the day’s Kenya Kwanza (KK) ruling coalition. Officials attempted to disqualify the play earlier in the competition but it still went on to the nationals. When it was disqualified from the national contest, the school went to court and a judge ruled in the school’s favour. Ultimately, the play was not performed at the national stage as the girls refused to perform without their director. Teargas ensued.

Up until the court’s ruling, the events mirror those of Shackles of Doom, a 2013 Butere Girls play that was also banned from the nationals for failure to promote national cohesion. This incident and successful legal challenge that followed helped to launch Malala’s political career. In fact, the anti-corruption, anti-nepotism stance of the play may have endeared Malala to certain actors who were then laying the groundwork for the Kenya Kwanza regime. 

The subject matter differs but both plays are critical of government corruption, impunity, and rights abuses. It begs the question, why did the Echoes of War run end with teargas, arbitrary arrest and a principal facing punitive disciplinary action? 

Cleophas Malala’s involvement is probably what did it. All drama festival plays are about systemic injustice and the haves exploiting the have nots. Corruption, state-sponsored violence, neocolonialism and similar themes are so common as to be the rule. The difference is that those other plays were not bankrolled and written by the former secretary general of the president’s own party turned critic. The CS of Education even wondered aloud as to why a person unaffiliated with the school would be the one writing the play. Sadly, no one told him that all the language teachers are all buried under ever growing stacks of schemes of work, papers and assignments to be graded. He went on to dissuade politicians from using students to settle political scores, inadvertently hinting at the bigger issue with Malala’s prominence in the saga. 

Why are politicians so closely involved with schools?

Once we step back and take a broader view of the problem, sponsoring a drama club seems like small potatoes. From brand new buses to entire class blocks, politicians love spending money in schools. Not all schools and certainly not in any way that might lead to lasting, meaningful improvement for their constituents but this is not new. Depending on how you look at it, public schools have been used to execute political agendas since the first ones were established by British colonists.

Formal western education came to Kenya along with Christian missionaries. Once British rule was established, they started to build schools. Eventually, they got around to building some for Africans. These early schools worked to unmoor young people from their communities and cultural roots, training them in the ways of the coloniser so that they would help reinforce the colonial project. This is why so many of our founding statesmen are alumni of that school near Thogoto. 

If you did not read Thiong’o’s The River Between at school, you’ve certainly perused Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Both are fictional accounts of this transitional period where missionary schools were coming up and starting to recruit African converts. Early graduates went off to universities abroad or took government positions.

Enter President Moi. The teacher, the farmer, the force behind the massive expansion in school infrastructure and policies that helped tens of thousands to access tertiary education. He did not just build new schools all over the country including colleges to train the teachers who would later staff those schools, he also started a nationwide free milk program. Music and drama festivals?  Him too. If you ask those who grew up in that generation they might tell you a story of how hearing Moi was visiting your school was as close as they could ever get to an American kid’s excitement about a visit from Santa Claus. He’d arrive with trucks full of brand new bata shoes, enough grain and flour to last you months and always, always, milk. Were the bags of flour marked as disaster relief meant for those affected by the devastating 1984/5 famine? Yes, but just drink your milk.

The Beginning of NG-CDF

After Moi, nyayo-esque generosity was formalised by President Kibaki with the creation of NG CDF or Constituency Development Fund. Though declared unlawful several times over, MPs continue to receive millions of taxpayer shillings over which they have full discretionary control. Given free reign, most seem to have chosen to focus exclusively on fraud-friendly schemes and re-election efforts. All while the country’s education system unravels. The TSC claims it cannot hire teachers for lack of funds and schools cannot implement the new curriculum for the same reason. Children are packed into classes and dorms, receiving far below the most basic standard of care. With MPs and elected officials across the board happy to exchange a million or more to sink a borehole in exchange for being the guest of honor at a packed school event, quid pro quo arrangements are inevitable. While not inventing the practice of putting money in schools to serve politics, the astronomical amounts presently at play take it from passive electioneering to something else entirely.

Cleophas Malala

Granted, Malala never got his hands on that sweet CDF money. He was, however, still an MCA and then a senator so he still enjoyed years of amassing wealth and leveraging it for political gains. His and other politicians’ vested interests in schools should be interrogated but zeroing in on a school play ignores the larger, more urgent issues.

The simple fact of Malala being the voice behind the play could have been enough to elicit the state’s response. Perhaps the difference between 2013 and 2025 comes down to different strokes for different folks. What is cool to one co-accused at the ICC may be unacceptable to another co-accused at the ICC.  

Still, it could have been the subject matter of the play that did it. We know that vocalized dissent is a real problem for William Ruto. The children at the festival in Nakuru are not the first to feel the sting of Ruto’s teargas as retaliation for demanding their rights.

In the play, a series of old tweets that were critical of the government lead to the forced disappearance of the main character. Is this enough to have armed police guards blocking the entries to a hall just to keep people from seeing a play where one of the characters is apparently pregnant with…..hope but also….a bomb? Well, worse has been done for less. 

And if you factor in all the officials who would have caught wind of this and taken it upon themselves to fix it, it is almost obvious. It is precisely the kind of cartoonish plan that only a real bootlicker could invent. 

1. Arrest a citizen just to undermine his right to move freely in his own country. 
2. Get the girls to perform but for an empty hall. 

And if people try to get in and see it? 

3. Police. 

Awkward pregnancy metaphor aside, comparisons to Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s I Will Marry When I Want, which was banned by President Jomo Kenyatta are fitting. Ngugi was arrested and tortured, eventually forced into exile. Censorship is a tool of tyranny. Control over what information people have access to is crucial to holding on to power. Authoritarians often start with the freedoms we take for granted. Who cares if some troll blogger vanishes without a trace? Why shouldn’t the board members who approve setbooks be required to profess their belief in God? 

A possible answer is in Tanzania, where the main opposition party was just banned from the elections and Tundu Lissu, the party leader, was arrested and charged with treason. Diabolical as that is, there was a little more urgency when the ruling government was forcefully evicting an estimated 100,000 indigenous Maasai from the Ngorongoro conservancy on ‘conservation grounds’. 

How do we go from a banned school play written by a washed up politician to the return of one party rule and political prisoners?

No one knows. It is different every time. This is why most countries have enshrined a set of fundamental rights which, if protected, should foster a free society.

But some people still try to find out how, why and when we fumble. There are people who dedicate themselves to articulating the individual, systemic and societal forces that influence how we live. They theorize over why some people seek power at all costs. They’ve been known to lay bare the conflicts that plague humanity. They argue, they ridicule, they provide catharsis and hope, they hold collective memory and allow us to know each other better. They breathe vitality into the competing narratives that are essential for societies to evolve. 

They do this through composing music, creating art, writing books, dancing and singing. 

They are the journalists who turn into relentless pests when looking for the answers they know are there. 

They are the music producers who went way beyond the textbooks of their childhood and found the cultural sounds we condemned to history’s grave.  

They are the photographers who would rather be chasing lions for international cover photos but need to give a human face to the street families of Thika. 

They are the actors who, when asked to participate in a sham showcase, proved that courage in the face of a tyrant is not reserved for characters in plays.

We wore our hearts upon our sleeves,
The curtains rose, but silence stayed,
Our stories spilled, unheard, unseen.