The Trial Of Dedan Kimathi

NGUGI WA THIONG'O, though best known as a novelist-his works widely read throughout the world-is also a prolific playwright. Among his published plays are: This Time Tomorrow, The Black Hermit, and Ngaahika Ndeenda (co-authored with Ngugi wa Miiri) which has been translated into both Kiswahili and English. (The Black Hermit has been translated into Kiswahili.) Before his detention in 1982, Ngugi was Chairman, of the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi. MICERE GITHAE MUGO has been writing since 1962 but is well known for her involvement in theatre (from the age of eight). Her works have been published in many journals and magazines of literature. She has written a play entitled Daughter of My People, Sing, and she is also a renowned poet with such published collections as My Mother's Song and Other Poems (published in the E.A.E.P's Poets of Africa series). Has the theme of the Mau Mau liberation struggle against the British colonial forces been adequately treated in Kenyan literature? Why has this literature on the whole been so submissive, hardly depicting the masses as capable of making history? Why have the artists in Kenya not been singing praises of heroes like Dedan Kimathi and their epic deeds of resistance? Whose history and whose have the writers and historians been recording? These are some of the questions that led Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Micere Githae Mugo to write The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a powerful play dramatising Kenya's liberation struggle, focusing on Dedan Kimathi, a celebrated leader of the Mau Mau revolution. In spite of all the pressure that is brought to bear on him, Kimathi refuses to surrender to British imperialism.