“LOOK at me! People! Do you not know that AIDS kills? You are the culprits!” cries a young Sunday-school boy dressed as a grave- digger. He is teaching his elders about safe sex. He can’t be more than 11, and his antics would be shocking in a cosy British Sunday school. But this is Africa, where AIDS is devastating communities and silence is the biggest enemy.
Uranga is a village near Lake Victoria in Kenya. It is also the home village of George Odera Outa, professor of literature and dramatic arts at the University of Nairobi. Odera Outa uses traditional African theatre to teach villagers around the lake about health and the environment. Theatre is ideal for such impoverished communities, he says, because it reaches everyone. Most people here are illiterate. Parents don’t have the money to put their kids through school and can’t even afford radios.
The jolly gravedigger, brandishing his pick and a spade, is one of Odera Outa’s creations. “AIDS kills them quick, and I need some jobs,” he quips. Behind him, other children hold up a backcloth covered in drawings of graves. He is greeted by a sad young girl, Delilah, who became a prostitute when her family was killed.
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“Delilah, tell me what is wrong.”
“I have AIDS.”
“And I have a spade!”
The humour is dark, the message uncompromising. Delilah has conceived twins, and dies during childbirth. The infants perish from the AIDS they inherited from their mother. The gravedigger addresses the crowd. “People! Tell me!” he cries. “If the unborn die and their parents have no future, who will remain?” Unless they abstain from irresponsible sex outside marriage, he warns, his spade is the only remedy.
The children’s audacious caricatures of their elders make the audience in turn hide their faces in embarrassment and burst into laughter. “The kids reach out to their parents,” says Odera Outa. Strategies that work in the West, such as encouraging condom use, would not work here, he explains. Contraceptives go against local culture, and most people cannot afford them.
As we rattle down the dirt track back to the main town of Kisumu, Odera Outa tells me about the strong sense of theatre in Kenya. Traditionally, it formed part of daily life in the village, reflecting the concerns and experiences of villagers. Although theatre for development is not a new idea, Odera Outa’s master stroke, it seems, has been to weave messages into local songs, traditions and fables. “I’m not dealing with Western notions of theatre,” he says. Players here just turn up during the day and give an informal performance, encouraging villagers to join in.
Next day, we arrive at Kamito, a fishing village on Asembo Bay near Kisumu, to watch the Kadongo Women’s Group. Odera Outa helped the 10 women in the group to develop their skills, and regularly takes them on tour.
When we arrive, musicians start drumming and singing, quickly drawing a crowd. Many join in the dance. After a while, chairwoman of the group Margaret Anyango tells the audience that the group are teachers and asks them to pay attention so they can become teachers too.
Each session tends to include several plays dealing with different issues. One play today is One Bucket, which opens with a husband lounging around his house, with two guests, a man and his wife. The husband’s wife comes home and starts clearing up, washing their child’s soiled nappy in the basin. She tips the water out, and then immediately starts preparing fish to feed her guests—in the same basin.
“What are you doing?” demands the woman guest. She refuses to eat the fish, because it will make everyone sick. The wife admits that she and her children have suffered from diarrhoea, so her friend explains how to wash and prepare food hygienically.
“Did you see these things?” demands Anyango. The crowd replies Yes with one voice.
“Do you also do these things?”—Yes.
“And do you also have problems like diarrhoea?”—Yes.
An old man in the audience objects. “If these things happen,” he complains, “then it is the women’s fault.” Must he take Anyango as a wife so he can have a clean house? Anyango is having none of it. Teaching women so they can learn from each other is the best way to advance cleanliness, she argues. I don’t catch the rest of her onslaught, but as the stick-wagging woman gets into her stride, the man looks increasingly abashed.
The message has clearly sunk in. “It is very important,” says Martine, a local woman. “They taught us how to be clean,” she says, “and how to boil water.” Chief Aggrey Oluoch, the village leader, says he has seen the plays many times. “People appreciate it, think it is important and follow it,” he says.
The actors also enjoy their work. “We love it,” they tell me. “We feel we have affected the lives of women,” says Anyango. “Even the men are changing!” she chuckles.
But theatre is not just about development. Odera Outa is researching ways of using theatre to restore the Luo’s rich cultural heritage, especially the aspects that emphasise health and respect for the environment. Many of these ideas have been lost. “The encroachment of capitalism, particularly colonialism, has made people lose confidence in what they did over the ages,” he says.
Lake Victoria, for example, was once considered a god—a source of sustenance. “The lake occupies a central position in Luo cosmology,” explains Odera Outa. “I gather these ideas and see which ones can go into the plays.”
That evening, we see his “myth-making” in practice. Odera Outa wants to educate people about the wider environmental impacts on the lake—how factories are discharging industrial waste into its tributaries, for example. One of Odera Outa’s theatre groups, called PEEP, is performing in a fish-ing villagejust outside Kisumu. The pic-turesque scene of the lake and islands in the distance is marred by dense thickets of water hyacinth, a foreign invader that thrives on sewage and industrial effluent.
Two male actors don straw hats decorated with purple streamers, the traditional garb of fishermen, while a third starts beating a drum with a fast infectious rhythm. The two actors dance and clap, singing about AIDS and how the infection spreads. Gaggles of children collect, followed by adults. Several fishermen recline on chairs to watch.
Using a form of narrative called sigana—a blend of rhythm, allegory, song, story and mime—they tell how the lake came to be. It is a clever adaptation of a creation story, mixing traditional and Biblical myths. They sing of how God created the lake, and how people came to live by it and contaminate it. Mirroring the practices of the local people, they highlight the problem:
“Where shall I put the rubbish, mother?”
“Run to the lake, my daughter! It will solve your problem.”
The women lament the fate of the lake. “She was the greatest beauty…. They have raped her. They have contaminated her.” They mime the action of throwing rubbish into the lake. “We have choked her with industrial waste and with human waste.” The audience is enraptured.
Odera Outa’s efforts were rewarded last year with the St Andrew’s Prize, which recognises new and inspiring ideas to help the environment. He dreams of expanding the project to spread environmental and health messages further afield. But Odera Outa is realistic about how much theatre can achieve. “It must be seen as a means to an end within the wider concept of development in Africa,” he says. Theatre alone cannot cure poverty, clean up Lake Victoria, or end corruption and exploitation. But unless people know what’s going on around them, things will never change.
