The Maabara Initiative, a Nairobi-based experimental theatre production collective is bringing back the double bill to Nairobians on the last weekend of March 2023.
ROOTS by Wanjiku Mwawuganga and DILATION by Esther Kamba will be shown at Nairobi’s Goethe Institut on Friday, March 24th, and Saturday, March 25th at 7 pm respectively.
In ROOTS, Wanjiku Mwawuganga takes her audiences on a journey tracing her family tree. It is a genealogical story that starts with Wanjiku’s great-grandmother, the first family matriarch in her maternal bloodline, and trickles down to her grandmother, her mother, and finally to herself, and how she gives rise to two amazing girls, with whom she trusts the universe to transform into the future superwomen as has been the case in her roots.
Wanjiku also explores how colonialism caused generational trauma in African families, from the perspectives of women whose husbands fought in the liberation movement in Kenya, the MAU MAU. ROOTS is a train in which once Wanjiku welcomes you aboard, you want to stay awake till the final destination. Wanjiku uses English and Gikuyu to tell the story in an authentic way.
In DILATION, on the other hand, Esther Kamba asks us what it means to give birth to herself as a woman. What a mammoth question. The inspiration behind DILATION came a few years ago while Esther’s eyes were shut in a maternal facility, just moments after giving birth to her one and only child. DILATION is a poignant story that begins from the metaphysical as seen by Esther Kamba and transcends into our world that defines women according to the social constructs of gender norms and gender roles.
Esther questions what it means to come home, for a person who decides to gather the tiny bits of herself to leave a comfortable life in the West and return to their motherland in Africa, in the hope of breathing fresh and free air at home, only to find that things are not and will not always be the same for someone othered by the two spheres.
ROOTS and DILATION were produced by Maabara Initiative and debuted in October 2021 at the Kenya Cultural Center.
A month later after their premiere in Nairobi, Mwawuganga and Kamba began their journeys of taking Roots and Dilation on an international tour. The two performances opened at the prestigious SpielArt Theater festival in Munich, Germany in November 2021. Esther Kamba then later attended two other theatre festivals in Germany, Festival Theaterformen in Hannover and International Tanzmesse NRW in Dortmund.
Wanjiku’s ROOTS had its second leg of an international tour at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel in Zurich, Switzerland in early August 2022.
Later in 2022, ROOTS and DILATION embarked on a local tour in Kenya, where Mwawuganga and Kamba traveled to perform and conduct performance workshops at the Little Theatre in Mombasa and The Food Movement in Kilifi.
If you have not had a chance to catch these two phenomenal women telling their autobiographical stories with passion and authenticity, then this March 24th and 25th you have to come witness ROOTS and DILATION in Nairobi at Goethe Institut, Maendeleo House, along Monrovia Street.
Joseph Obel is a theatre critic and performer based between Nairobi and Kisumu. You can connect with him directly through jphochieng@gmail.com