Introduction
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu’s 1989 A Play of Ghosts is an unconventional play. In its cast is the fictional author of the play, Kema, who is also the heroine’s lover, the producer of the play, and then the heroine, Victoria. For a play that has its author and producer as part of the characters, it is not surprising then that it has no defined plot. The work may be described as coming from a mad genius, and Uzoatu would not be annoyed by this description, for it is one of his characters, Mentalo, the heroines’s sister, who defines madness as “unrequited genius.” The unconventional nature of the play notwithstanding, A Play of Ghosts celebrates language while showing that the tragic fall in society is bound to produce “stage-struck ghosts of the ghetto,” human beings who are nothing but ghosts of destruction—metaphorically dead and literally destroying the stage nature has thrust them upon, the society. The play also shows that these ghosts can become humans again, can “regain their basic humanity” through unity and collective “commitment to the community,” even though this may initially lead them to many false starts.
Hotel Victoria
Most the of the play’s scenes occur in Hotel Victoria, a brothel referred to as the “the veritable house of sin” by Producer. The birth of this brothel is a testament to how exclusion from the formal economy can force people into doing anything to survive. Mentalo and his sister, Victoria, the heroine, are orphans trying to survive in a world where they are jobless even with their university degrees. “University graduates no longer get jobs. Those who are employed get no salaries,” laments Mentalo. Yet, they must pay rent to Alhaji in whose house they live, if they are not to be evicted. Alhaji is aware of the power he wields over the siblings and wishes to take advantage of it to make Victoria his tenth wife. Victoria who is engaged to the equally poor Kema, the son of the revolutionary Erinye, for whom she gets pregnant.
Mentalo pressures Victoria to accept Alhaji’s proposal so that they can continue to have a roof over their heads, a suggestion that leads to a fallout between the siblings, each accusing the other of being selfish. For Mentalo the fight is for the money and not some kind of poor love that Kema confesses. “Money is the lingua franca,” Mentalo maintains, yet Victoria announces her unwillingness to learn the language.
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There is a limit though to how long the disadvantaged can hold out and Victoria soon reaches her limit on the night Alhaji visits when she was on her lowest. After that night, the version of Victoria that fights for love and abhors the language of money dies. In her abortion of Kema’s foetus, she attempts to kill everything about Kema in her, especially the idea of a true love that is not transactional. This leads to the establishment of the first Hotel Victoria, right there in Alhaji’s house where she lives with Mentalo. On the nights she has customers, Mentalo sleeps outside so that Victoria and her customers can have the house to themselves. She understands that this is a walk into darkness, but one she readily embraces, such that when Mentalo insists that Victoria is not a prostitute but only an unfortunate girl trying to survive, Victoria replies, “The truth is we manage to exist because I sell my body. There’s nothing to be ashamed of calling the profession its real name. The time is past when I was bitter. For me now, it is the simple philosophy: Life goes on.”
After a fire incident leads to the destruction of the first Hotel Victoria, Victoria establishes a bigger and better one with the help of Alhaji who makes his money from politics, and even recruits two girls to join her in the business. On the signboard of this new “veritable house of sin” is the motto: Love is Naked.
Kimathi Street or The Place of Revolution
Named after the Kenyan revolutionary, Dedan Kimathi, Kimathi Street close to where the first Hotel Victoria was located, breeds radical revolutionaries. Those are the kind of revolutionaries who like Kema says, “That we may not succeed shouldn’t stop us from striving,” the type that seems to strive sometimes just for the fun of striving. Politicians like Alhaji make it possible for Kimathi Street to continue brewing revolutionaries for the person excluded from the government finds there their succour and hope. The “Sons of Erinye,” as these revolutionaries are called, are the common man’s answered prayers. When Kema was beaten and left to die by Mentalo, it was Producer, another son of Erinye that rescues and saves him. Yet, their brotherhood is one that forgives such that when Mentalo, homeless after the burning of the first Hotel Victoria and his fallout with his sister is left with nowhere else to go, they warmly welcome him.
Contradictions in Kimathi Street
Mentalo’s case is one of the “false starts” that happen when “stage-struck ghosts of the ghetto” try to regain their humanity. When he joins the Sons of Erinye, Mentalo who encouraged his sister to go into prostitution, suddenly develops an unquenchable disgust for prostitutes. One may think that this happens because he has developed better ethics, but the truth is that Mentalo’s annoyance is out of an unsettled vendetta he has with his sister. Even as a revolutionary, we still see a Mentalo who does not regard women as equal to him, a Mentalo Victoria says, “knows it’s only me he can dominate.” That is the same revolutionary Mentalo who jokes that “Today’s girls start as prostitutes only to end up as virgins after pentecostal visitation!”
Even as a revolutionary, we still see Producer, one of the earliest customers of Victoria, being easily distracted by the promise of sex that he postpones revolution to indulge the flesh. The quickest revolutionary change occurs in Lola, one of the prostitutes working with Victoria, who says that “Nobody goes to Kimathi Street and remains the same. There, the dead wake.” But even her awakening still comes with the false start of believing in lies against Victoria and seeing her as the enemy instead of a victim like herself. With many misplaced acts, including the murder of the presidential adviser, Chief (Dr.) Timothy Koburu after he shot a son of Erinye and the attempted killing of Alhaji, the revolutionaries try to regain their humanity, if through contradictions.
Through his revolutionaries, Uzoatu argues that the voice of reason may come from the most unexpected of places, like a brothel. Mimi, the second girl working with Victoria laments “It’s so sickening to contemplate that because of an imagined revolution young men are brainwashed to wander the streets looking for who will kill them.” Before visiting the Kimathi Street, Lola, yet another prostitute, comments of Mentalo “This man combines the tough talking of emergency revolutionaries with the sentimentality of an undersexed refugee.” Through these comments by the prostitutes Uzoatu highlights the plights of the masses of unguided youths, in different parts of Africa, and the world at large, recruited into many freedom fighting schemes, where they unnecessarily sacrifice their lives, without really understanding what it is they fight for, while destabilizing the society. The comments may also be interpreted as mild disapproval of armed and violent revolution as it leads to the waste of lots of young lives.
Salvation in Kimathi Street
Towards the end of the play though, we begin to see more wholesome revolutionaries, those who can no longer be pejoratively referred to as “emergency revolutionaries.” There, we see Kema analyse the paradox of the politicians’ efforts thus “Politicians all through history fight honest words and ghosts instead of providing the good that will keep people away from violence.” We see the tough talking Mentalo agree with Mimi that “We [the revolutionaries] rush into the jaws of perdition and we think we are martyrs.” This growth in their revolutionary vision brings about forgiveness and unity. We no longer see fracas between Victoria and her girls, Mentalo and Kema, or Victoria and Mentalo. Rather, we see them united against Alhaji, one of the politicians who made them miserable. This unity is marks a buildup to the regaining of their basic humanity. They finally achieve the restoration of their humanity once they are able to control their anger and not murder Alhaji like they did Chief Koburu. Kema’s speech at this moment is worth reproducing here. Speaking to an enraged Mentalo, he said:
Mentalo, we have come a long way to this point. We never started out looking for men to kill; it was only what a few of our fellows represented that we set to root out. The measure of our success is how effectively we bring along these people and not how efficiently we eliminate them. For killing the individual is the vocation of those who are haunted by ghosts and pursue easy victory for victory’s sake. We fight for life and victory does not exist by itself. Victory lies in the struggle and the will to go the distance.
On Dedan Kimathi and Violent Revolution
Uzoatu’s A Play of Ghost is subtle in what I reckon to be its critique of the Mau Mau resistance led by Dedan Kimathi after whom the Kimathi Street—where young people are radicalised in the play—is named (and indeed, of other resistance struggles of such nature). It enters a conversation with The Trial Of Dedan Kimathi, published in 1976 as a collaborative effort between Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo. While Ngugi and Mugo’s play “sing[s] the praises of the deeds of this hero of the resistance who refused to surrender to British imperialism,” Uzoatu, in A Play of Ghosts, looks at how even the freedom fighters can be part of the problem they attempt to solve, a perspective that has been much explored, both literarily and from the point of factual historical inquisition, when it comes to Dedan Kimathi, a controversial figure.
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Uzoatu’s focus is not on Kimathi as a historical figure though. It is on the youths whom he insists must understand what it is they fight for, and fight appropriately, not with matchets and guns as “stage-struck ghosts of the ghetto” are wont to, but with unity “and the commitment to the community,” as humanity demands. Uzoatu’s approach to revolution differs from Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo’s, who seem to consider violent revolution as a necessary evil, and the lives lost as collateral damages, in that Fanonian sense. While Irobi, for another example, in his 1991 Nwokedi, fronts Nwokedi, the violent revolutionary, as some sort of the ideal freedom fighter, Uzoatu in this play insists that the ideal revolutionary looks nothing like Nwokedi for the ideal revolutionary must strategise on how to effectively get even the enemies on board, rather than how to efficiently eliminate them.
Beyond the heaviness of the play and how deftly and convincingly Uzoatu presents his case, the play excels also in the crafting of its dialogues. When talking of how military dictators transition to civilian presidents and wield power even when they are not supposed, we hear Producer saying, “When I put on khaki, I am in power. When I put on agbada, I am equally in power. Aaaah, I am still in power even when I go stark naked!” Such clear-eyed witticism is found throughout the play, like when Victoria, speaking on the same phenomenon as Producer says, “Politicians and soldiers are Siamese twins joined at the stomach!” and when Mentalo trying to prove that he knows what he is doing says “I am not foolish like sardines that lock themselves inside a can and leave the key outside.” There is no shortage of comments that make the reader stop to think and chuckle, in the play. We smile when Producer said of Mentalo “This bloke is really of the forsaken streets, the unsung number of the ethos, the guru of the wit of desolation” and when he answered Mentalo’s question of whether it is advisable for a man to sleep with his pregnant wife with “Say, don’t you give more fertiliser to a growing maize plant?” And when Victoria says, “the author never dies,” we stop to contemplate that sort of immortality that comes with authorship, with being a creator.
Conclusion
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu’s A Play of Ghosts is indeed an unconventional beauty. Its content preaches commitment to community and the collective struggle as necessary to solving societal issues, yet its forms commits to no clear arrangement. From chaos, order must arise, it seems to say.
Artwork: moving through shadows… acrylics/backcloth on canvas by @Ronexarts 2020
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