Versatile Mulwa has rested, but the show he loved will carry on

Mwalimu David Kakuta Mulwa, a legendary icon in the Kenyan creative industry with over 50 years of vast experience and having inspired generations after generations both academia and creative industry.[FILE,Standard]

It is Chinua Achebe who says that some people (are so lucky that they) have their kolanuts broken for them by the gods. And when it comes to talent and versatility, David Kakuta Mulwa, passed away on December 5, was up there with the best.

So versatile was he that for a whole week, we have been struggling to make up our minds who he truly was. He not only featured in the original cast of Francis Imbuga’s canonical play, Betrayal in the City, he also appeared in popular TV shows such as Makutano Junction and films including To Walk with Lions, Dangerous Affair and Born Free. He taught creative writing and theatre arts and mentored countless emerging authors, some of whom have gone on to become celebrated writers in their own right.

Long before I met the bespectacled man of letters, I had encountered his impressive list of plays, mostly as an undergraduate student of Literary Studies. For literature majors, you had to read so many books you barely had a life outside the pages.

It was in that world of letters that we came across numerous plays, including Daraja (1986), Master and Servant (1987) and Redemption (1990). After college, while doing work-related research, I discovered Clean Hands and Glasshouses (both 2000). It was, however, his play Inheritance, published by Longhorn in 2004, that piqued my interest to work with him.

I had just joined Oxford University Press (East Africa) in 2009 and had been tasked with assembling a team of authors for a new literary series targeting secondary school students. In the past years, I had found myself nervous at the prospect of meeting a prominent author whose works had been in circulation since I was a toddler.

With Mulwa, however, it was different. He was already published by OUP and kept stopping by my desk to say hi whenever he was around. Besides, we had met at several events, so it was easy to rope him into the new series. When he heard about the project, he initially thought he would contribute as a playwright, as that had been his mainstay, but seeing how well he handled dialogue in plays, it was tantalising to imagine what he would do with prose fiction. That is how I ended up editing We Come in Peace, a novella that examines the cunning of a seemingly benign colonial expedition that extends a fake hand of goodwill, only to reveal its lethal fangs of domination and exploitation. On the surface, the novella shows how newcomers to Africa before the 20th century tricked their hosts into welcoming them with open arms, only to realise that the newcomers were keen to – again as Achebe would have it – extend the handshake beyond the elbow, in an embrace with the proverbial leper that left the hosts gasping under the yoke of cultural disruption and economic exploitation.

You should have seen Mulwa, seated across from my desk, the veins on his face dilating with mock horror, changing his voice to mimic Kaveni wa Musyoka, the narrator in the novella, recounting how the deck of a ship named The Man of War was stained with blood, including Kaveni’s own, during the brutal conditions of captivity as the enslaved were transported towards the slave coast.

For me, the script was not only about the historical violence and militarised oppression of the slave-trade era, but about the human mind’s tendency to fall for the wiles of those who promise good tidings but turn out to be predators. The instances of dialogue were as sharp as in Inheritance, and the scenes so vivid that instead of writing a blurb, one just needed to extract a scene from the script itself. It was little wonder that shortly after publication, in the 2011–2012 award cycle, the novella won in the youth category of the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature.

In 2014, my former boss at Oxford, Kithusi Mulonzya, called me to edit another script by Mulwa. I had already left the publishing industry and was working at The Standard. That is how I found myself meeting Mwalimu Mulwa over weekends at his house in Utawala or at Triple-O restaurant off the Eastern Bypass, the last time accompanied by Cosmas Mwaniki Kapingazi, literature teacher and author.

The end product was Flee, Mama Flee, a harrowing yet inspiring story of Mama, an enslaved African woman who refuses to submit to brutality, dehumanisation and systemic oppression. After suffering repeated violations and losing her children, she summons the courage to escape with other enslaved women..

The novel chronicles their flight through forests, hostile terrain and the constant threat of recapture, portraying both the terror and fierce resilience of women determined to reclaim their humanity. Flee, Mama Flee was the runner-up for the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 2015.

After these two projects, Mulwa continued involving me in his work, including a series straddling the novel and TV series genres. He continued writing even after he stopped enjoying his drink due to health issues. Though I had not met him recently, every phone conversation confirmed that he kept his own advice – “keep writing” - to the many young writers and thespians he mentored.

In a late-night conversation on Thursday, Kinyanjui Kombani, the author of The Last Villains of Molo, recalled how he first presented his raw script to Mulwa at Kenyatta University. Mulwa termed it a masterpiece and advised Kombani to have it typed and submitted for publication.

The novel is widely acclaimed for its powerful exploration of ethnic conflict and post-colonial Kenyan society. Mulwa features prominently in Kombani’s forthcoming autobiography, having encouraged him to “keep writing” long after both had left Kenyatta University. 

As the patron of Kenyatta University Travelling Theatre, Mulwa not only featured in Kombani’s stage production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, but also roped in other lecturers.

Kinyanjui recalled how, after breaking a leg on the steps of the Kenya National Theatre, Mulwa proceeded to play his part while seated, as an ambulance waited outside. That was vintage Mulwa. He always reminded his charges that the “show must go on”.

Indeed. Rest well, Mwalimu. The show still goes on.