I realised that I should give you a glimpse of my other hobby, being a playwright.
Location- somewhere in Africa
THE SWEEP
Scripted by poet mutiso
CHARACTERS
Setwe: mad man
Otulu: blind old man
Fwodu: graduate
Jitembe: medicine man
Warriors: voices
Protesters: voices
Place: Esebwa village
Ethnic groups: The Injina
The Lovureko
THE SWEEP
This country nurtured hope decayed,
The politician cruises on a 4WD guzzler,
The thief!
Feeling the base of his belly.
There is a slum in my heart
But I cannot relocate it to my foot
Nor hand nor back.
Its rusted tin makeshifts make my blood flow slow.
War has filled my heart with bullets,
Steel and blood cannot be swept away.
A bullet lodged in my head
Is another brain of the dead.
Africa my home
Africa my tomb.
SCENE ONE
Prologue
For a long time the Lovureko and the Injina in Esebwa village have nurtured an ancient grudge that has exploded into avenge without impunity.
This time, the Injina’s were caught unawares.
SETWE: (Early in the morning, on a lonely path from the village.)
I wanted to go with them,
I asked them!
Oh they refused; they refused!!
OTULU: (Coming on stage running)
What?
(Brandishing a walking stick)
What happened?
SETWE: (In a trance)
I can still see their angry faces
Their fierceness terribly enchanting
Their eyes, red, glowing, burning!
OTULU: You mean the Lovureko,
The raiders?
SETWE: They took with them Olorun, the best warrior in the village
All the elders...the women... our children.
All of them, see?
OTULU: (Nearly sobbing)
You mean no one is left in the village,
That they are all gone?
SETWE: No, no Otulurembwe, you and I, we are here.
They did not sweep us all.
Remember Fwodu?
Mmm… he still smuggles fish to Jitembe.
…And, by the way, what happened to your cheeks?
They look swollen and bloated like an overfed politician.
OTULU: (Swallows the insult)
Yeah, I roasted maize a couple of days ago,
And one got lost under my reed of a bed.
My walking stick could not reach it, but this morning, it rolled over.
It had all dried out.
I could not throw it though,
For it was like throwing my wisdom.
SETWE: Wisdom!
Working your worn out jaws for the sake of dry grains?
Wisdom in that block of a head?
I would rather be insane!
(Leaves shaking his head.)
OTULU: Yes you are insane,
You were a long time ago.
That was many years, when we were still young.
You started by pretending that you were mad,
So that you may avoid participating in the raids, or even hunting.
(He laughs)
You were lazy, and a coward!
Pretenders are worse than murderers.
You murdered yourself.
(He is shouting now)
You know why?
Because… because the madness stuck!!
Curtains
SCENE TWO
This scene occurs inside Jitembe’s hut. The hut is adorned typically as witchdoctors’, bones animal hides, and cowry shells e.t.c
Jitembe is a busy man, too busy to know that his village has been raided.
JITEMBE: (measuring the limbs of a fat toad.)
This is a real masterpiece.
Such a fat limb could send chills of its charm
Across the ridge of Esebwa and beyond.
(Staring at the limbs)
Who in this village can rival me?
I the only medicine man that reins.
OTULU: (Animated and furious as he approaches Jitembes’ hut)
I never did pretend I was blind,
It just came like flu.
JITEMBE: Otulu, is it you again?
Eeh… come in.
Now I have the answer,
The gods revealed to me your malady.
They say that you are a special case.
(Sadly)
They say that you have developed ancestral resistance.
OTULU: You do not know the beauty I see in my world.
JITEMBE: I know.
That is why you talk all by yourself,
Imagining that someone is listening.
Let me advise you old one,
No one really listens to your void mumbles,
No one ever listens!
Do you hear?
OTULU: Jitembe, I never listen to you and you never care.
So why should I in the whole world care
If no one listens to me?
Should I?
Tell me toad hunter; tell me.
FWODU: (He is heard whistling as he approaches Otulu and Jitembe, dangling a fish)
I have brought this straight from the river.
It has not even touched down.
JITEMBE: Fwodu, I can smell its rotten nature two ridges away.
FWODU: If you mix this rare species with a little of your antidote,
I bet it will make a potent concoction.
It is a royal among fishes.
JITEMBE: I do not want it, you smuggler.
FWODU: You still owe me the one I supplied last week.
JITEMBE: It was rotten.
FWODU: You preferred it that way.
By tomorrow you must pay,
But if you do not …
(Exits Fwodu)
OTULU: (Softly)
Why did you make me blind, Jitembe?
JITEMBE: Did you not hear me tell you?
It was the gods, they said …
OTULU: We had a feud over land.
JITEMBE: …that you could not be cured.
OTULU: Then there was this irritation in my eyes …
Yet I was seeing perfectly!!
JITEMBE: You had wronged the gods.
OTULU: Then you gave me black powder to apply in my eyes.
Black powder to ease the irritation.
JITEMBE: I just told you!
OTULU: (Pensively)
I never saw light again.
JITEMBE: You heard.
OTULU: It was the last reed!
(Pointing, mistakenly, his walking stick away from Jitembe)
You snatched away my vision.
You will pay for every single ray of light you owe me.
JITEMBE: Ahem
(And sneezes)
OTULU: (Turns swiftly, animated, angry)
You also took away my land you black magic wizard!
JITEMBE: (Shakes his flywhisk violently)
The gods are now angry.
They want me to cast a spell on you.
OTULU: If you are as powerful as you claim,
Why not use lizard tails to make yourself rich and famous.
Tell me Jitembe, I want to hear.
JITEMBE: Get out of my shrine; get out!
Just run to your hut and do not even try to look back.
OTULU: It is only those able to see
Are blinded from the truth.
I can feel the Earth tremble
Breaking away from reason.
Curtains
SCENE THREE
Fwodu sounded the alarm using the village chief’s horn. It was an urgent call to discuss the situation and fate of their village.
JITEMBE: (As he hears the trumpeting horn).
Whoever dreamt up a horn as a communication device was doomed never to awake from his nightmare.
(He dangles his flywhisk. Addresses the audience).
Just listen to that ear splitting noise.
Listen!
(The horn blows again).
Can you really tolerate that and later expect to hear someone whispering to you?
I bet you will not.
Listen again.
(The horn blows).
I swear to my ancestors that that is Fwodu the silly intellectual.
He is the loudest horn blower in the village.
That is why the elders prefer him.
With him blowing that horn, you can be sure it will be heard beyond the ridges of Esebwa.
(Musing)
I will attend the Baraza.
Maybe it is an aspiring member of parliament campaigning, and then I may get a tin of beans from him.
(Exit)
Fwodu enters the stage blows the horn once and sits on a stone as he awaits the villagers. Setwe and Otulu arrive and exchange greetings. Jitembe is the last to arrive.
JITEMBE: Where are the other villagers?
Four of us cannot make a Baraza, I thought …
FWODU: Please get seared so that we may proceed.
(Pause as Jitembe sits)
The main reason I called this meeting is to …
JITEMBE: You mean it is you Fwodu who has called this meeting?
Somebody give me water to drink.
OTULU: Shut up you sorcerer, I will not remind you that you have forgotten your amulets in your lair.
JITEMBE: A mans worth cannot be measured by the length of his trouser.
By the way, how did you know?
OTULU: I could always hear the rattle.
FWODU: …is to enable us discuss the fate that befell our villagers.
JITEMBE: Will someone tell me what has happened?
I can only see four of us in the village.
Will somebody tell me?
SETWE: (Whistles)
A whole witchdoctor does not know?
Jitembe, you must be a fraud.
JITEMBE: (Stands animated)
Just listen to the mad man.
He is crazy, crazy to the core!
Son of the crooked river, declare the number of cows you own, now that you challenge me.
SETWE: Even if I could have had cattle, the Lovurekos would have rustled them.
I do not chew thorns in my words, nor have I spat on your pathway
But I know, even in the village dance, I attract the most beautiful women.
JITEMBE: Hear! Hear!
You do not know how to address your fathers.
The white hair on my head is not grass.
Trust me, I have seen better days.
OTULU: The hair on your head is grass all right, especially the grass on my land.
The land that you grabbed!
FWODU: You are free to walk out of this meeting if it has not attained your standards.
And this applies to you all.
O.k. we shall begin by explaining where we were last night when the Lovureko attacked our village.
JITEMBE: Why is he bossing us around, has anyone ever heard of the word democracy?
Fwodu! I know you are one of them.
You went to the white mans school;
Where they write on flattened trees using rolling sticks.
We are not children; stop making rules here.
FWODU: I have never seen a blind witch doctor.
You mean you do not care about the plight of our villagers?
OTULU: You are insulting me.
FWODU: My apologies brother
It is this Jitembe; a lot of seriousness is required in this meeting to help us get organized.
We shall start with Setwe; where were you during the raid?
SETWE: (Stands, takes a small drum and starts to beat it without following a pattern. Stops, scratches his scalp as if an idea has struck his mind, laughs, beats the drum hysterically and sings.)
African fight African brother
African steal African brothers’ cattle
Colonialist come
He grabs African land
Brothers support each other to chase colonizer
Colonialist run away
Africans turn on each other
Fight over land
Kill each other.
Who was the enemy?
FWODU: Setwe! Setwe! … Setwe!
SETWE: (Turns abruptly as if awoken from a nightmare)
I was at the edge of the forest trying to convince the bees not to build their hives too high up the trees… see my back?
JITEMBE: It is swollen all over; you mean they stung you?
SETWE: They were such a mean lot.
(Sits)
OTULU: The sweetness of honey contradicts you.
SETWE: (Stands to demonstrate)
I ran very fast towards the village.
Then I met them!
OTULU: Who, the Lovureko?
SETWE: (As he utters the following words, a minimum of four extras pass armed with bows and arrows. They walk stealthily then perform a mock war, war cries and songs and then disappear backstage. Drums).
They had covered their faces, and decorated their shields.
Our villagers were tied in chains.
Then I saw Olorun, our bravest warrior, run with three spears lodged in his backside and fell.
They came to him and hacked all over his body.
Then they carried him away.
They did not know him or his mother; he did not know them or their sisters.
But they knew he was from the Injina tribe, and he knew they were the Lovurekos.
(Animated)
I wanted to go with them!
I asked them, but they refused!
JITEMBE: Who would ever want to go with you anywhere?
Even a fly will avoid you.
SETWE: They just shoved me aside, and passed.
FWODU: Next.
OTULU: Frankly, I cannot remember where I was at that moment.
As you all know, I became blind years back.
So I have forgotten the topography of the area.
JITEMBE: You mean even now you do not know exactly where you are?
OTULU: You do not understand.
Where I expect trees to be, I find they have been cut.
Grass has disappeared on the plains; gullies have formed on the hills.
Mansions have been built on the cleared forest.
Playing fields for our children have been fenced to build a hotel.
Roads washed away by rains.
See?
I cannot recognize any area or place.
Only my hut.
Does anyone understand?
FWODU: We do Otulurembe, we really understand.
OTULU: The other day, I nearly broke my ankle on a pothole in the market place.
Who is supposed to repair our roads?
(He spits)
The leaders of today, ha!
FWODU: They are the same leaders of yesterday who have hang on too long.
But why the laughter my friend, you seem bemused?
OTULU: No Fwodumare. Today’s laughter is mirthless, a mask that has cracked on my face.
It is a new way of crying for I cringe in sorrow.
FWODU: We are in this together Otulurembe.
Jitembe what about you, where were you during the raid?
JITEMBE: (Shakes his flywhisk)
Who does not know me, the great medicine man?
No one would dare touch me, let alone attack me.
As a matter of fact, I slept like a baby.
OTULU: Now we know the unpatriotic citizens.
People like Jitembe slept like a baby when the Lovureko sacked the village.
Jitembe, don’t you have any shame?
You thump your chest like a gorilla, yet you cannot stand up for the village?
He never even foresaw this disaster, foreseer indeed.
FWODU: The issue we are handling is very sensitive.
Let us avoid harboring grudges at all costs.
SETWE: Fwodu, tell us your story.
FWODU: Oh, I was just coming to that.
You all know that I had a grudge with our local chief.
He suggests that the law does not allow us to brew local alcohol.
That it is illegal.
JITEMBE: I cannot figure it out.
Does anyone know where the chief takes the brew he confiscates from Fwodu and his followers?
SETWE: Search me into the deepest recess of my misconstrued madness, my animosity.
My tattered self, tatters of Uhuru and its rotten fruits.
FWODU: Who does not know?
Very early in the morning if you look into the chiefs’ eyes, you see the unholy glow, red and watery.
I can bet on my beer jerricans that it is caused by hangover created by a million bells and rattles in a circumcision ceremony.
OTULU: Do not even remind me.
Last week he was barely able to open a Baraza.
ALL: (Laughter).
FWODU: He was always preaching about development projects, and of how committed Serikali is.
He promised us piped water two years ago, right?
ALL: Yes! Yeah!
FWODU: But what happened?
Only the Lovureko got piped water.
OTULU: For us the river is nearer than the taps, so we shall stay the way we are.
We shall continue to drink from the same cup with cattle.
Hear with our ears then close our minds
Listen to the sweet words of promise but not dream it
For there is always something for us
Something of nothing
But survive we must.
JITEMBE: It is a fact. It happens to the littlest of Esebwa village.
FWODU: Just like you I ask for my fish payment but you divinely say ‘come back tomorrow’.
JITEMBE: No my son, I only speak the tongue of the ancestors.
Though you graduated from the university, I never bewitch you so as to be unemployed.
I never mismanaged village finances
I never dug potholes on your doorstep.
I am just a poor ancestor-fearing citizen.
OTULU: You are too self-centered.
Why not sing the songs you want others to sing?
Just like the Prime Minister, you think we venerate you because nobody revolts.
But I tell you like a storm a revolution is building in my heart; and my heart is greater than any ocean.
For now I may seem to be busy trying to fill my perennially empty stomach like everybody else.
I have no time to dwell on democracy and potholes.
Within these words you will find the wisdom of the aged, of those who have seen the sun rise twenty thousand times and can still see.
FWODU: I remember the time I fell in love with the village chiefs’ daughter, oh what success?
You know I wanted to marry her, then obviously the next step was for me to be appointed the village headman; but my undoing was to consult Jitembe.
(This part is a flash back. It excludes both Setwe and Otulu).
FWODU: Jitembe the great medicine man, I have come to seek the truth from the Oracle.
(Drums are heard as he bows)
JITEMBE: You are in love young man.
FWODU: But either love or I is blind great one.
That is why I have come to seek the way, show me the best path to follow.
JITEMBE: Love might be blind but it can always find its way out.
Yet you will always be trapped Fwodu.
You will have to appease the gods first, as we all know; love does not brew in one pot.
(Drums sound as Jitembe chants incoherently; Fwodu produces a cockerel for payment. Jitembe completes his ritual of rattling bones, shells etc).
For you to win the heart of the chiefs’ daughter, you have to at least win the friendship of the chief himself.
Eat at the same table with him!
FWODU: But …but I am too poor to even dare to cross his path.
JITEMBE: When he laughs my son, laugh louder than him.
When he scratches his bulging stomach, scratch yours more sophisticatedly.
FWODU: Look at me Jitembe.
Do I have a stomach to elicit a second glance?
It barely gets a daily meal.
JITEMBE: That is where you go wrong my son.
Use your head and your ambitions will be fulfilled.
Your mind is not a desert but it is a flowerpot blooming with ideas.
(Fwodu proceeds with his narration to the group)
FWODU: My friends, Jitembe deceived me.
He made me believe that to evade village tax would prove to my peers that I was rich and had influence with the local authorities.
I imagined they understood that the basic concept of corruption was to be a big fish.
SETWE: Yes I remember, the scandal spread through the village like bush fire.
Especially the way the chiefs’ daughter turned down your advances.
(Mimics)
‘My father will never accept you as his son-in-law, he says a person who smuggles fish and evades village tax cannot feed two mouths’.
ALL: (Laughter)
FWODU: I still haven’t told you where I was last night.
ALL: Tell us!
FWODU: I was in the middle of the communal plantation.
JITEMBE: Yes! I knew it.
Maize cob thief.
I bet you were roasting maize!
OTULU: Give him time.
FWODU: I was brewing this new brand of Chang’aa.
I used sugar instead of molasses.
JITEMBE: Now this is our man.
Where is it?
FWODU: It is in my hut of course.
SETWE: Go fetch it, this meeting of cows and a chicken has run my throat dry.
Of African killing brother
Of African stealing his brothers’ land.
FWODU: When the village goes back to normal, you will all have to pay me back.
Exit.
JITEMBE: Wait up; I will help you carry.
Exit
OTULU: (Pensively)
The stomach has become our brains.
We abide by its dictates, till we sell our souls.
Curtains
SCENE FOUR
The same group of people but now seated around a pot full of the local brew all drinking their share.
OTULU: So what do we do, attack the Lovurekos?
FWODU: Exactly.
JITEMBE: Hey, are you crazy?
How do you expect this bunch of morons to form an army?
Who among us can confront them?
SETWE: I will go.
I will attack them at night.
They have taken our people to a foreign land, where what they breathe is dust and pungents’.
What they eat is dry air.
And in their hearts what do they keep?
They keep anguish and despair I tell you.
What is left for them but sheer pain of the heart, of the stomach, of all …sheer pain.
Why did they leave me behind?
I asked them!
They refused.
FWODU: Jitembe, you will go.
JITEMBE: What difference will it make?
Even if I wear my amulets, I can only dance to the gods.
SETWE: (In a trance)
Yes, they will come again.
They will sweep all the corners of the village.
They will sweep us all.
(Drums beat as he dances vigorously. The drumming stops abruptly but he still dances then falls)
JITEMBE: But we have a government.
It will protect us.
FWODU: It is more complicated than that.
The Prime Minister is from the Lovureko tribe.
We did not vote for him, therefore, he cannot protect us.
He can only protect his people.
SETWE: They say I am a mad man.
They say Jitembe cannot dispel evil spirits that have grabbed plots in my head.
But why, for stomachs sake, did my local Member of Parliament give me a tin of maize meal in the last elections?
Did he expect it to sustain me till t he next general elections?
Who is mad, him or I?
People of Esebwa Village, vote with your stomachs.
Vote with your stomachs I say; and bargain well for a bigger share of the national cake.
JITEMBE: What about the police, the people in blue?
They will protect us.
Yes! Service for all.
FWODU: Learn to consult your oracles before making groundless assumptions.
A hungry dog cannot protect a hungry home.
I think the brew is getting into you head.
JITEMBE: I drink for the sleep.
When a bee circles yet I do not receive clients, then I must drink.
Most of us do not have the luck of a chameleon, and the economy is bad too.
In my dream last night, I saw yams coming towards me.
But when I reached out to grab them, they …they started shaking.
Then I sat back laughing looking at them.
SETWE: The great sorcerer has spoken.
So, what is your philosophy great one?
JITEMBE: Simplicity is the best alternative in life.
OTULU: Hypocrite! Most of the people I have spoken to, before I die, have proven to me that you cannot claim wisdom just because you are old.
FWODU: Listen to the message from the Lovurekos.
Even if they are one of us, we have to follow their ways or live in a political nightmare.
OTULU: I can now see the truth more clearly.
Our ancestors have spread it out for me to see.
One day the big fish shall be pulled out of the river, and then it shall choke in the fresh air of democracy.
JITEMBE: But who shall pull the big fish out of the river and drag it up the cliff?
OTULU: You and I, the power of the cheering crowd.
(Slogans and shouts are heard in the background, e.g. Tumbo must go! Tumbo must go! Then screams, gun shots and stampede).
They will never sweep the masses off the streets.
Their brutal force will be weakened by our togetherness, but innocent blood will have to be shed.
This transition will not be an easy one.
Let us not despair.
Determination is not a foreign object; it is within us!
Curtains
THE END.
Copyright 2007 poet mutiso
All rights reserved.
