SIBI OKUMU’S
‘MINISTER KARIBU’ RETURNS THIS WEEKEND
BY Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 12 March 2018)
John Sibi Okumu
picked up playwriting on a dare. Two dares in fact. One came from a girlfriend
of the actor, Nick Njache, who eventually co-directed his second play, ‘Minister
Karibu’, which incidentally is opening tomorrow afternoon at Kenya National Theatre.
The other
dare came a bit closer to home. It was from Barrack Muluka, who told him that
if Sibi wrote a play, he would unconditionally publish it, which he did.
And that was
how ‘Role Play: A Journey into the Kenyan Psyche’ was born. And with it, the
man best known for his acting career, (both in films like ‘The First Grader’ and
‘The Constant Gardener’ and on stage playing everything from Romeo and Shylock
to Vladimir in ‘Waiting for Godot’ and Robert Mugabe in his own script
‘Breakfast with Mugabe’) was now on the road to becoming one if not the most prolific and polished playwrights
in Kenya. But so far, ‘Role Play’ is the only one that’s been published (which
ought to be rectified by local publishers).
“If someone
includes the four scripts that I devised [In Search of a Drum Major, Like
Ripples on a Pond, Milestones and Phenomenal!], I guess I can claim ten plays
to my name,” Sibi-Okumu tells BD a few days before his controversial political
satire, ‘Minister Karibu’ opens, staged by Aroji Drama Academy under the
direction of Tash Mitambo.
Sibi isn’t
likely to describe his play as ‘controversial’ although he admits he
intentionally created a cast-full of stereotypes so that audiences could see
how ridiculous those clichéd characters really are.
The play
went down very well when it was staged by Phoenix Players in 2012. But some
critics didn’t seem to understand the nature of satire (which to paraphrase
dictionary.com is the use of irony, sarcasm or ridicule to expose or denounce
vice and folly.) They claimed he’d abused specific politicians.
Nonetheless,
Phoenix Players were so pleased with Sibi’s literary skills, they made him
promise to write a new play every year and stage it at the Theatre. He kept his
promise writing scripts like ‘Meetings’ (2013), ‘Elements’ (2013) and ‘Kaggia’
(2014). He’s had a hiatus since then, although the former French teacher (at
ISK and Hillcrest) and TV anchorman (on ‘The Summit’ for KTN and the
Zain/Celtel Africa Challenge) hasn’t been idle.
He’s
currently working on several theatrical projects, all of which he says feature
one ‘super-star’ and that is Kenya. He adds that it was seeing August Wilson’s
‘Fences’ (on Broadway) with James Earl Jones that showed him how affecting it
can be to dramatize events of ordinary people’s everyday lives. But he doesn’t
want to say much more about those projects until he’s satisfied they’re set to
go on stage.
In the meantime,
he’s been traveling a lot, serving as everything from a conference moderator
and facilitator and a Master of Ceremony. Most recently he’s been in New York,
working at the United Nations on a report resolving an international dispute
over water rights.
But it’s the
play, the musical and the novel that Sibi’s simultaneously working on that one
wishes to see completed before any of his other multiple tasks get done. One
would also wish he would either climb back on stage or into a forthcoming film
or even go for a radio talk show since the man is not only an actor, director
and playwright.
He’s also
got a voice that’s got an amazing musicality. It’s a voice that got him mocked
as a child; he was called a ‘black Englishman’. What his classmates didn’t know
was that in fact, he grew up from an early age in England. The whole of his
early education (up until he was ten) was indubitably English, so there’s
nothing affected about the royal way in which he speaks the Queen’s mother
tongue.
What is
affecting is to learn that Sibi had a father who went off to UK for further
studies when his son was very young. Eventually, the dad called him and his mum
to join him, but they were never very close. The one thing the father and son
shared was a love of literature and that’s endured. “I was reading James
Baldwin’s ‘Another Country’ before we returned to Kenya. I picked it from my
father’s library,” he admits.
Speaking to
Sibi on that enduring love of literature, one only hopes his own literary
projects will soon bear fruit and that we’ll see more of his works staged as
Aroji Drama Academy is doing this weekend.
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