This is like admitting that through impersonation, you sat an examination for your younger brother, and you did the same for other candidates. You are essentially telling the world you abetted cheating on a grand scale, and that you are, therefore, a fraud. What’s more, that you were paid handsomely for this crime.
What of the drama teachers and their principals who bought Malala’s scripts? They did not want to do the hard work of assisting their students to generate original texts, thereby learning the skill of composing plays. Instead, they took a short-cut, which as I said involved cheating, and strained their school budgets by paying huge sums of money to a man who did not need it.
This was essentially an illegal payment that the school principals will not account for. The money could have been used to buy books, including those on creative writing, or even to feed the students. And mind you, these are the same people who have been complaining about inadequate capitation.
According to reports in the print media, there are other Kenyans who are engaged in this dishonest business of selling drama scripts to schools.
CULTURE OF CHEATING
Let me tell you a story. Years ago, a leading national school scooped the prize for the winning play. Later, the principal of the school was interviewed on national television.
“Who wrote the play?” he was asked.
“I did,” he answered in a tone that lacked conviction.
A short while after, a former postgraduate student of mine, who had been a good actor, walks into my office at the University of Nairobi.
“Professor, I’m the one who wrote that play,” he said without blinking.
“Which play?” I asked.
“The winning play at the Kenya National Drama Festival, and I was paid Sh400,000,” he answered.
I sensed he expected me to congratulate him. But it was like he had punched me in the tummy. And believe me: I had to resist the temptation to spit on him.
Which brings me to the culture of cheating in our educational system. There are cartels in Nairobi and elsewhere who write master’s and PhD proposals for students. I’m told they even write the theses for them.
An official at the Commission of University Education, in a speech at the University of Nairobi, told us that they knew about these illegal entities and even where they are located. And I was sitting there and wondering: Then why can’t you do something about it?
When I was working on my PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, my supervisors insisted on hearing my voice in the writing. They would hear it in my diction, in my syntax and in my tone. I could not have cheated them even if I had wanted to.
So, my question is: Why don’t our Kenyan lecturers do the same? Why are they letting our students get away with work that has been outsourced?
SHODDY SCRIPT
Let us now talk about the artistic quality of Malala’s script Echoes of War, which was reprinted in The Saturday Standard of April 12, 2025.
In the synopsis of the play, Malala tells us the following:
“The play is a hyperbole attempt to illustrate the widening gap between two generations; the old and the young.” The word ‘hyperbole’ is a noun, but here, the playwright is using it as an adjective, qualifying ‘attempt’. The proper form should have been ‘hyperbolic attempt’.
But even in its ungrammatical rendition, the sentence sounds needlessly pompous and unworthy of a playwright. This might sound trivial, but the semicolon in the sentence should, in fact, be a colon.
Hyperbole is a figure of speech that refers to stylised exaggeration. The synonym is ‘overstatement’. However, I did not see much of this in the script. And as I continued to read it, I started feeling that the term he should have used is ‘melodrama’.
Again, in a clumsy attempt to sound clever and sophisticated, he misleads the Butere girls by misusing the terms ‘setting’ and ‘exegesis’.
Moreover, the plotting of this play is poorly done. The dramatic conflict is not well defined, and in whatever form it exists, it is not resolved. The theme of telemedicine is surreptitiously smuggled into the text in an attempt to pander to the expectations of the young generation. But a more discerning audience would keep seeing it as an unnecessary imposition.
POLITICALLY MOTIVATED
A cardinal rule in creative writing is that you do not use art to settle scores. You write in good faith. You are sincere and honest about the message you are communicating to humanity. And the message is universal and timeless. But when an artist has an axe to grind, that is when he or she slides into propaganda.
A man goes through a divorce, for instance, and loses his sense of perspective. Then he writes a play demonising women, completely forgetting that he has a mother, sisters and daughters. So, you have propaganda right there.
For whatever reason, Cleophas Malala was ditched by his party UDA, and instead of counting his blessings (for example, how many Kenyans have been in those elevated positions?), he chose to hit at his enemies through drama.
In other words, his motive for writing Echoes of War was not sincere and honest, to say nothing about a desire to fleece a school called Butere Girls. As a result, the play became preachy and didactic. In a word, it degenerated into propaganda.
If you’re one of my usual detractors and you doubt what I’m saying, tell me: How else is the audience expected to interpret the phrase ‘Echoes of War’, which is smuggled into the script towards the end, and then it becomes the title of the play?
We all know the meaning of the word ‘echo’, but we haven’t been told about a war. So, what is the audience supposed to make of the collocation ‘Echoes of War’ other than to see it as some angry propaganda?
Then you have actors in a fictitious kingdom in the Middle East who somehow, and I repeat somehow, know about a drama festival taking place at a school called Chavakali, in the western part of a country called Kenya.
Further, the audience is treated to a spectacle involving young, impressionable actors shouting a bunch of political slogans reminiscent of the ones we heard from Gen-Zs during their demonstrations last year.
If you think I’m dead wrong in characterising this as propaganda, feel free to write to UC Santa Cruz, requesting them to recall the PhD they awarded me back in 1980.
Finally, let us be clear: art and propaganda are like oil and water; they don’t mix. Propaganda messages are typically one-sided, one-dimensional and simplistic. True art, including drama, tries to capture the depth, the subtlety, the nuance, the irony and the complexity of human experience.
Good drama, like all good literature, is life-affirming. It does not glorify war or violence. And from the point of view of composition, good literature is an ironic construct. I used to tell my students at the University of Nairobi that literature would be unthinkable without irony.
Let me end where I began. Script writers who have disgraced the drama festival and turned it into a commercial enterprise to siphon money from schools should apologise to the public and refund the money they have stolen. Yes, I said it.
And those drama teachers who feel inadequate can go back to school and take classes in stylistics and creative writing. Your students deserve to be taught how to write plays. I’m sure their parents and guardians would agree with me.
Henry Indangasi is a Professor Emeritus,
University of Nairobi
