In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), Wa Thiong’o provides a wealth of critique, analysis, and observations of postcolonial African language politics. Throughout the text, he supports his claims with relevant anecdotes, historical evidence, and personal accounts. It is in the chapter “The Language of African Theatre,” though, that he provides the most tangible and detailed example of the strength of literary tradition in African culture. In this section, he shares how the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre came into being and demonstrates how the surrounding community was able to use the space it provided in order to create a socialized production based in Kenyan cultural and literary tradition.

By contrasting the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre with past attempts at radicalizing the nation of Kenyan Theatre, he successfully communicates just how special the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre was in its ability to embrace community culture and participation. Wa Thiong’o aptly states that Kenyan theatre movements in the early seventies could never be truly inclusive of the country’s culture or break free from its colonial confinements because even the most radical scripts were written in English and from the perspective of the petty-bourgeoisie (see section IV). It was also confined literally within the walls that colonists had forced Kenyans to perform art in when they eliminated the popular cultural stage found in free and empty public spaces. No longer allowed to perform out in the open, Kenyans could only perform within enclosed spaces which were often inaccessible to the peasantry. Here, he provides explicit evidence for how colonial strategies hoped to remove the oppressed peoples from their linguistic and cultural traditions, breaking their bond with their history and cultural identities.

The Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre, however, broke from these oppressive structures. Performed in an open-air space, the productions were performed using the Gĩkũyũ language, allowing the content, actors, rehearsals, and perception to be steeped in the linguistic tradition on the community in which it was performed. The community was able to participate actively in the discussion and rehearsal of the productions, including the reintroduction of forms of dance, song, and mime characteristic to the people’s traditions. The Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre’s success in embracing the peasantry language and culture allowed the participants an accessible education on the content and form of theatre. For a people disempowered by colonialism through strategic denial of education, this became a powerful, uplifting experience.

The fate of the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre, however, demonstrates how threatening colonial powers see a unified, culturally intelligent people. As Wa Thiong’o explains, the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre was outlawed by the Kenyan government in 1982 after they rose to national popularity. This instance is a direct example of Wa Thiong’o’s own point that colonizing powers left countries to be independent, but only after establishing an elite, neocolonial class which still held the values and views of the colonial regime. The new regime’s values were established through systematic education of select groups with western thought and in exclusively western languages. So, these powers become threatened by a people reconnected to their linguistic, and therefore cultural and historical roots. The Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre, though razed to the ground by the government, could never be fully threatened or destroyed by the neocolonial government because their theatrical tradition was never rooted in the space itself, but rather the unity of the group, its culture, and its artistic values. The real threat to the regime, then, is a linguistically and traditionally unified people, something Wa Thiong’o consistently advocates for throughout his texts.