ANTI-COLONIALISTS PLAYS

TRIAL OF DEDAN KIMATHI

The play gives to the Kenyan natives what was denied to them by the imperial masters – agency. The
blacks in the play are not passive robots who stand in waiting for commands from their oppressor. They
actively participate in the creation of history. Kimathi’s defiant resistance in the court illustrates the
desire of African natives to reclaim their own lives and be their own masters. Kimathi refuses to
acknowledge a white judge in the court is because he will not observe a law that is not democratic but
strictly made by the colonialists to protect their lives and interests at the detriment of the Kenyans, who
had no part in making it. Below excerpt buttresses this:

JUDGE: I may remind you that you are charged with a most serious

crime. It Carries a death sentence

KIMATHI: Death

JUDGE: Yes, death. .

KIMATHI: To a criminal judge in a criminal court, set up by criminal

law; the law of oppression. I have no words.

JUDGE: Perhaps you don't understand. May be your long stay in the

Forest has...I mean we are here to deal fairly with you.

to see that justice is done. Even handed justice.

KIMATHI: I will not plead to a law in which we had no part in the

making.

In the second movement of the play, he asks the pertinent question – “By what right do you, a colonial
judge sit in judgement over me?”.

The representation of Kimathi as a freedom fighter, a leader of the Mau Mau movement and a voice of
the people is thus a dismissal of the colonial narrative by Thiong’o and Mugo and celebrates the ability
and liberty of Kenyan natives to sculpt their own future and define their own history.
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM OF POST-COLONIAL PERIOD

I WILL MARRY WHEN I WANT