The themes in Kinjeketile include the themes of colonial oppression, anti-colonial resistance, myth versus reality, and unity.
Theme of Colonial Oppression
The theme of colonial oppression is the backbone of Kinjeketile. The play portrays how German colonialists imposed forced labour, exploitation, and punitive systems on East African natives. They put Africans to work on their cotton plantations under severe measures in a way characteristic of black slaves during the slave trade. Any attempt at respite by any of the workers is met with brutal beating. Kitunda’s whipping for straightening his back clearly exemplifies the systemic violence used to ensure compliance.
The cotton plantations replace subsistence farming with cash crops for export. The people are unable to grow enough food crops to sustain them due to the colonisers’ insistence on cotton cultivation which shows their disregard for local needs. Hence, famine forces the natives to survive on poisonous roots, as revealed in the dialogue between Bibi Kitunda and Bibi Kinjeketile as to the dire consequences of the intake of these roots.
Beyond these, the systemic violence fostered by colonialism is further demonstrated by the public abduction of Chausiku to satiate the sexual desires of one of the faces of German colonialism. Without any doubts, colonial oppression is demonstrated in the economic deprivation, the dehumanisation, and the brutality inflicted on the African natives by German colonisers. This necessitates the emergence of the resistance movement.
Theme of Resistance
For every cause, there is always an effect. This is where the theme of anticolonial resistance comes in in Ebrahim N. Hussein’s Kinjeketile. The oppressed African natives are pushed into rebelling against the German colonialists who have hitherto used economic and military power to oppress them. Amidst their secret meetings, the people only needed a push for them to act on the indignities they have suffered, and they get that in Kinjeketile’s prophecy.
Kinjeketile inspires them into a rebellion with his message of resistance, augmented by the gift of magical water that promises protection form bullets, given to them by Honcho. He unites the disparate tribes with this message. And from the word “go”, the people become hooked to the liberation the resistance promises. They destroy the cotton plantation first as a signifier of their uproot of the exploitative colonial establishment. They go on surmounting all hurdles in their way to liberation, kept going by fanatical belief in the protection the water offers, until they get to the German fort with its destructive cannon where their fanaticism does not hold sway and amounts only to suicidal plunge, highlighting the limitation of spirituality where practical military strategy could have helped.
The anticolonial resistance ends with the defeat of Kitunda-led people’s army; after the loss of over a thousand lives, the escape of a few and the capture of many survivors, and the eventual death pronouncements on the prisoners of war. Kinjeketile, himself the message bearer, is sentenced to death by hanging in a public place.
Although the rebellion ends in failure, its impact transcends the immediate outcome. It plants the seeds of freedom in the community’s collective consciousness and foregrounds the importance of resistance as a catalyst for change. Unsurprisingly, Kinjeketile refuses to retract his words, since doing so will render the liberation fight meaningless and deprive the future generations of hope and the consciousness that freedom from oppression requires resilience and sacrifices.
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