In 1953 Kenya - a British Colony - was in a state of revolt.

The indigenous people used to the utmost their traditional resources including the power of unseen forces.

The British Army invented special techniques to combat resistance to settler rule.

Small gangs of loyal (to the Crown) Gïküyü, or turned rebels and exceptionally adept Brits were dressed as rebels and let loose to masquerade, infiltrate, and kill.

They were called pseudo or counter gangs.

The opera is the story of one of those gangs.

Act One - Nairobi and the special training camp

Act two - The Forest and the township edge.

Cast notes

Jensen mid twenties.
When others go drinking he runs on the beach - high minded without being priggish he has an ability to think abstractly - a tidy mind but not a dry heart.

Ken early twenties.
His father was a prisoner of war and he became used in his teenage years to running the family livestock holding - he is that rare thing: a natural killer.

Muthoni twenty to thirty.
Making her way in city life best way she can and runs the property in which live the
likilimba (commune pooling wages). She has a lodger -

Matenjagua early twenties.
Mission literacy then caught up in mass expulsion back to ancestral lands - drifts into city life and has worked briefly in the radio repair shop part owned by:-

Marion thirty to forty.
She escaped her family in South London during the war into the WRAF where she meets her flyer husband who takes her to Kenya. She is unhinged by her husbands assassination & lurches out of her caste.

General Waruingi late twenties early thirties.
Makes a journey from emulation to origination. Educated to clerk level; corporal in
Burma during WW2 he goes into the forest as the least worse choice and by the time of the opera is the accomplished and respected leader of a forest gang.

Falkirk age forty to fifty
A plain clothes police man with a religious bent; his awareness that his self-loathing
makes him cruel is finally resolved by the suicidal ecstasy of his self-exposure on the
battlefield.