Background and sources
In 1953/54 sections of the indigenous people of a part of the African continent, the British colony known as Kenya rose up against the dominating Europeans. A soldier called Kitson invented special techniques to combat active resistance to settler rule.
Small gangs of loyal (to the Crown) Kikuyu or turned rebels and exceptionally adept Brits were dressed in rebel wear and let loose to infiltrate, masquerade, get information and kill. The indigenous people used to the utmost their traditional resources including the power of unseen forces.
Their own “imagined communities” in the forest, made central by women, became a social laboratory for new gender relations. I can do no better to set the scene for the opera’s under plot, its forest parts, than to quote from Luise White, scholar of women’s role in Kenya:
As the state attempted to manufacture class and kinship out of the grim dormitories of their urban workforce Africans themselves began to rethink and restructure the gender categories so designed... ...The revolt of these men and women articulated and debated the nature of that distinction (skilled/unskilled) - their revolt was about marriage, about the allocation of domestic chores. This did not make their revolt any less political, but it situates those politics in everyday private life. In this way Mau Mau contested all aspects of birth, life, and death: The British built a gallows on the ruins of Kenyatta’s Githunguri Kenya Teachers College and women prisoners at Kamiti buried the men hanged there with their heads facing Mount Kenya.1
How did I get into this?
In the blood tangled squirearchy of England’s West Country the Cornishes (my ancestors) and their middle distance relations the Kitsons jumped their fences and thumbed their prayer books for generations. Sense and sensibility usually fell right way up: George Cornish pulled the poet Coleridge out of his soldiering tent and later, much later, Major Kitson wrote a book.
“ … I saw two or three men squatting round a watchman’s fire some fifty yards away”2
At a fox hunt meet Kitson eyed a horse whose price was beyond him. The owner, Leopold Ullstein, was an executive director of the publishing firm Barrie and Rockliff. Barrie was a ward of the creator of Peter Pan - adopted when his father fell at the first day of the Somme.
Barrie and Rockliff joined Jewish acumen and Etonian flair and long pockets to dip into literary side-streams. Their translator from French, Humphrey Hare, worked at night in a green eyeshade on Maurice Druon the creator of the Resistance anthem Chant des Partisans.
"Friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains? Friend, do you hear the dulled cries of the country in chains?".
A deal was struck book horse horse book.
His book came up into my hands out of a box at a charity fair. And opened up at photos - posed groups; what were they? - and faces blacked or black or blacked out - what was it that hit the spot.?
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I got no more than three pages into the text than I felt it blow thru me in several directions at once. 1953 Kitson was twenty six and posted to Kenya. I was six, a child of Notting Hill, London.
During the years that he was out there tangling with ritual I was in a gang of three that ferreted at lunch break in bomb sites for dead rats and discarded stockings with which to sculpt complex mysteries; who looked astonished at Gosney as he spoke about space; who passed round Smiffie’s Dad’s Tube-Train guardsman's key; who walked down Bayswater chanting secret language with Harrison of the wide slow smile and easy feet.
At home my mother’s string quartet, the Esterhazy, ripped, in jagged segments, thru music pieces; the sweet sickness of pub song came from across the way and hurling across the night waves came jazz frpm the Voice of America - this was all The Fifties.
We used to burn effigies. Each year in November old rubbish was piled up and lit - and sitting atop was a “Guy”. Who supplied the clothes for the spineless bundles? As we tugged that musty feldgrau jacket onto the lumpy newspaper carcass some thousand miles south there had been the same tugging and pulling and stepping back to inspect fictitious representations _ the countergangs of the Mau Mau rebellion - the subject of our opera.
But there is a deeper “subject” I felt buried there - to be unearthed in song, in drama...
Chaplin does it and we laugh. Soldiers see it and don’t speak. At Bradford in 1985 there was a fire at a stadium. I saw a man some way away beating at the fire which was his head. Beating at his head with his hands. He looked “silly” as people do whose dignity has been done away with by, for example, munitions.
On the Internet, a clip from Chechyna a Russian soldier being shot at, killed - and how he looked as he stumbled and slid about on a muddy track - “silly”. A forbidden glimpse of the indeterminate grey wall upon which the human project dances.
There is a cliché about the artists distancing act. Beneath the social self is there another watcher: deep, limbic, cold? And how do these viewpoints map onto each other thru language? Just as architecture has been called frozen music could at one time song have been frozen memory? I felt compelled to write.
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1. Luise White Separating the men from the boys: constructions of gender sexuality and terrorism in central Kenya 1939 1959 International Journal of African Studies vol 23 No 1 1990
2. Gangs and Countergangs General Sir Frank Kitson Barrie and Rockliffe London 1961