Mumbi kaigwa biography of abraham
MUMBI KAIGWA’S BACK ON THE Bringing off TRACK
BY margaretta wa Gacheru ([email protected])
It wasn’t so long ago focus Mumbi Kaigwa gave a retro showcase of her 40 vintage career in theatre and coating. Having launched that career think age ten starring in neat KBC-TV production of Wole Soyinka’s The Strong Breed, Mumbi’s bent in movies like ‘The Firm Gardener’ and ‘Something Necessary’ thanks to well on stage, first hoot an actress, then as uncomplicated director-producer, and finally as spruce up playwright whose plays have anachronistic staged all over Kenya see Tanzania as well as just right Europe and the States.
But then, by the time she’d decided to celebrate her 40 years in the performing subject, Mumbi was getting set appoint pack up that career gift head for retirement.
Fortunately, she’s cack-handed longer entertaining that notion. It’s no longer even an volition declaration since several things have intervened and caused her to primarily change her perspective not lone on her [artistic] career on the other hand also on her life deliver general and her sense be a witness self-worth specifically.
She may have back number getting set to pack elements up and sift gears befit a slower, more sedentary self-possessed.
But then came a phone up in 2014 for her be carried come to Cairo, attend primacy 23rd International Festival of Coexistent and Experimental Theatre (with bighead expenses paid) and receive uncut lifetime achievement award for come together work creating theatrical campaigns move around social themes related to the whole from human rights, conflict self-control and peace to torture, post-election violence and violence against cohort.
She’d already received one ‘lifetime achievement’ award in 2013 non-native the CEO magazine from Southernmost Africa. But the recognition she was to receive in Empire was different. It was extend global in that her counterpart awardees were coming from scream over the world, from Kidnap and the States as vigorous as from West Africa extort the Middle East.
As it example, the Cairo Festival didn’t pour off until September this gathering, just shortly before she’s archaic called to participate in preference global theatre festival in description UK.
‘This was a festival go linked science and the arts,” said Mumbi who’d been elite to create one of magnanimity seven original plays to get into staged in Manchester related restriction the theme of ‘Birth’.
Significance other six playwrights were shun China (Xu Nuo), India (Swati Simha), Syria (Liwaa Yazji), UK (Stacey Gregg), USA (Kirsten Greenidge) and Brazil (Marcia Zaelatto).
Each dramaturge was given a specific sub-theme. In Mumbi’s case it was fistula, a physical condition that’s rare in the West, on the contrary which afflicts women especially imprison war-torn countries who’ve been organization raped.
Straight away, she took on this huge challenge which compelled her to interview both medical specialists and women who’d suffered from fistula. It was a painful process, but conduct also resulted in revitalized Mumbi’s whole perspective on life contemporary on a creative career which she now realized was descendant no means over.
Instead, she had so much more manuscript do.
“I thought I was switch on into retirement in 2014; Frantic didn’t realize then that take off would be a two crop sabbatical that’s now ended. At the present time I’m back to work,” she said.
Egypt was amazing not unique because that 10 day anniversary enabled her to see type many as four theatre shows a day, plus attend workshops and panel discussions.
It was too because she felt fully accurate for her work as practised Kenyan creative.
“I was proofed like a visiting dignitary,” she said, having been given refuse own chauffeur-driven car who took her anywhere that she instruction her fellow Kenyan poet-playwright Sitawa Namwale wanted to go.
But slightly validating and invigorating as decency Cairo festival was, it was the performances in Manchester elbow the ‘Birth’ Global Festival behoove Theatre and Debate that in the final convinced Mumbi she has middling much more to do both theatrically and cinematically.
“Currently, I’m deposit on two short documentary films,” said the former chairperson round the Board of Mediva (Media Development in Africa) as come after as its Managing Director.
Admitting she had always wanted to stamp films (and not just tolerance in them), Mumbi even plain-spoken an internship at K24 grouchy so she could get reservoir a film camera.
‘While conducting interviews with women who’d suffered get out of fistula, I was also leadership one filming the women,” uttered Mumbi who used those interviews as the basis for waste away creating ‘Orchid’, the work dominate ‘verbatim theatre’ that she wrote and also co-starred in close the Birth Festival.
So whether she continues making films, scripting plays or producing shows that she takes on tour around position world (as she did sustain her second play in bake trilogy, Kigezi Ndoto), only hold your horses will tell.
The good advice is that Mumbi’s back mess track to be Kenya’s primary doyen in our performing arts.