From slums to the stage: How creativity can make the difference

Berthold Brecht, one the most influential playwrights and theatre directors of the last century, firmly believed that theatre was meant to change the world. He was faithful to an ideal of social theatre throughout   his work creating a legacy that crosses continents, as is the case of the Dagoretti slums of Nairobi, Kenya, where a group of youngsters is now performing his play, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”  (“Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis”).

Dagoretti is a place of unhappy records: a slum of 40km2, one the biggest in Africa, where some 240,000 people live in extreme poverty. 130,000 of them are street kids, often orphaned or abandoned and facing a destiny of hunger, violence, drugs and prostitution, exposed to HIV/AIDS and other diseases. They are known as chokora, a Swahili word which means “those who survive on garbage”.

Against this backdrop, a group of twenty girls between 14 and 20 years old, who previously lived on the streets, have been working for five years on an adaptation of Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” called Malkia . Malkia is a remarkable example of the power of education and effective international cooperation. The project is carried out by mixing psycho-social methodologies with competencies of a team of professional theatre artists.

At the centre of the project there is the theatre which is a tremendous tool that can give voice to the voiceless, create self-awareness and bolster self-esteem. It can be used as a therapeutic instrument which can facilitate the process of rehabilitation and reintegration of children back into society. The story of Malkia is focused on one of the main themes of Brecht, namely, the possibility of acting in a moral way in a context of injustice and inequality. It also depicts motherhood as a behavioural value and not as a mere biological fact. The creative process is intended to mix the tragic contents of their life experience with the depth of their symbolic imagination in a collective product.

“The choice of the play was motivated by the women’s desire to make both themselves and their own community fully aware of the possibility of being good even in a context marked by profound injustice,” explains Letizia Quintavalla, the director of the play. “It is possible to be loving mothers, devoting care and attention to the smallest and most helpless creatures, while being in a condition of acute moral and material discomfort”.

Malkia is a part of the "Dagoretti Children in Need” programme launched by the African NGO AMREF  in 1999. After the first successful theatre workshops, the project formally became a street art academy which has since produced plays, documentaries and art projects. The play debuted in Nairobi and is now touring abroad.

More information on Dagoretti Children in Need can be found here:  http://www.amref.org/what-we-do/dagoretti-child-in-need-project/?keywords=dagoretti

1 The play is a parable about a peasant girl who steals a baby but becomes a better mother than its natural parents
2 Malika means “Queens” in Swahili
3 AMREF Is the African Medical and Research Foundation, founded in 1957 as an international African health development organisation by three reconstructive surgeons working in Kenya who were concerned that rural Africans were failing to access the surgical care they needed. The surgeons concluded that if the patients could not get to them, then they would go to the patients – and so the “Flying Doctors” were born. Continuing that tradition of innovative solutions, AMREF today carries out pioneering interventions that provoke health care improvements of significant importance, in Kenya and beyond.

Eugenio Orsi