Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – I Will Marry When I Want (Kenya)

• Co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii and first performed in Gikuyu at the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre, this play offers a searing critique of post-independence Kenya, where neocolonial economic forces continue to dispossess peasants and laborers. The central character, Kiguunda, dreams of a better life but is crushed under the weight of capitalist exploitation, Christian hypocrisy, and elite betrayal.

It is theatre as communal wake-up call—a ritualized aesthetics of refusal.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In Foucault’s late philosophy, especially The Care of the Self, ethical subjectivity emerges through practice, critique, and the stylization of life. Importantly, Foucault insists that the “care of the self” is always historical—it is shaped by the conditions of power and the forms of truth-making that define a culture. In I Will Marry When I Want, this ethic of care is radically politicized: it becomes a collective practice of historical critique and communal resistance.

Kiguunda’s struggle is not personal, but epistemological: the truth about land, ownership, and justice has been suppressed by colonial residues masquerading as Christian morality and economic progress. The elite characters—who invoke “development,” “civilization,” and “God”—are embodiments of what Foucault would call regimes of truth: discursive formations that silence subaltern voices while appearing morally righteous.

Ngũgĩ’s theatre becomes a technology of self-formation—but not an individualizing one. It is communitarian, pedagogical, and insurgent. The very act of staging the play in the Gikuyu language, in an open-air setting for villagers, is a Foucauldian rupture—a counter-conduct against the disciplines of colonial education, Christian paternalism, and capitalist ideology.

The play embodies Foucault’s idea of ethics as critique: the characters (and the audience) are invited to examine how they are governed, how they have internalized domination, and how they might practice freedom differently—not in abstraction, but in the reappropriation of land, language, and labor.