There is nothing like a live performance. You can look at things on television, and you can look at things on YouTube, but when you get in a room full of people and you say one joke, and everyone’s laughing at the same thing, it’s a really great experience. -Loni Love
To watch Amarula- a tragic, love comedy performance which brings to the front themes ranging from explicit family values, ‘cross-generational’ love affairs, intimacy in return for good university grades and fear- is to be titillated, to be shocked and to be tickled to laughter, all at the same instance.
The old Fort, an iconic landmark in Mombasa, far removed from the chaos of the city stands defiantly watching the sea. Slightly behind it are a set of aged structures in the National Museums of Kenya property, underneath which tunnels run to and from Fort Jesus. One of these structures which has seen a significant effort at renovation (the most recent being a partial interior redecoration using fabrics) while maintaining elements of the old, houses Swahilipot, a dedicated Tech and Art hub which has since its inception metamorphosed into a creative and expressive space for youth. It has thus become a sort of inspiration for artists who tend to feel more in their element at the Pot than elsewhere where their passion for art may neither be appreciated nor supported.
As the sun plunges into the westerly end of the ocean in slow motion, basketball-like, beyond the weather-beaten skyscrapers and slow-moving traffic, way beyond the docked masses of iron, further, further beyond the nondescript fusion of sea and sky, Mombasa undergoes a gradual metamorphosis as the world elsewhere closes its mouth for the night.
Lethargic day life paves way for an exuberant night life soon as the hint of the sun is swept off the sky. Shop corridors and pavements which were otherwise dull during the day light up, tables and chairs dragged from back rooms as workers in sagging tight jeans, plastic sandals, and earphones dangling from their ears clean away the day-time madness, pouring soapy water on the pavements which suck it in pretty fast having being dehydrated the entire day by Mombasa’s unforgiving heat.
Webs of lines are etched deeply into his face. A set of languid, deeply burrowed eyes tell the tale of a man tortured by life. If you pick a random event from precolonial Kenya, this man was probably a little older than that. With each hunching movement he clenches his gum and complains that a terrible ache pierces his back ‘like needles’. The elderly man had long forgotten what it felt to have joints that moved with ease without torturing him with a sting of pain.
As I help him onto a well-aged three- legged seat under a towering palm-tree, he lets out a shriek like a man who had stepped on thorns. This man is a member of a little Known Pemba community living in the Kenyan Coast.
