‘We’re healing the nation’: echoes of present in plays retelling Kenya’s past

Xavier Ywaya as Tom Mboya in a play about the Kenyan statesman that is part of the Too Early For Birds series of shows staging diverse stories from Kenyan history. Photograph: Edwin Ndeke/The Guardian

On a recent Saturday night at an auditorium in Nairobi, a rapt audience of more than 600 people held their breath as the revered Kenyan statesman and independence activist Tom Mboya walked out of a pharmacy with his friend Mohini Sehmi.

Gunshots rang out. “Did you hear that?” a panicked Sehmi asked Mboya, who slowly collapsed to the ground. “Tom! Tom! Tom!” she called frantically, realising that he had been hit.