Review: Play takes on sexism, muddies nationalism

I Will Marry When I Want (1970) dramatizes the problems facing the working class and peasants in post-colonial Africa, and shows how these problems are essentially the same throughout the world. The play takes on the issues of sexism, religious idealism, and capitalist land ownership and makes the effort to demonstrate that factory-peasant unity in class struggle is the only form of true empowerment for the masses. While the play falls short of demonstrating that nationalism is the most tricky and difficult to overcome in the capitalist ideology of our time, members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) can find it useful in reinforcing the fact that only full-scale communist revolution can end the struggles for our class.
Ngugi, the playwright, was imprisoned without trial in Kenya in the late 1970s because he was using this play in exactly this way (he now lives in exile in the U.S.). Because we are bombarded daily with capitalist, fascist, and defeatist art, we ought to be more than eager to read, study, and discuss the literature that is the product of the communist movement.
Kiguunda (Kigu-unda) and his wife Wangeci (Wangesi) are poor farmers, who are troubled when they think that their rich neighbor, and Kiguunda’s boss, Kioi, wants his son, John, to marry their daughter, Gathoni. Kiguunda remembers the days when he fought the British imperialists in the Mau Mau rebellion (1950-56), and the better life this period seemed to promise. He is suspicious of the rich exploiters. However, Kiguunda thinks Kioi’s interest in his family is their chance for material comfort, and so they do as he wants. When Kioi betrays them, grabbing their land to boot, they understand that capitalism holds nothing for misery, and revolution is the answer.
Kioi, and his wife Jezebel, represent the small class of African capitalists who have become the new ruling class of Kenya after independence from colonialism in 1962. They are rich from buying up land, as well as from being the “watchdogs,” as they call themselves, for capitalists from the imperialist countries who continue to exploit Kenya for cheap labor and resources. They steal Kiguunda’s farm to resell it to foreign investors as a site for a pesticide plant.
Gicaamba and his wife, Njooki, former Mau Mau, are factory workers. They are class-conscious and warn Kiguunda and Wangeci never to trust the rich. They tell Kiguunda that class struggle is the only solution. In the end, the farmer – now landless – and the worker unite to call for revolution, similar to, and yet different from, the Mau Mau rebellion of their youth, for this time it will be for the workers and the poor.
Tie fight vs imperialism with sexism
Gicaamba, the worker, stresses the importance of combining the fight for equality with the fight against sexist oppression. He recalls the sexism of the traditional African societies as well as during colonial times and the present. He discusses the contribution of women to the household and the anti-imperialist struggle against the British:

Gathoni is not to blame …
We the parents have not put much effort in the education of our girls.
Even before colonialism,
We oppressed women.
Giving ourselves numerous justifications …
Do you think it was only the men
Who fought for Kenya’s independence?
How many women died in the forests? (104-105)

Without equality between men and women, the workers’ and farmers’ struggles cannot win.

The role of religion
The role of religions as an oppressive ideology against the poor is a major issue in the play. Kiguunda and Wangeci are proud of their traditional wedding, but deeply suspicious of the religiosity of Kioi. Kioi and Jezebel want Kiguunda and Wangeci to join their Christian church, which they do despite their misgivings. Religion is clearly depicted as an ideological tool of the exploiters, whether the British imperialists in the recent past or the African exploiters of the present.
Kiguunda remembers the anti-imperialist Mau Mau rebellion as a time of national unity. (Another play co-authored by Ngugi, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, exposes how shallow this unity was). Gicaamba makes it clear that the African rich have replaced the imperialists as the new exploiters, every bit as bad as the old ones. Kioi provides an African cover that allows the old imperialist powers to continue to exploit Kenyan workers.
Although the play does a wonderful job of critiquing idealism, sexism and individualism, the  playwright does not have the political understanding of the limitations of nationalism as a tool in overturning capitalist inequality. While many anti-colonialists of the post-WWII period felt that nationalism could be “good” if it represented the interests of poor, marginalized workers who are discriminated against by corrupt capitalists, in no situation did this actually succeed. In each case, including Kenya, the so-called revolutionaries became the new national capitalist forces.
The issue of nationalism vs class-consciousness is muddy. In places, nationalism is portrayed as positive in a way which contradicts the sharply anti-nationalist line set forward elsewhere in the play. This political weakness in the play could lead to very fruitful discussion. Religion, sexism and nationalism are barriers for workers everywhere. The play could also be assigned by teachers, and used by students for reports and papers, as a forum in which to raise revolutionary, antiracist, antisexist ideas.