Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,  2000.

Interview conducted by Mbye Cham for the African Women in the Cinema Project, October 1998 at the Southern African Film Festival (SAFF) in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Wajuhi, you directed the video feature film entitled Mine Boy that was screened here at the festival.  Could you begin by talking a bit about your background, how you came into cinema, what interested you to take up the camera and begin working in this area?  Also, what are some of the previous works you have done prior to Mine Boy, which came out in 1997?

I would say that I was attracted to film as early as eight years old, when in grade four I was made the leading actor in a film.  At that time, for whatever reason, I was made to play the role of a man.  I do remember some of the lines because I played the king... I remember my excitement and the excitement of the crowd when we put this show on. I dreamed on: even when I went to high school I was recruited by the drama teacher for stage; I believe again he spotted talent.  And that time they needed a little girl.  I played a little girl in the play that we were putting on for the year's drama festival.  From then on I stayed in drama throughout high school.  I was in charge of drama in college.  On and on I dreamed about being an actress, the big screen.  Of course, at that time, we did not have any African cinema, but they would bring in occasionally films like Sound of Music.  While looking at outside films, I had been seeing myself and seeing my starting role in it, where at that time we did not have anything going for film.

After high school, I met one of our leading drama teachers. He had not taught me, but his wife was our drama teacher in high school.  By that time he had left classroom teaching, he was working with the Educational Media Service with the Minister of Education in the Film Production Department.  He asked me, "Are you still acting?"  I said, "Why not?"  He said, "After college, come over and I will let them know about your talent."  That is how I ended up at the Educational Media Service.  After that, I was trained in film production, documentary film production, and 16mm.

I did a number of documentaries.  Eventually we had to shift to video production because the cost of 16mm was just impossible.  In the process, again, the teacher who I would say was my mentor was in charge of TV drama production.

Is he a Kenyan?

Yes, he is Kenyan, but right now he is working in Namibia in the same line.  He was in charge of television drama production at the institute.  I was picked to be his production assistant as part of my training package, that was before I went to formal media training.  Eventually, the man left the institute and I took over the production of the drama festival.  I have being doing that since.  I have been working in drama production and documentary production, I would say that I have excelled in both.

Did you go elsewhere outside of Kenya for formal training?

Yes I did, I have been trained in Japan, especially for educational television production.  I have also been trained in Britain in the same area.  In Japan, we were attached to NHK for a month and then we had formal training at their training institute.

Could you talk about the documentary films that you did on 16mm?

I did a film in 16mm on prenatal conditions and how they affect the health of the unborn.  In this film, we followed a lady at home; this was in rural Kenya, because that is where the majority of the Kenyans live.  We saw her day-to-day activities and we were able to get background information from doctors and psychologists on how diseases, for example, that a pregnant woman gets will affect the unborn's health, the diet of the mother, and how, again, it relates to the unborn's health.  Again, like I said, because I am working in the educational institution, our target audience usually would be for that kind of material, would be to get trainees, because they have to understand the students that they are teaching.  Therefore, we were able to relate that information to the learner in class.

Was Mine Boy your first feature film?

I would say not, because, like I have said, previously I have done quite a number of drama productions.  In Kenya every year, we have our annual drama festival where college students, high school students and primary students also come and compete.  We pick the best script out of that, work with the film students and, using one camera, we shoot the programs.  So, the difference between that and Mine Boy is that Mine Boy is longer, because the plays coming from the drama festival would, at best, be fifty minutes, but Mine Boy certainly is longer than that.

So these are basically plays that you shoot on video?

Yes, these are the dramas, although we do now write the screenplay and so on.

What pushed you towards Mine Boy, which, of course, is a novel by Peter Abrahams from South Africa?  What were some of the things that attracted you personally?

The choice of Mine Boy was not my decision alone.  We have Mine Boy as one of the texts that is being studied in high school right now, for the last three years.  Over the years we found it very useful to produce plays for television, because what has been happening is, especially for the city of Nairobi, free-lance theater artists would put up the place and students would come into the theater and watch.  But then, that only caters for about five percent of our students.  So, as a ministry, we had the responsibility of making similar information or similar resources available to schools.  So we designed a system whereby we, on an annual basis now, take up the textbooks for English literature and Kiswahili, because those are the two national languages.  We dramatize and put the films on tape, then we send them to the schools.  Either the schools will buy the cassettes or we have mobile vans that go to different locations in the country and we show these films.  We found that by using this method, performance in literature has improved dramatically in the schools.  That was the major reason for choosing to put Mine Boy on video.

So the audience for Mine Boy is basically the school age children who are going through the process of exams?

That is our main target audience, but what we found out is that there is a thirst for people to see themselves on the screen, regardless.  And although our intended audience is the high school students we have found that a lot of other people out of school do not hesitate to buy the same tapes and watch them for their own entertainment.

Has Mine Boy run on Kenyan national television?

Mine Boy has not been screened on our Kenyan Broadcasting Station, which is a public station.  Unfortunately, the station wears two hats: it is public and it is commercial. To be able to put up such a film on our television you have to pay.  We find it more cost-effective to use the same money...you would be paying something to the rate of maybe half a million Kenyan shillings for one show, because we are charged at the rate of about a hundred and thirty-five thousand Kenyan shillings for a half an hour.  We find it is more cost effective and we will reach a greater audience.  Again, when you are showing the films in the schools, or when we give them the tapes, they are watching it under a controlled situation.  Therefore, they can stop it and discuss and watch again, or they can watch several times.  So we find it more cost effective to take the programs to the people rather than putting it once, for the same amount of money, on the national broadcasting station.

You stated that you work primarily on video now rather than 16mm?

Oh yes, we cannot afford 16mm anymore, especially the cost of the raw stock and the processing.  You know, you take more time with film than with video, so that is where we are.

Could you talk about the Kenyan Institute of Education where you are?  Is it a government department?  What is the structure and how is it funded?

The Kenyan Institute of Education is a department within the Ministry of Education.  It is the major curriculum development center for the country, and the Educational Media Service where I work, where we produce educational materials, is now a department within the Kenyan Institute of Education.  Originally, programs of a school were housed under the Ministry of Information.  In 1965, we were doing broadcasting for radio and television programs.  However, what they realized was that since programs done as educational resources are to support curriculum, then the Educational Media Service was better placed under the Ministry of Education and housed at the Kenyan Institute of Education.  Because then we are able to work hand-in-hand in consultation with curriculum development on a day-to-day basis.

You have other women filmmakers in Kenya; what is your relationship with them, have you seen their work?  What has been the influence of their work on your own perception of cinema?

The most interesting thing about the Kenyan women filmmakers is that we went to the same college at the same time. Anne Mungai and I did quite a few student productions together.  She was originally trained as an editor; I was trained as a producer.  We have other producers like Dommie Yambo; her program was also showing at this festival.  She is also quite heavy in terms of documentary productions and, right now, she is also going into a feature production, her script is ready.  We went to college together, except for Jane Murago-Munen, who was a year ahead of us.  By then, eventually, because it is a small industry, we ended up working together.  I worked with Jane; again, she was an editor at the Kenyan Institute of Education.  We have edited programs together.  Right now, we are in the same film organization.  We have a Kenyan National Film Association where Jane is the secretary and I am member.  We are working together. What we have been able to do now as an association and as colleagues in the profession is that, we keep probing each other, or challenging each other.  So that if I do something that Jane thinks is not very well done, she would not hesitate to ask me, "What do you think you are doing?"

Like we have been saying all along, this is a male-dominated area and therefore people would be faster to spot a fault in a production done by a woman.  If a similar fault is in a production done by a man, they may choose to overlook it.  Let me give you an illustration from one experience that I had.  We had a new team of young men that was recruited in my institute around 1990.  That team had just acquired an outside broadcasting or outside production unit with three cameras and the whole shoot.  I was sent out on an assignment.  I had a man who did not have any experience in production as my assistant.  So I have a lot of new guys as my crew, they don't know me, I don't know them, their first attitude was, "Couldn't they get a producer?  Why are they sending us out with this little girl?"  We spent a week; this was a national festival of music and drama. We spent a week with them, came out with very good material.

As you know, with every production there is always a hiccup here and there.  Then on the final day we had, not a major problem, but nevertheless, they made it sound like, if it were not a woman in charge of this production maybe this problem would not have occurred.  So we had a bit of tension.  I was the only female producer in the department.  Then a year and a half later, the guys came to me and said, "Why are we not busy?"  I said, "What do you want to do? All of the male producers are there, why don't you challenge them?"  They said, "We are sorry, we didn't know that you were the best."  They said, "We did not know who we were dealing with at the time," and they actually apologized.  Not so loudly—no men would apologize so loudly—but in their own way and on an individual level they would say, "We didn't know what you were talking about," because I was able to prove myself to them.  So those are just some of the challenges that one has to face.

Do you face similar challenges when it comes to seeking funding? Have you ever had to go out on your own to secure independent sources of funding for other than government mandated programs?

As an institute, we do believe in cost sharing or even going out to seek an extra coin here and there.  I have not found it much of a problem.  Because, in the first place, when you are searching funds from whomever, the first thing they ask for is not just a CV on paper, they want to see a program that you have done.  You prove yourself that way, they come over or they ask you for a tape and they see your program.  They like it; they give you a job.  I would not say that I have felt discriminated against as a woman, because I have got my work to support my application.

Are you thinking about doing anything in 16mm or 35mm in fiction, feature, outside of the Kenyan Institute of Education, in the near future?

I have been working on a script for some time now.  I went to FESPACO in 1991 and I saw what the West African filmmakers are doing.  You know, now you are looking at this you start writing you own script.  In the process, again, you realize that it is not easy to get funds.  So, what I did was I started out writing a script and then I thought maybe I could make it a book.  So, I am working on a book, and I am hoping that I should be able to sell a screenplay on the same book.  Yes, it is in my dreams that one day I should be able to make a film outside the Educational Media Service mandate, to put my statements on the screen.

Is the book you are working on a novel or a play?

It's a novel.

Are you in any way influenced by the writings of some of the women writers in Kenya, let's say, Micere Mugo and Grace Ogot or other African women writers, at all?

Yes, in a way, I am.  Of course, I agree with some of their views and some of them I don't.  Quite a number of short stories that Grace wrote, some of them based on oral narrative—and that was quite a few years back—when you read some of them, and I can't remember the exact story, but now the way of thinking has changed somewhat, towards looking at—including her oral narratives—whether they were gender sensitive.  We say that the women are the traditional storytellers.  What kinds of stories have we been perpetuating?

In another workshop, we were looking at quite a lot of stories that have been told by men and women, but largely by women.  What you have realized is that, although we are saying that the society is male dominated and therefore a lot of stuff is seen from male eyes, but again the women who are telling the stories, the characters that they are painting, it is us who are not creating the female heroes, as storytellers.  So one would look at those stories, yes, they may have picked them from oral literature, but again, how relevant are they?  Is it a story that you want to perpetuate?  Or, is it a story that you want to put on paper and put question marks around?  Because quite honestly, a lot of our oral stories, they call the woman the woman, but they name the man in the story, they name the boy in the story.  They talk of the mother of Kamau, they talk of the wife of Kamau.  So we are saying at this time in life, we need to have women who have a name in the stories, as much as I respect the older writers.

So that in any project that you do, you believe that there is this female sensitivity that comes through and that critically engages some of the established conventions already in place?  So that the way that you as a woman see things is different from the way that maybe a man will see them created.

Maybe, not because I am a woman.  I have followed the gender debate, and I have, maybe, been influenced now to start looking at things the way they should be and the way society portrays.  As an example, when you watch the soap operas that we have from America and elsewhere, what we have is the wife who is shorter than the husband, which means she always has to look up to him.  Is this done deliberately?  Do we do it consciously?  Or, is that the way life is?  The wives are shorter than the husbands?  Why is it that the woman has to earn less?  So that, again, she is a dependent.  When you are casting, either for the stage or even in a book, that is the kind of character you are putting up.  Therefore, you don't know whether that is the way it is.  But you know that there are some wives who are taller; again, when you put up such a scenario, you are almost telling those who are not married, if you are looking for a wife you've got to look beneath yourself, she's got to earn less, she's got to be shorter, she's got to be whatever you are not.  So that the man is always up there and the woman is down here.  So these are some of the subtle messages that one has to think about consciously when you are writing, or even when you are putting up a show on stage and bring it to film.

You mentioned that you were in Ouagadougou in 1991.  As you remember, there was this meeting of African women video/filmmakers.  I don't know if you attended the workshop.

I remember it very well.  What happened with me in Ouagadougou, I had gone as an UNICEF delegate and at that time UNICEF was running a parallel workshop on films supporting children to the other workshops at Ouagadougou.  Because I had done quite a number of films about children with children as central character, I was involved more with the UNICEF workshop.  Nevertheless, I was able to interact with the women from Africa and the Diaspora.

As a woman, how would you define your role as a filmmaker?

I would say that filmmakers are storytellers and as a filmmaker, part of my responsibility is to make sure that I am telling the right story and in the right way.  Not just for Kenya, but I believe for Africa and for the whole world.

Do you see a political or socially oriented role that filmmakers should play in contemporary society?  Given the kinds of challenges that face African peoples in general, and Kenyans in particular, what role do you see film playing in terms of engaging those challenges? And also, maybe perhaps provoking some kind of thought and action towards transforming it?

I believe film can be used effectively as an information medium.  It can also be used effectively for education and, in fact, we have been using it for both.  Other departments, including my department, have been doing programs on video about a subject like AIDS and family planning.  Documentaries and dramas, and what some projects in Kenyan have done, is work on video within a certain district so that you are not bringing information from outside the region.  The team would go there, spend two weeks, talk with the people, shoot, have discussions, have community theater, go back to Nairobi and edit the material; we then bring it back to them.  In that way we have been able to use it effectively to entertain them and again to educate them; and, again, for their own reflection.  When you are seeing yourself, you are seeing your situation, then it is easy to remember and to change to a certain extent both attitudes and behavior.