Episode 58: Gwyneth Herbert

Gwyneth Herbert: It just was this magical place for me where the stories, it felt like the stories were running to meet me everywhere that I went. And at the same time, there was this sense that I was somehow running from myself, even being there in the first place.

Josh Caldwell: Hi, atypical daydreamers, welcome to the show. Today, I've been thinking about the number three and why it's the magic number. So I Googled it, and the first thing that came up was, it's the smallest number needed to create a pattern, making it the minimum requirement for a complete, memorable, and harmonious structure. Also, the triangle is considered one of the strongest shapes. And there's so many sayings like ready, set, go, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The three-act story structure, beginning, middle, end, past, present, future, the Holy Trinity, three little pigs. My guest today is Gwyneth Herbert. She's a songwriter and composer. And today she shares three pivotal journeys she took to Kenya. With each trip, she peels back the layers to get to a deeper truth, all while wrestling with the complexity of memory. What is remembered, what is forgotten, and what is conveniently left out?

Gwyneth Herbert: It's funny, each time I visit it, it's like it pops up for me at a time when I'm either running from something or in some period of transition. And 2013, I was kind of at the end of coming out of a very messy, codependent, destructive relationship and falling straight into a new one, running away from my hedonistic life in East London with the promise of a new start by the sea. And I got this call to come to Kenya to tour the coast with a band of local musicians. And at that time I'd been commissioned to write an arrangement of a foreign language folk song for the birthday of a British composer, Benjamin Britten. So I was like, great, while I'm out there I will collect folk songs and talk to people. And I'll use this tour, because it was a tour of really fancy hotels, to fund my trip over there.

So I was based out of the Reef Hotel in Mombasa, which is quite a swanky place. Immediately, it felt very strange. There were banquets, there was a bar in the pool. And at the same time, on my days off, I was going out into the surrounding villages of Mombasa and working in schools there, talking to kids, collecting stories and songs. And going back into this lavish five-star environment. That sat so strangely with me. Particularly in December 2013, it was the anniversary of fifty years of independence of Kenya from British colonial rule. There were all these celebrations in the streets, and yet here I was seeing almost colonialism with a different face and being a part of that.

Gwyneth Herbert: I went to this place called the Little Theatre of Kenya in Mombasa and met a playwright called Agutu Moriah. And on one of my song and story collection trips, I had heard a story of a Giriama folk legend called Mekatilili wa Menza. And I became obsessed with this story.

Mekatilili was a woman who lived in 1913 in a Giriama village in Kenya. And at that time, the British armed forces were going around all of the villages and recruiting the first-born son from every Giriama household to come and fight for us in the First World War. And they came into Mekatilili's village and they took her beloved son. And after they went, the elders held a meeting. There was a circle of elders in her village and she walked in, she ambushed their meeting, which was quite unheard of for a woman to do. And she had in her hand a mother hen and five chicks. She dropped them into this circle of elders. And she said to the chief, pick a chick. So he pointed at one little chicken. She said, go try, pick it up. And the mother hen was straight up in his face. And he couldn't get anywhere near the chick.

And there was a bit of silence and then she said again to him, pick another one. He points at this other chick. She tries to pick it up and again, mother hen is right in his face. And she says, you see, while you men are standing around with your hands between your legs and your eyes to the ground, we mother hens are ready to fight for our chicks. It is time. And so she led a rebellion, a revolution of the Giriama against the British. And she won.

Gwyneth Herbert: There are different chapters of this story. She was captured, she was imprisoned, and then by magic she escaped. And then she was captured again, imprisoned, escaped again. And then the British realized they couldn't kill her because they would martyr her. And so they came to this agreement to stop forced conscription and to stop the land grabbing from the Giriama at that time.

So I went back to the theater and put a call out for local musicians, photographers, artists, rappers to all come together and make something in collaboration. Between 25 and 40 artists showed up and we, over the course of a weekend, created this show called This Is Mombasa through photography and music and song and storytelling. I'd also been working with a local orphanage choir aged between three and eighteen years old. This little kid called Jeremiah had been teaching me very basic Swahili and we wrote a song together called Wapi Rafiki Rafiki Uko Wapi, which means, where are my friends? My friends, where are you? I love Swahili because it's a language that already sings without any melody to it.

And in the lead up to the gig itself, I was so stressed out. Nothing was where I wanted it to be. We were gonna have lights in the trees. We were doing this performance outside. My perfectionism was up. There weren't any seats for the kids. I didn't know where the sandwiches were. Everybody was late. And my friend Agutu, who had flown in that final weekend to surprise me, was just like, Gweno, which is what he called me. It means chicken in Luo. And he's like, Gweno, take a pause. You do not need the light in the trees. We have the moon. The children sleep on the floor. They can sit on the floor. Take a pause, Gwyneth.

Gwyneth Herbert: And whenever I'm kind of getting into that place again, I always remember Agutu's voice. Just take a pause. Maybe I don't need to reinvent the moon in every situation I find myself.

And I went on stage and as I started playing, the orphanage choir who were behind me went into this dance routine, this kind of flash mob that they had secretly choreographed as a surprise for me. And I'm trying to play the ukulele and sing and I am just a puddle on the floor. It was one of the most beautiful gifts that I have ever received in my life. Wapi rafiki rafiki uko wapi and they're there, doing their crazy dancing, acrobatics, all in perfect sync. It just was this magical place for me where the stories, it felt like the stories were running to meet me everywhere that I went. And at the same time, there was this sense that I was somehow running from myself, even being there in the first place.

Josh Caldwell: Hey, it's Josh. Hope you're enjoying the podcast. And if so, are you wanting more road stories? Well, good news. I've got you covered. Consider becoming a patron. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories that there just wasn't time for. And you'll be supporting a truly independent podcast. Find the link in the show notes and thanks. Now back to the show.

Gwyneth Herbert: And this was a recurring theme that came up for me every time Kenya has emerged in my life. I didn't want to leave. And for a while I wondered whether I could live by the sea in England or half come back here and live here. It wasn't to be. I settled down, started a new relationship, got married. And then in 2019, 2020, Kenya came up again. And at this point, I was running in a different way. My marriage was just unraveling. And I was hiding from the grief of that, holding on in many different ways and running into work, into other coping mechanisms. And this is where another Kenyan possibility comes up.

I was at a company called Mahogany Opera run by a guy called Freddie, who had a shared interest and love of Kenya and very deeply embedded with his own family history. He commissioned me to make another project. And I'd been chatting with Agutu, the playwright, about how we might revisit some of these stories together. So this is 2019, 2020. In Britain, it's in the wake of Brexit. And there's all this rhetoric about patriotism and colonial legacy, people across parties talking about how we should no longer be ashamed of colonialism, we should be proud of it. And it feels just so uncomfortable. The politics of memory. What do we choose to remember and what is conveniently forgotten? And at the same time, I am running from my own recent memories and not quite ready to face what is unraveling in my own life.

Gwyneth Herbert: And we're on the brink of a general election too. And I embark on this new adventure with Agutu investigating stories of British colonialism. And from this work comes a real realization of how ignorant I am of my own country's history. It was Salman Rushdie who said that the thing about British history is the majority of it hasn't actually happened on this island and there's no real awareness of the huge ripple effect of our intervention throughout the world. So I start learning about the Mau Mau Rebellion of 1952 to 1960 that led to Kenya's independence, which is what was being celebrated during my first trip there.

These stories of colonial history which for me feel really removed at that time. And for my collaborator Agutu, feel embodied, remembered, part of his family history, and still living within him. And so it's tender and complicated and messy as we try and meet within these conversations remotely. And I don't have a language around how to talk about what's happening within my own life at that time. And he keeps asking me, why are you here? Why are you looking at these stories right now? And I don't really know.

Gwyneth Herbert: When I land in Mombasa for the first stage of our research trip, his provocation is we're going to sit with ourselves and go inward and explore our own histories and our stories. And I am in absolutely no state to want to do that. All I want to do is run to the next thing. I want to be that kid. I want everybody else to be telling me about them. I am not ready to do that kind of work because it feels too painful. What is remembered, what is forgotten, what is conveniently left out.

So from these awkward, searching, clumsy conversations, we go from Mombasa into the Karura Forest, which is where a lot of the Mau Mau rebellion was fought out. And we go into the caves where the freedom fighters would be hiding. And we're walking through the forest and for the first time, it feels like we can meet there, like we're two kids in the forest, walking it together. Like nature is holding our conversations. And we're caught in this tangle of overhanging vines and creepers, which look like they're spelling out secret symbols of history. And the roots of the trees are so overlapping that it's impossible to see where one tree begins and the other ends. And we become aware of nature being this other participant or witness to this human traumatic history that we're trying to look at and explore together.

And then from there, we get on a train. From the train, we take a very noisy matatu. And then from a matatu, we are on the back of a motorbike and driving through the Aberdare region, past the crumbling colonial house of General Winglight, under the cover of forest where some of the fiercest fighting happened during that struggle.

Gwyneth Herbert: Much like in Mekatilili's time, the African rifle brigade had come and fought on our behalf in the Second World War. And everyone had been promised as a reward for fighting, land within Kenya. But what actually happened was that land was taken from the Kenyan people and given to white settlers, not to the African people.

And then walking through this unbelievably beautiful, lush land into the farmland of Agutu's family home. And there hadn't been a mzungu, a white person there for thirty-two years. So I was greeted with a mixture of delight, disbelief, curiosity, and eventually an extraordinary welcome. I don't know, I still felt like we were carrying the weight of this history and remembering what it might have been like the last time somebody that looked like me had come into that land uninvited.

And then from there, we get back on the back of motorbikes. And as we're driving through the Aberdare Range again, we are caught in a storm of caper white butterflies. And I say to Agutu, what is the Swahili word for snow? And he says, I don't know if we have one. Do butterflies live in flight? Do they live where they land? And from the flight of the butterfly, we make our own flight and land in the memorial for the Mau Mau Rebellion in Nairobi.

And so there is this memorial with a kind of non-apology from William Hague, a beautiful sculpture, but the absence of real accountability. And we watched the moon coming through the silhouettes of these two figures with the stories of those who'd lived through the experience of that struggle and that oppression ringing in our hearts and the silence of the British kind of deafening. What is remembered, what is forgotten, what is conveniently left out.

Gwyneth Herbert: Just after my return from this Kenyan trip, I reached a rock bottom and came into recovery and put down all of the things that I had been using to run from my own stuff. And I put down a lot of my work and my creativity. And I wasn't sure if I would be able to make again or what that would look like, if I would be able to reconnect with that little kid running through the world with her arms wide and her heart open saying, play with me.

In 2025, I'm starting to kind of peep out of my door and build capacity and be out in the world again in a new way. And I get another call from Kenya. And this time, Agutu is looking to investigate his play that he's written about the Mau Mau Rebellion and asks if I and Freddie will go over there and explore what it might mean to turn it into an opera. And I do not feel like the same kid on the back of the motorbike. And I'm really scared about what it will look like being out there this time.

What actually happens is I land and we go straight back to the Little Theatre of Kenya and into a workshop with about thirty young actors and artists. And I am not ready for this. I need to take a pause, take a pause, Gwenno, under a tree and be in my body and cry before I can meet the group. And this time, the adventure is so much quieter. We go from Mombasa to Malindi to Watamu and Kilifi. And every day I'm just asking, what is the work today? And really, I thought my job was to go out there and put things to music. And actually, as we're exploring these stories in the company of people from Kenya, some of whom are also hearing them for the first time, because the silence around this isn't just over here, it's over there too. I realized that my job here is just to be in this body, in this space and listen as people share what it has meant for them.

Gwyneth Herbert: And I'm able to do that now because I've been sitting, practicing sitting for four and a half years and practicing listening in a new way for four and a half years. We go to a little bookshop to do a play reading and not one word of the play is read. Instead, we do a ceremony inviting the ancestors to join us and then just talk about the stories and I just listen. And there are four incredible young women artists who are part of our group and we walk together again in the forests and I listen.

And one of them says that she's never had a white friend before and she would not be allowed to take a white person home with her. And she is the one that I grow this incredible bond with. We find ourselves finding similarities in our familial history and our experience and connecting in ways that because I've sat and listened to myself, I can now sit and listen to her in a new way. And there is just healing that is happening that has nothing to do with re-narrating the past. It's about being together in a new way in the present, whilst also hearing and listening to what has happened in our two cultures.

And towards the end, we go and visit a Giriama village again, very like the one that I visited when my trip in Kenya began. And sit in a circle, in a drumming circle of elders as people share stories of grief and struggle and joy and dancing. And I'm working with all of the kids there and I invite them up and we do this improvised dance. And I'm like, here she is. Here's the little kid not lost to me who still gets to play by the fire.

Josh Caldwell: I want to thank Gwen for sharing her experience. Now don't forget to check out her website and her Instagram to see what she's up to and all the many organizations she works with in Kenya and in the UK. All the links are in the show notes. This podcast is created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid, my side music project. General support and copywriting by Miranda Caldwell. And if you know someone who you think might enjoy this show, send them this episode. The support really helps. Thank you for listening and I hope you come back next time.