Bweranyange Girls’ criticize reckless parents

Dec 09, 2004

AVERY disturbing situation. A husband leaves home in the morning without even looking at his

By Emmanuel Ssejjengo
AVERY disturbing situation. A husband leaves home in the morning without even looking at his children and so does the wife. The children grow up without guidance and become juvenile delinquents.

As parents fight, the children also fight. But who is to blame? This is the question students of Bweranyange Girls’ School asked the audience at their production of the play, Who is to blame? The production took place at the Ndere Centre recently.

The play was written and directed by a student, Rhona Rwangyezi. It depicts a troubled modern family. Dr Michael dedicates his effort to his work and neglects his household duties. Likewise, his wife, Denise (Rhona Rwangyezi), a lawyer, commits herself to her work and kills the mother in her. Like father, like son. Like mother, like daughter.

The children are as “careless” as their parents. They fight and disrespect their elders.
Rwangyezi exhibits a stunning skill at conveying psychological complexities of her characters, who form uneasy romantic and physical alliances as they struggle to claim a distinct individuality.

Michael expects his lawyer wife to attend to the children and home more than she does to her career. But Denise is a contemporary woman.

Though not mad with feminism, she still asks for her place. “Let me be a woman, atleast,” she says. When she threatens to resign from her law firm so as to take charge of her family, her friend, Sophie, reminds her that in this day and age, her place is not in the kitchen.

Denise’s character symbolises the society the play depicts. While she will quarrel with her husband because he refuses to take David (Alice Gamukama) to hospital, she will also forget (David’s) birthday. While she is being eaten away by the modernity, she is also a monster to her family.
Rwangyezi earned well-deserved ovations for character development. The little David is timid, insecure and innocent. But he is trampled upon because he is voiceless.
His suffering is silent, but evident.

The children are gone, gone. The highlight of this is when Clowe (Hellen Rwangyenzi) and Mark (Brenda Kisakye) make a birthday party for their brother, David. The party is a mixture of kimansulo, teenage wildness and alcohol abuse. It was Bobbie Wine and Julianna Kanyomozi’s Taata Wa Bana, to which the spoilt brats “shook their booty like crazy”.
The question: Who is father? Who is mother? arose again and again.
The parents return home to find a house as indisciplined as the family itself. They blame their children, but the children blame them, while their grandmother blames Denise.

It is no wonder that, while the older faces exhibited confusion, the young faces were at ease. The youngsters had spelt it out: “The emperor is naked and we know”.

Rwagyezi scores highly as she triggers off everyone’s thought on the disparity between modernity and tradition – global and local cultures. She suggests there is no need for a global culture.

Let’s embrace a “glocal” (mixture of global and local) cultures. Pick the best out of each and, perhaps, we may live happily in the future.

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