Why would a cow need a wife?

Angella Emurwon describes herself as a freelance writer. Her play The Cow Needs a Wife won third prize in the 2010 BBC African Performance Playwrighting competition and has been adapted for stage. It will be showing at National Theatre from June 2 to June 4. She sat down with Hellen Nyana and told her about her experience as a writer and what winning the prize meant to her.

How long have you been writing?
I have always been writing although I never really wrote for the public. I have written for small projects here and there, but nothing big.

Why do you write?
I like to paint pictures with words. I am a storyteller and I love to share. If you sat me down to coffee I would definitely tell you loads of stories. I like to share my challenges and the lessons I have learnt. I like to communicate my internal life through stories.

What inspired the story?
The story is loosely based on a story I was told of a young man who wanted to marry a girl and he had to raise money for a kwanjula. After he got what he need for the function, the girl refused to marry him and his uncles suggested that he chooses from his ex-girlfriends and marry one of them.

Why would a cow need a wife?
When a man has all the things he needs to marry a wife (such as a cow) but no woman to marry and yet he needs the stuff taken, it does seem to me like it’s the cow that needs the wife.

Should people read more into this play than just a man trying to get married?
I hope people will find many meanings to the story that they can relate to because there’s something for everybody in the play. It does talk about the preparations for marriage but on a deeper level it deals with crisis management. How people will have a small problem and magnify it and complicate it even further. You can apply this to your life or even the politics in our country.

Under what genre would you place this play?
In a broader sense, it would be comedy. BBC labelled it slapstick (a type of comedy involving exaggerated activities which may exceed the boundaries of common sense) although I may not exactly call it that. I would call it social commentary though.
How did you get into the competition?
There a two friends of mine who knew how much I loved Wole Soyinka. So when one of them heard about the competition and that Wole Soyinka would be a judge, she called and asked me to write something to compete even if there were about two weeks to the deadline. She called every two days to ask me if I had written and finally, I wrote the play to really get her off my case.

Was this your first time to enter this type of competition?
No. I did send a play once to BBC but I never got any feedback.

Being a fan of Wole Soyinka as you have confessed, wasn’t it daunting to know that he could be a judge in the competition?
All I hoped for was for someone to look at it and just comment on it. You know, tell me whether I was moving in the right direction or what few things I could employ here and there. I never really expected to win.

Wole Soyinka described your play as, “...one of the zaniest plays I have ever encountered” and that as he read it, “he chuckled all the time”. How did that make you feel?
It was overwhelming. I was shocked that it won third place because winning was as much a surprise to me as it was to everybody. But for Soyinka to say that was truly overwhelming. In fact if there’s a word bigger than overwhelming then that is the word I would use. I started to really think of myself as a writer from that point on.

Who are some of your best playwrights and why?
Wow. That’s like asking a mother who her favourite child is. I really can’t say but I have been thinking a lot about Francis Imbugua’s Betrayal In the City of late. You know, he says, “When the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it’s not enough to say a man is mad.” I also grew up reading Soyinka’s Jero plays and Kongi’s Harvest. Arthur Miller was also a good one. I recently watched Broken Glass, a play that was written by him. Those are the few I can think of right now.

How has the process of adapting the play for stage been?
It’s been quite different from the audio play. The audio play must engage the reader so they do not switch off and so relies a lot on how clear words are and the noise around such as footsteps of an approaching person. The stage play on the other hand must be visually engaging, loud and well acted. I have therefore had to add a few things to the original play and one more character to make the scenes flow into each other better. The Kampala Amateur Dramatics Society is the one bringing it to stage and so you can expect a varied cast and an African village that you have never seen before.

Is there a future for Ugandan playwrights?
Very much so! And not just playwrights but the performing arts as a whole. I have been to open mic sessions, poetry recitals and public speaking events and I am excited about the future of this industry. I am working on a musical right now and I have met many talented actors and actresses, directors of films and musicians as well.

Tell us more about these other projects you are working on.
I am working a musical that should be staged next year. I have written the script and now I am just putting together things such as the music. I am also adapting an African book for film and I am done with the treatment and sample and we are at the contract stage now.
I am also designing a hotel and spa (the look and feel of the place) at the moment.