Too Early For Birds Brings Back Its Wangari Maathai Tribute

Too Early For Birds is bringing “Shawry for Trees: The Roots of a Revolutionary” back to the stage, five months after the show’s sold out debut left audiences asking for another round.

The rerun lands at Nairobi’s Jain Bhavan auditorium from September 25 to 27, dates that fall on the fifteenth anniversary of Wangari Maathai’s death in 2011. The production team calls the timing a coincidence they noticed only after locking the schedule, though they admit it feels like more than luck.

A ninth edition built on a viral moment

Shawry for Trees began, unlikely as it sounds, with a TikTok clip. A young Kenyan forgot Maathai’s name mid sentence and reached for “shawry for trees” instead. The line stuck, and Too Early For Birds turned it into the title of its ninth edition, which first opened April 10 to 12 this year to strong reviews and a packed house.

The play traces Maathai’s path from a curious girl growing up in Nyeri to Africa’s first female Nobel Peace Prize laureate, an honour she won in December 2004. Writers Abigail Arunga, Wacuka Mũngai and Ras Mengesha built the script around her roles as mother, professor, member of parliament, assistant minister, activist, farmer and writer, then let Ndinda Kioko shape the final edit. The research behind it came from Kĩmemia Macharia, Nyagũthiĩ A. Murage, Meran Randa and Mũthoni Mwangi, with Ngartia contributing as well.

Audiences who caught the April run described a story that refuses to flatten Maathai into a museum piece. It shows her silenced, dismissed and underestimated because she was a woman, then charts how she pushed past all of it. The sacred Mugumo tree recurs as a symbol throughout, tying her environmental work to something spiritual rather than purely political.

The title role went to Akinyi Oluoch, a drama therapist and licensed psychologist who trained in Montreal and won Best Actress at the 2018 Sanaa Theatre Awards. That clinical background suits the part. Maathai is hardest to play in the quiet stretches, long before the Nobel Prize and the international headlines, when she was simply a woman in Kenya arguing that planting trees was a political act. Oluoch built her performance around that idea rather than around the version of Maathai the world met later.

Why the company keeps returning to her story

Too Early For Birds describes its mission as continuing what Maathai started. In its own words, the team sees itself as part of the African People she addressed in her book “The Challenge For Africa,” and treats storytelling as its version of the fieldwork she did in biology.

Much of the cast and crew grew up in communities shaped by the movements Maathai helped build, including the women who planted trees and helped push out a dictatorship. That history shows up on stage through orature, the oral storytelling tradition the company leans on to pass down knowledge the way Kenyan communities always have. The result blends careful research with what the team calls a touch of ancestral magic.

Since launching in 2017, Too Early For Birds has staged more than 40 productions covering figures such as Tom Mboya, the Nyayo House survivors, Zarina Patel, Timothy Njoya, Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima and Syokimau, among others. Over 90 per cent of those shows have sold out, and the Maathai story alone has now run for nine editions since the original viral video. The production grew out of a partnership between the history blog Owaahh and performers Ngartia and Abu Sense, and is executive produced by Story Zetu. This run is produced by Sheba Hirst, with marketing led by Mũtwĩri Njagĩ.

The ensemble behind the story

Shawry for Trees runs on a deep bench of Kenyan theatre talent, and the company is naming all of them.

Shiviske Shivisi, who currently plays Chichi in Showmax’s “4Play,” brings more than a decade of stage and screen credits to the ensemble, including “40 Sticks,” “Poacher” and over 20 stage productions such as the earlier Tom Mboya edition. She earned a special mention for Best Supporting Actress at Venezuela’s Five Continents International Film Festival in 2019. Joe Kinyua, a familiar face from “Njoro wa Uba,” “Sue na Johnnie” and “Changes,” left a career in accounting for acting in 2008 and has since appeared in the 2013 film “The Fifth Estate.”

Faith Wangare, known on screen as Miss Kahiro, now leads GenZManifesto on K24 TV and made her stage debut in “Sarafina” in 2019 after appearing in the award winning film “Click Click Bang.” Charles Gachanja, 24, already carries a Kenya Theatre Awards nomination for “Shadows of the Cloth” and has made a habit of playing real historical Kenyan figures, having previously taken on the role of JM Kariuki. Sam Arlcons, a performing artist and dramaturg, adds credits from “The Island” and “African Twist,” while Diya Vaya, Red Brenda and Karimi Rimbui round out the cast, working across film, theatre and live music.

Behind the scenes, director Martin Kigondu, named to Business Daily’s Top 40 Under 40 for 2025, shapes the production alongside production manager Marichu Muturi and stage manager Mercy Wangui, a two time Kenya Theatre Awards winner for stage management whose credits include “Sarafina,” “Ngaahika Ndeenda” and “The Trial of Dedan Kimathi.” Alice Kitata assists on stage management.

Why this edition matters now

A panel discussion held ahead of the September preview made the company’s intent clear: this is not a nostalgia tour. The activists and environmentalists in the room treated Maathai’s politics, her fights over land, colonial era structures and the true cost of development, as unfinished business rather than settled history. Those same questions were on the table when she faced tear gas in Uhuru Park in 1992, and the show does not pretend otherwise.

That approach fits the pattern Too Early For Birds has followed since 2017. Each of its more than 40 productions treats Kenyan history as a live conversation rather than a museum piece, grounded in orature, the oral tradition Maathai herself championed in “The Challenge For Africa.” By that measure, Shawry for Trees looks like the edition the company has been building toward all along.

Where and when to catch it

The 800 seat Jain Bhavan auditorium sits inside the Shree Sthanakvasi Jain Sangh complex in Loresho, Nairobi. Five performances are scheduled across the three day run.

Early Bird Hummingbird tickets are close to selling out, organisers say, so anyone planning to attend should book soon rather than wait for the door.

Too Early For Birds has built its reputation on turning overlooked or half remembered chapters of Kenyan history into theatre that feels immediate. Bringing Maathai’s story back this September, on the very anniversary of her passing, gives Nairobi audiences a second chance to sit with a life that keeps finding new relevance, one tree, one fight and one hummingbird at a time.