FROM CINEMATIC ABSURDITY TO STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE: BECKETTIAN AESTHETICS AND POSTCOLONIAL CONFLICT IN DAUDI ANGUKA'S MVERA

Publication Details

Publication Date

10/09/2026

Volume / Issue

Vol 1, Issue 4 (2026)

Article No.

042

Journal

British Journal of Contemporary Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.67693/BJCR-2AVPUJ9E

Received

27 Aug 2026

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7

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1

Abstract

Contemporary African cinema has increasingly moved beyond conventional realism to explore fragmented histories, political disillusionment, trauma, displacement, and the psychological consequences of structural violence. Yet scholarship on African conflict cinema has tended to privilege historical realism and sociopolitical representation, while the potential of absurdist form to produce an alternative understanding of postcolonial experience remains comparatively underexamined. This paper examines Daudi Anguka's Mvera (2023) as a cinematic reconfiguration of absurdist aesthetics within a Kenyan postcolonial context. Rather than treating absurdity simply as a stylistic departure from realism, the article conceptualizes structural absurdity as a condition in which political, economic, and social contradictions become experienced by individuals as repetition, uncertainty, communicative breakdown, spatial confinement, and disrupted temporal coherence. Drawing on Beckettian aesthetics, postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and African film scholarship, the paper employs qualitative close textual and audiovisual analysis of the film. Particular attention is given to fragmented temporality, silence and minimal dialogue, spatial confinement, visual estrangement, repetition, characterization, and the relationship between historical memory and contemporary exploitation. The analysis argues that Mvera does not simply represent conflict as an external political event; it transforms conflict into an aesthetic and experiential condition. Mvera's entrapment within a system that disguises exploitation as opportunity, together with Thabiti's conversion of economic vulnerability into political power, produces a world in which ordinary categories of choice, progress, security, and freedom become unstable. The film's absurdist structures therefore reveal a deeper contradiction within postcolonial subjectivity: individuals are invited to pursue mobility and economic liberation while simultaneously being incorporated into systems that reproduce their vulnerability. The paper concludes that Mvera reconfigures Beckettian aesthetic principles through specifically Kenyan social realities, demonstrating that absurdity can function not merely as an existential category but as a cinematic grammar for representing structural violence, postcolonial dislocation, and the persistence of unresolved historical contradictions.

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This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Free to read, share, and adapt with attribution.