By Ogova Ondego
Published January 16, 2022
Mention the name Margaretta H Swigert among mass media, arts and culture circles and Kenyans will stare at you with ox-like dumbness. Say Margaretta wa Gacheru and they will suddenly stop whatever they are doing and give you rapt attention for wa Gacheru is considered an authority on things art and lifestyle in this East African country that was created by the British who also named it Kenya. Yes, Margaretta wa Gacheru is arguably the longest and most consistent serving writer on creativity in Kenya. But this article isn’t about the British, Margaretta H Swigert or Margaretta wa Gacheru but about Margaretta H Swigert’s astudy that seeks to debunk myths, stereotypes and half truths about Contemporary Art in Kenya.
The study, titled Globalizing Kenyan Culture: Jua Kali & the Transformation of Contemporary Kenyan Art: 1960-2010, is a doctoral dissertation that has earned the writer a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois, USA and yes, the entire document is available online under a Creative Commons license.
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Besides seeking to set the record right and sounding like an expose of sorts, this study, that covers the 1960-2010 period, focuses on visual arts in Nairobi although it also touches on other art forms,
“So to clear the air and offer a more comprehensive and counter-hegemonic perspective on what actually transpired in the visual art world of Kenya over the past decades, I have taken on the task of illustrating and explaining the transformation of contemporary Kenyan visual culture over the last half century,” wa Gacheru writes. “This entire dissertation is designed to affirm what has been negated (and neglected) in Kenya‘s visual cultural history as well as to restore a tangible sense of that culture. Visual art wasn‘t brought to Kenya by European colonizers. On the contrary, the visual arts have been a dynamic dimension of East African culture for centuries.”
Donors play a central role in transforming and globalizing Nairobi‘s art world. Kuona Art Trust, Rahimtula Museum of Modern Art (RaMoMA) and The GoDown Art Centre, for instance, may not have happened without substantial funding from donors. National Museums of Kenya, too, receives lots of donor support for its programmes.
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The study draws a line between Artisans and Artists.It says the latter are scattered around Nairobi and its environs and that they are less inclined to be counted or classified. It is therefore little surprising that no one knows how many artists are working in Nairobi, let alone Kenya.
A contemporary art movement operated by independent, non-formal practitioners referred to by the Kiswahili term, Jua Kali, is flourishing.
Everything from abstract expressionism, social realism, Afro-surrealism and naturalism to junk art, bar art, matatu art and graffiti to sculpture shaped in stone, cement, scrap metal, soda bottle tops, fiberglass, recycled stained glass, mud, steel wire and papier mache is created here.
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“The inventiveness of the artists is seemingly boundless, and while it is true that many jua kali artists have appropriated some ideas from Western sources, the art works produced are thoroughly indigenized,” wa Gacheru writes. “I call the creative process jua kali because it emerges from outside of formal systems and institutions in ways that are improvisational, innovative, entrepreneurial and highly imaginative.”
She argues that despite the vibrant developments in contemporary Kenyan art and culture, the visual arts in particular has received scant attention from Western scholars and even less from fellow Africans, be they art historians, sociologists or anthropologists, who tend to be preoccupied with West African and South African art movements.
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It wasn‘t until 1966 that Kenya‘s first indigenous African-owned art world was born, and since then, more than 25 art venues have been conceived in the last decade (2000-2011) alone.
Among the myths frequently associated with Kenyan contemporary art the study debunks are: there is no such thing as contemporary Kenyan art; the only art which does exist in Kenya is naïve, primitive and tribal; contemporary Kenyan art came into being either in the 1980s with the arrival of the German-American art dealer Ruth Schaffner at Gallery Watatu, or the 1990s with the establishment of Kuona Trust by the British national Rob Burnet, or since 2000 when international donor funding contributed to the construction of art worlds controlled not by indigenous artists but by expatriates and their African surrogates to whom the funds were bestowed ostensibly to aid African artists.
She argues that the roots of contemporary Kenyan art are to be found in the Mau Mau war of resistance in the 1950s.
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East African art is not something that got started in the 21st century, let alone in the 1990s or even in the 1980s. East African artists such as Louis Mwaniki, Gregory Maloba, and Elimo Njau have been traveling, studying and exhibiting in Europe and the United States since the early 1960s. As such, they have been constructing art networks which are both transnational and local since that time, wa Gacheru contends.
“For all of the studies done by national and international agencies, such as the government‘s Sessional Paper on ‘Small Enterprise and Jua Kali Development in Kenya’ (1992), none have identified jua kali artists or jua kali art networks as catalytic factors fueling a contemporary Kenyan art movement, leave alone a cultural renaissance. Nor do they recognize the economic potential latent in Kenya‘s thriving jua kali art world. For all the funding that has been channeled through the Kenya government for the development of the jua kali sector, virtually none of it has gone to promote jua kali artists,” she writes.
The Ford Foundation-funded Kuona Trust, The GoDown, and RaMoMA are referred to as ‘cartels’ as they don’t assist artists as was envisaged.
Alliance Francaise, Goethe Institut, Banana Hill Art Studio, Race Course Restaurant, the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden and Mamba Village and annual fairs, such as the Bizarre Bazaar, the International School of Kenya Exhibition, and the Story Moja Hey Festival are some of the venues that hold art exhibitions. Local artists, wa Gacheru says, organize their own ad hoc group exhibitions in up-market malls like the Village Market, Yaya Center and The Junction, and restaurants such as The Talisman, Le Rustique,and Cafe des Arts.
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New artists‘ networks are being established in Nairobi slums, such as Maasai Mbili which got together in 2003 in Kibera, Kijiji Art Center, another self-help artists group launched in 2009 in Kayole, and Mukuru Art Center which trains slum children in painting and drawing.
“Many local artists for a wide range of reasons have shifted their studios and exhibition sites to their peri-urban homes, first to save money on urban rents, second to save on the exorbitant commissions that some galleries demand, and third to have the space they need to work as they like. I found a number of artists‘ enclaves—in Ngecha, Ruaka, Kahawa West, and Kitengela—where jua kali artists live and work at the same site, but their homes are nearby other artists, so they still get the benefit of neighborly networking,” the researcher says. “Artists were frank and forthright in their expressions of displeasure with the status quo at established art worlds. Their grievances included the high commissions (including VAT or Value Added Tax) that a gallery like RaMoMA is demanding artists pay. They also felt that galleries were doing little to promote local artists‘ work either locally or trans-nationally. They were also unhappy that art venues like Kuona Trust were no longer conducting skills training workshops as they previously had done.”
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“I have found very little written to retrieve a sense of cultural history related to the visual arts; and where I have seen it attempted I have often found misrepresentation, distortion, and/or partial representation of the facts. For instance, in 1990 Dr Johanna Agthe published Signs: East African Art from 1974-1989, but rather than cover the full scope of developments in Kenyan visual art, she primarily focuses on artists that she met through one Gallery Watatu and whose works she personally collected for her Folk Art Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Signs includes significant East African painters such as Jak Katarikawe, Etale Sukuro, and Joel Oswaggo, as well as sculptors such as John Diang‘a, Gakunju Kaigwa, and John Odoch-Ameny. But she was incapable of including several jua kali art networks that were just coming into being in Nairobi‘s peri-urban areas, such as Banana Hill and Ngecha. Granted these art networks exploded on the contemporary art scene in the 1990s, but the unintended consequence of this omission is that her book leaves one with the perception that the field of production among Kenyan visual artists was much narrower than was actually the case at the time. In 2003, a controversial book entitled Thelathini (meaning thirty in Kiswahili) was published by Ford Foundation, with the promising observation made by the then manager of Kuona Trust, Judy Ogana, that ‘recent years have seen an exciting renaissance in Kenya‘s artistic circles, with a remarkable group of adventurous abstract artists, powerful painters and mindbending sculptorsemerging from the streets of the nation‘s capital, Nairobi and its environs’. But Ogana accurately foresaw the book would cause controversy because it left the false perception that the thirty artists selected were either the first generation of Kenyan contemporary artists or the best and the brightest? of the lot. A similar problem arose the following year when Ogana together with Carol Lees of OneOff Gallery wrote catalogue notes for a Kenyan Art Exhibition in Brooklyn, New York. Understandably, the works of only a few selected Kenyans could be included in the show, but by calling artists who had only appeared on the art scene in the 1990s ‘firstgeneration Kenyan artists’ the two curators not only ignored the rich history of contemporary Kenyan visual art that had preceded the establishment in the 1990s of art institutions like Kuona Trust and One Off Gallery. They as well as the book seemed to perpetuate the myth that no visual arts were practiced in Kenya prior to the new millennium, or until the launching of Kuona Trust in 1995, claims which reinforce the hegemonic view that ‘culture’ came to Kenya with the arrival of British colonialism (or neocolonialism). So to clear the air and offer a more comprehensive and counter-hegemonic perspective on what actually transpired in the visual art world of Kenya over the past decades, I have taken on the task of illustrating and explaining the transformation of contemporary Kenyan visual culture over the last half century.
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