By Ogova Ondego
Published January 17, 2022
Globalizing Kenyan Culture: Jua Kali & the Transformation of Contemporary Kenyan Art: 1960-2010, a study that retraces contemporary Art in Kenya, has been published. This is a doctoral dissertation that has earned arts writer Margaretta H Swigert who is better known as Margaretta wa Gacheru in mass media, arts and culture circles in Kenya, a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Loyola University of Chicago in Illinois State, USA.
“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 says of the term Jua Kali.
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Though she says the roots of contemporary art in Kenya are in the Mau Mau resistance of British rule over land alienation of the 1950s, wa Gacheru takes 1960 as the starting point of her study for it was in this year that the Roman Catholic Church sponsored Kenyan artist, Louis Mwaniki, to study for two years in Rome, making him Kenya‘s first trans-national artist who studied and exhibited in Yugoslavia, UK, USA, Germany, Italy and Canada.
“The same year Elimo Njau became the first East African to mount a one-man exhibition in London and travel all over UK, Germany and Sweden,” she writes. “So when Rob Burnet writes in the Triangle Arts Trust catalogue of 2007 that the first Kenyans to travel abroad was in the 21st century with funding from the British High Commission, he is sorely mistaken.”
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She argues that Africans were already focused on cultivating a vibrant art world, including visual and performance artists before the establishment of Paa ya Paa in Nairobi City Centre in 1966. The founder members of Paa ya Paa were Elimo Njau, Pheroze Nowrojee, Jonathan Kariara, Charles Lewis (Editor of Oxford University Press), Terry Hirst, and James Kangwana.
Three expatriate artists, Jony Waite, Robin Anderson and David Hart, launched Gallery Watatu in 1969 so they could show their own art. It mounted its first one man exhibition for Louis Mwaniki, who had recently returned from study tours of Italy and Yugoslavia, in 1970.
The German Cultural Center (Goethe-Institut) was the first to open its doors wide to African artists and intellectuals in 1963 at the dawn of Kenya‘s Independence. It mounted a series of workshop-exhibitions jointly with Paa ya Paa from the mid-1960s through the 1990s. Alliance Francaise was equally enthusiastic about using culture as a creative means of making headway among local Kenyans, especially from 1977 when the French Cultural Center (FCC) was launched and its stage and exhibition galleries were opened wide to indigenous Africans.
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It was also in the 1960s that non-academic arts workshops and training programmes started taking shape in Nairobi. Paa ya Paa was the first center to hold series of workshops for both East African, Pan-African and trans-national artists to come and participate in multicultural activities as well as mentoring events. And because Kenya was being seen as ‘a haven of peace’ in a stormy region during the Sixties and Seventies, many African refugee artists from Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Ethiopia, Sudan and Mozambique landed in Kenya, ending up at Paa ya Paa. Artists also came from Europe, US and the Caribbean to participate in artist residencies or workshops. So while a series of Wasanii International Workshops would start up 30 years later in 1997, claiming theirs were ‘the first international workshops’ ever to be held in Kenya, the record can now be set straight.
Other venues that did not focus on academic art training were started by Americans, Germans and East Indians in the 1960s. For instance, Bombolulu was started by an American Peace Corps volunteer named Holland Millis who only hired and trained disabled Kenyans to make original jewelry designs out of recycled copper wire. Another American designer, Alan Donovan, was inspired by Millis‘s project, went off to Mathare Valley, and opened a jewelry workshop of his own. He trained Africans in jua kali jewelry making using organic materials such as seeds and animal bones as well as recycled scrap metals, especially aluminum. Having spent time in Northern Kenya among the Turkana people, Donovan had been inspired by their aluminum jewelry designs which he had taken and quickly commodified with the help of his Mathare Valley art network. Then, once he teamed up with Joseph Murumbi, Kenya‘s former Vice President, to open African Heritage Pan African Gallery in 1971, Donovan took his hybrid designs along with his workshop to the city Center where they were marketed both locally and globally. They also launched a campaign for the establishment of a National Art Gallery.
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Donovan’s workshops replicated what Kisii and Kamba artists had been doing collectively since the 1920s, only his goal was now to more effectively commodify their art forms and supply much larger markets. Donovan was one of Kenya‘s most effective marketers of crafts, fashion, music and fine art. African Heritage was not just a showcase for hybrid forms of Kenyan crafts but it also provided an important platform for a number of East African and Pan-African artists, including Elkana Ong‘esa, John Diang‘a, Odoch Ameny, Expedito Mwebe and Jak Katarikawe. Organizing an African Heritage Band also helped launch the music careers of a number of gifted Kenyan musicians. It also ensure the art network that made African Heritage its hub included a myriad of Kenyan youth, particularly young women who wanted a shot at modeling either in Donovan‘s annual African Heritage Pan-African Fashion Show or in one of his European tours which he did for several years.
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Joseph Murumbi sold his vast Pan-African art collection to the Kenya Government to provide the initial permanent collection for the National Art Gallery that President Moi had theoretically agreed to establish. He persuaded the Government to buy the centrally located National Bank building which it was to transform into the National Gallery. He was one of the country‘s biggest patron of the contemporary East African art, so much so that he owned a multi-ton slab of Kisii soapstone that he had commissioned Elkana Ong‘esa to sculpt for his home. But upon meeting the UNESCO Secretary General Amadou-Mahtar M‘Bow and hearing of his appreciation of Kisii stone sculpture, he gave the slab and the commission to M‘Bow. As a consequence, Ong‘esa‘s Bird of Peace resides permanently in Paris, France, at the front entrance of the UNESCO Headquarters.
Two other non-academic skills training centers set up in the 1960s to enable local Africans to get jobs in commercial art-related fields were Creative Arts Center established by VJ Kalyan, a young Bombay trained Kenya-born Indian and the YMCA Craft Training Center started up by a visiting German artist named Albert Soars. Young women artists would gravitate to CAC, training some of Kenya‘s most interesting women artists such as Tabitha wa Thuku, Maggie Otieno, Beth Kimwele and Mary Ogembo.
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In 1982 a number of visual artists at Kenyatta University decided they wanted to take their ‘art to the people’ in a way similar to what University of Nairobi thespians had done annually since 1974 when the Free Traveling Theater took popular theater in local languages all around the country annually for a one month period. The group calling itself Sisi kwa Sisi was also inspired by Ngugi wa Thiong’o who was rehearsing his second Kikuyu play entitled Mother, Sing For Me with an all-peasant cast. Unfortunately, their effort was ill-timed as they organized their traveling visual arts tour of several Nairobi slums shortly after the coup attempt and the urban public wasn‘t inclined to get involved with strangers.
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Moi may have forgotten about a national art gallery after the 1982 coup d’tat attempt, but the one thing he did that endeared him to artists is that in 1985 he made Art and Music mandatory subjects in the new national 8-4-4 curriculum. In Elizabeth Orchardson-Mazrui‘s mind, one reason for Kenya‘s current cultural renaissance is Moi‘s decision to make Art a required subject in the national schools syllabus, for it meant that even when students did not get advanced training in fine art, they still had a basic grounding in the field.
The arrival of Ruth Schaffner in Kenya in 1984 marked a turning point in the contemporary Kenyan art world since the German-American saw contemporary Kenyan art as a valuable commodity on the global art market. A trained economist and graduate of The New School in New York, Schaffner‘s impact on Nairobi‘s jua kali art world was incalculable, in part because she was a seasoned art dealer who already owned two art galleries in California, one in Santa Barbara the other in Los Angeles, and as such, she had a wealth of knowledge and experience in running lucrative art Centers. She also knew a great deal about the transnational art world and her skill as an ‘art-preneur‘ was unsurpassed by anyone who had ever worked in the field in Kenya before. And once Ruth arrived, she quietly made the rounds of the various local art Centers, particularly Paa ya Paa, where she bought up African artworks at what she knew were throw away prices by international standards. Then in 1985, she offered to buy Gallery Watatu from Jony Waite, who at the time was the sole owner of the gallery and who readily agreed, albeit, on one condition: that she could exhibit her art and that of the Wildebeest Workshop free of charge for the rest of her days.
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The ‘reign’ of Ruth at Gallery Watatu (1985-1996) was life-transforming for many so-called ‘self-taught‘ and aspiring Kenyan artists, most of whom quickly heard that Ruth was ‘dishing out‘ hundreds of shillings once a month on a Tuesday if she liked the paintings, drawings and carvings that local artists brought into the gallery. From 1985 to her passing in 1996, Ruth paid more attention to the marketing of African artists in Kenya than had ever been seen before.
Ruth was and continues to be the most controversial character on the Kenyan art scene. To many jua kali artists, she created an art world at Watatu that provided them with funding, mentoring and art materials as well as a site where they could display and sell their work.
She would occasionally hand out loans to artists and she often supplied them with art materials if she saw they had potential and a passion for art.
Though Ruth Schaffner did more to globalize the Kenyan art scene than anyone before or since, there have been attempts to erase her name from contemporary Kenyan art history. For instance, the art book Thelathini features mainly artists that Schaffner promoted in one way or other; yet there is practically no reference to her in the text at all. Nonetheless, even her critics admit she played a monumental role in advancing Nairobi‘s jua kali art world.
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Ruth Schaffner was also instrumental in generating the explosion of jua kali art activities in the 1990s, including the establishment of two very different art networks which were born in the wake of her work: one at the Banana Hill Art Studio from 1991, the other at Kuona Trust in 1995, the first initiated by indigenous Africans, the latter launched by a British former employee of the Watatu Foundation, and both drawing upon things they had learned while doing business with Ruth.
The most significant story of the 1990s was the establishment of so many new art networks, starting with Banana Hill Arts Studio, which would subsequently be associated with the short-lived Nuru Arts Center. Then came the arrival of another commercial art gallery called One Off in 1993 after which Gallery Watatu formed a not-for-profit foundation out of which emerged the Ngecha Artists Association. With jua kali training becoming a strategic focus at both Banana Hill and the new Watatu Foundation, it was stunning to see another art educational institution established, but in 1994, the Buru Buru Institute of Fine Art (BIFA) was born, to be followed a year later by the formation of Kuona Trust at the Nairobi National Museum just a few months before the demise of Ruth Schaffner in 1996.
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Ruth, Schaffner, who was approaching 80, was in search of a place where she could establish a permanent art world for Kenyan artists. Having held several training workshops at the Ngecha YMCA and having met so many jua kali artists from Ngecha village in the process, her vision became a plan that was drafted by Wanyu Brush and another Ngecha painter and playwright, King Dodge Kang‘oroti, who explained how the plan became a project proposal: At the same time as we were establishing the Ngecha Artists Association, we were talking to Ruth about the idea of an art Center in Ngecha where artists could have a permanent base for training, exhibiting and working fulltime. Ruth was all for it, and after we gave her our draft she called in Rob Burnet and asked him to draft a similar proposal using our ideas. Then she planned to choose either his or ours to take with her to the States where she wanted to fundraise for an art center at Ngecha. As it turned out, she chose ours.
Dodge‘s understanding was that when Ruth went off to the US to fundraise, Burnet was also meant to use the Ngecha proposal that they had drafted together to fund raise for the Watatu Foundation locally. But according to Adama Diawara, Ruth‘s Ivorian spouse, Burnet spent his time while she was away fund raising for himself and using her donor proposal to do so.
Kuona Trust has often been hailed as an exciting and innovative cultural ‘incubator’ from which many talented young Kenyan artists have been ‘hatched’. However, very rarely, if ever, are the roles of Ruth Schaffner, Wanyu Brush and King Dodge Kang‘oroti acknowledged as being central to the conception of Kuona Trust. Nonetheless, Adama Diawara is very clear that Rob Burnet was still employed by the Watatu Foundation when he found the site at the National Museums of Kenya and claimed it for a Center he would subsequently call Kuona Trust. As Adama saw it: Instead of fundraising for Ruth, he was setting up his own arts program modeled on Ruth‘s ideas and drawing in all the artists he had met through working for her at Gallery Watatu. Ruth felt devastated and betrayed when she found out what he was doing. She was still in the States when she sent him a fax and fired him on the spot.
Burnet admits he was looking for a site for Ruth‘s project while she was away in the States, and that he found the free building at the Nairobi National Museum with the help of the curator of the Gallery of Contemporary East African Art, Wendy Karmali. But he claims he called Ruth and told her about the Museum site and she turned it down. “She said she wasn‘t interested in it, but I felt the site was too perfect for the project to be rejected,” he says.
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Van Rampelberg had a run-in with Burnet in 2003 after the Briton had got a job at Ford Foundation based on his work with Kenyan jua kali artists at Kuona Trust. The Belgian claims that many of the photographs in the Ford-funded book Thelathini are of paintings and sculptures that belong to the Ruth Schaffner collection, yet Burnet would not allow an acknowledgment of Ruth to appear in the book.
As all of these art networks were being activated, a brand new jua kali art movement was gripping Nairobi as matatu art was being born on the streets of the capital city from the early 1990s, dramatizing the colorful and dynamic character of Kenya‘s contemporary visual culture.
It is important to note that matau charged not three shillings but 30 cents when they commenced operation in Kenya and also that the population of Kibera is some 252 000 and not 1.5 Million according to Kenya Population and Housing and Census 2009. University of Nairobi isn’t the same as Nairobi University.
What is the ‘African side of town’ in Nairobi, an African city? There are also not just ‘42 Kenyan communities‘ mother tongues’ as the study states but more than 100 in Kenya.
