In 2013, the late Sidney Littlefield Kasfir (may she rest in peace) wrote an article in which she challenges conventional narratives of Modern African art history, which often marginalize or exclude certain regions, artists, and art forms. She argues for a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of modern African art, one that recognizes the diversity of artistic practices across the continent and the complex interplay of local and global influences. This course taps into this debate by making available a body of artworks from the East African region — a region that has not received much attention. It draws inspiration from an original exhibition concept by Okwui Enwezor, who first examined the dynamic and politically charged era of independence in African art and history and how liberation movements and art were bound together in forging new cultural identities. It immerses students in the creative experiences of Eastern Africa, enhancing their ability to understand and appreciate the region’s art and its contributions to continental and global cultural discourses. The reference to East African modernisms is deliberate. While acknowledging the complex and sometimes contested boundaries of individual countries within East Africa, it looks beyond these demarcations without dismissing their significance. Grounded in the ideals of the East African Community (EAC) — a regional bloc currently comprising the Democratic Republic of Congo, Federal Republic of Somalia, Republic of Burundi, Republic of Kenya, Republic of Rwanda, Republic of South Sudan, Republic of Uganda, and the United Republic of Tanzania — the course also considers the ongoing discussions regarding the potential inclusion of Ethiopia and Djibouti. It acknowledges the shared cultural regionality encompassing over 400 million people. It aligns with the collective identity enshrined in the Treaty Establishing the East African Community. This includes those in Ethiopia and Djibouti currently engaged in discussions about joining the EAC and recognizes the shared history linking artistic practices in the EAC countries with those in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The cultural and socio-religious factors, which shape the varied histories of Eastern African modernism in the second half of the 20th century, are heterogeneous and complex. Pre-colonial traditions of making art and historic inner-African intercultural relations play a major role throughout the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia. Historical intersections are part of the complex cultural matrix that shaped the development of modernism and modern art in Ethiopia and its resonances beyond the region. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, independent Ethiopia went through internal and external conflicts that either aimed at building centralised power or intended to maintain sovereignty, respectively. Ethiopia’s triumph over colonial Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 is widely perceived as an early flagship victory over colonialism. But

Modern Art in East Africa is unique in its aesthetic compositions as well as its conceptual underpinnings. In Kenya, the process of modernisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was brief, occurred within one or two generations, and in chaotic and violent circumstances. The social and cultural upheaval, which colonised Kenyans experienced as a result of colonial intervention and subsequent industrialization and modernisation “destroyed or half-destroyed a great deal which must now be re-examined to see if it is salvageable” (John Roberts, 1967:199). One particular example of this cultural rupture is the fact that the majority of Eastern Africa’s early modernists were professing, and in some cases devout Christians, rather than adherents of local religions. The historian Toyin Falola considers Christianity a unified religion, which paradoxically disrupted “systems and cultures that were in place for thousands of years prior and uniquely tailored to suit the people and environment of the land.’’ As a result of the aggressive suppression of local religious and cultural practices by colonial missionaries and agents of Empire, many modern Kenyans repudiated the pre-colonial worldviews and cosmologies of their non-Christian forebears.

Tanzanian modernism emerges from heterogeneous, locally rooted modernisation processes and an African interpretation of global modernisms and modernities.

Uganda’s modernism developed without linear progression. Throughout its trajectory, it has not exhibited any unified set of trends that can be described as persistent or consistent or sustained for longer than a decade. Uganda’s modernism is a product of experiments where influential agents, both foreign and local of varying backgrounds and intentions, created contexts within which they supported the type of art education and production they believed to be appropriate for their respective protégés and audiences. 

Ethiopia’s rich history is characterized by its ancient endogenous civilizations and religious traditions. These are passed on for generations through oral history and inscriptions of written languages. Ancient languages include Sabean, which is no longer in use; the Ge’ez now only used in the Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, Arabic in the Harari region for qur’anic worship and Amharic, which has been the official national language since the twelfth century. Due to geographical proximity various societies in Ethiopia are among the earliest to be exposed to and to accept both Christianity and Islam, in the 4th and 7th century respectively.  Both religions continued to evolve until modern and present-day Ethiopia with the unique particularities of the local interpretation of both religions. The emergence and expansion of these missionarising religions since the medieval periods is one facet of the recorded history of religions in Ethiopia. But various communities persisted in maintaining regional religious and cultural traditions, such as the practice of Waaqeffanna of the Oromo and their social ethics of Safuu, rather than adopting incoming religions and institutional politics. Peoples and ethnicities from the southern part of Ethiopia, for example the Konso people known for their sculpture known as Waka carved from wood, are also among many who maintained their indigenous beliefs and motifs. Attributable to its geographical set up in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia’s encounters with foreign and colonial powers are a prominent part of its past. The settlement history of communities and ethnicities and their internal conflicts recurrently surfaced in power struggles and wars waged in the country. Dr Yerasework Kebede Hailu (2020) states that: “Historically, Ethiopian identity has delineated from different perspectives: the Aksumite perspective, which presents an understanding of Ethiopia as an African Christian society; the Orientalist Semitic perspective, highlighting Ethiopia as Abyssinia; the Pan-Africanist, Garveyism and diasporic perspective, presenting Ethiopia as a symbol of African political freedom; and the Rastafarian perspective, featuring Ethiopia as the home of the Lion of Juda“ (Hailu, University of South Africa, 2020). These perspectives served as the fertile bedrocks for the existence of rich plural societal and national values. Endogenous spiritual aspirations were enriched by new religious traditions while patriotism mined legends from ancestral oral heritage. Traditional knowledge systems, drawn from regionally diverse cosmologies, converge in many of the local narratives, which play a significant role in shaping modern and modernist art in Ethiopia.

Tradition is a loaded term in the discourse of Africanist art history, but it is also extremely relevant to the history of modern art in Kenya. ‘Tradition’ is perceived in opposition to innovation in Eurocentric canonical modernist discourses, where innovation is understood as a core tenet of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’. The Euro-modernist idea that African traditions should be interpreted as the antithesis of modern industrial life and cultural progress has inhibited historians, anthropologists and cultural commentators from considering traditions of art making, cosmologies and knowledge systems of Kenyan communities as foundations of ‘Short Century’ modernity (Gladstone, 2014). To date there is no comprehensive mapping or history of traditional art forms and how they impacted on and infused modernist practices.   If Africa was considered the ‘dark continent’ (Pakenham, 1991) by Western colonists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then Kenya was certainly considered one of the continent’s darkest corners. In many ways, it was not seen as a land inhabited by people at all but a land of inhospitable, untamed wilderness.

In 1953, Margaret Trowell and Klaus Wachsman wrote a book entitled Tribal Crafts of Uganda. It was the first effort to compile an inventory of Uganda’s cultural artifacts and it remains the only publication so far on the subject that provides a concrete description of Uganda’s rich cultural heritage. As the title suggests, the authors’ treatment of the subject was colored by a colonial bias. The authors speculated that African people did not produce art, often referred to as easel painting; rather, they produced ethnographic objects motivated by practical needs in their physical and spiritual cosmoses. To this end, Trowell and Wachsman, did not appraise objects of aesthetic merit, an attribute that was reserved for Western art. Assessing traditional artifacts, presented pitfalls to many Western scholars of African art who habitually focused on apparent visual impressions, who paid little or no attention to associated belief systems in which the art objects are shrouded. [FIG 01].  

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has had a pivotal influence, not only in encouraging a tradition of making art, but also on the art education history of Ethiopia. One of the earliest institutionalized attempts to provide art education on record was by the church, even though the undertaking was based on the church’s doctrine. Another effort, though less documented, was by pre-modern artists who educated talented and interested students in artistic production. These artists, who mostly were self-taught, had exposure to artistic canons through the church initially and later on began to produce art in a style usually referred to as “Ethiopian traditional art.”

The Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts is the oldest and most prestigious art school in the East African region. It has undergone many transformations to become what it is today, which is a school within Makere’s College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology with four departments.

In Tanzania, the CEAA was acknowledged as an important agency linking the country’s new arts and cultural development programmes in the East African region. The birth of CEAA in 1964 was to some extent inspired by the Pan-Africanist movements at the Makerere University College in Kampala in the 1940s. African students studying abroad and within Africa were forerunners of Pan-African movements through various approaches. The CEAA found its roots in Tanzania through early fine art students, who became its members while studying at Makerere from the 1940s onwards. When East African countries such as Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania achieved independence in the early 1960s and later formed the East African Community in 1967, CEAA was already in place, with artists working in collaboration across their national frontiers FIG 01. During the first CEAA meeting, Sam Ntiro was elected chairperson, Elimo Njau as its Secretary-General and Eli Kyeyune as its treasurer (Miller 1975:73). The School of Fine Arts at Makerere University in Kampala, apart from its continued tradition of providing art education to East African students, also provided space for visual art societies and group activities. CEAA chose Makerere as its regional headquarters, while creating branches for its members in their respective countries. In Tanzania, the CEAA branch office was situated in the Division of National and Antiquities at the Ministry of Education premises in Dar es Salaam. The CEAA was known from 1969 as the Society of East African Artists (SEAA), while Francis Musango from Kenya replaced Elimo Njau as its new Secretary General (Miller 1975:97).  Based on its founding objectives the CEAA intended to organise and coordinate projects to improve and promote visual arts activities in East African countries. The focus was to inspire young artists and join forces to localize visual art practices by incorporating a form and content style based on indigenous traditions within the East African region and Africa as a continent. Closer reviews of CEAA activities indicate that in many instances this organisation pioneered cultural decolonisation campaigns in the visual arts field. The Community in Tanzania significantly inspired and promoted the visual arts through training, exhibitions and conferences. Member artists volunteered to teach visual arts in secondary schools, teachers’ training colleges and later, when established, at the University of Dar es Salaam.

Ronex Ahimbisibwe– interviewed, Dec. 3rd, 2012 [FIG 01]. In this interview excerpt, Ronex, a 2000 Makerere Art School graduate, invites us to reflect on the complexity of releasing the artistic talent through an organized system of education. He is not doubting the importance of technique, but in his opinion, it appears, methods are not more important than ends. Throughout the history of art education in Uganda, art schools, art collectives, artists workshops etc. have grappled with the challenge of bringing forth a visual tradition where the African identity is not lost in the desire for academic and international standards.