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.

What constitutes modernity in African art practice? This is a question one must ask in order to fully appreciate modern art in Kenya. We could argue that art becomes modern in an African context when its locus of production is transposed from the communal (be it clan, extended family, or ethnic community) to the production of the individual artist’s subjectivity. Pre-modern works of African art and craft are always interpreted as the product of a community’s aesthetic sensibility rather than an individual artist’s subjective taste. Contrastingly, Kenyan modernism is concerned with creating subjective new practices and methodologies in the face of obsolete, irrelevant, or transmogrified pre-modern worldviews and traditions. Here modernism presents a fluid concept, which depends on the different manifestations of modernity in Kenyan society and the cosmopolitan art worlds that explore these nuanced realities. 

Kenya is home to 42 recognised tribal communities. Each of these communities functioned as independent nations prior to the formation of the British East Africa protectorate in 1895. Furthermore, each of these communities has unique linguistic and cultural histories and customs. All of Kenya’s 42 tribal communities roughly fit into the linguistic and cultural distinctions of Bantu people, Nilotic people, and Cushitic people (Sutton, 1981).

 However, such distinctions are not set in stone, and certain modernists in Kenya’s ‘Short Century’ worked to imagine a national identity based on the shared experiences of all postcolonial Kenyans, particularly in cosmopolitan urban areas like Nairobi. In Kenya there are countless variants of modernist aesthetics both in art and in music. Outside of the metropolitan capital of Nairobi, modernist art in Kenya has always varied aesthetically, sometimes drastically, from individual artist to artist, depending on the regions and communities they hail from. Elkana Ong’esa’s practice as a modernist sculptor, for example, is rooted in the sculptural traditions of the Gusii community in Western Kenya [FIG 03]. Ong’esa was born in the town of Tabaka in Kisii County (Ong’esa, 2023) to a family of craftsmen (Chidumebi, 2024). Tabaka is home to the ‘Murigango clan of the Abagusii people of Southwestern Kenya, who, according to John Akama , have been carving artworks from local deposits of soapstone for ‘over three thousand years’ (Akama, 2018:1-3). Ong’esa sculpts in the same medium, from the very same deposits of soapstone indigenous to the town of Tabaka. 

Pan-African commonalities were shared between various schools and collectives on the continent in the mid-Twentieth Century.

 The Khartoum School in Sudan, the Zaria and Nsukka Schools in Nigeria, The Addis Ababa School in Ethiopia, the School of Fine Art in Makerere University in Uganda, and organisations founded by its alumni in Nairobi and Kampala like the Paa ya Paa collective in Kenya, all worked under a similar conceptual theme of reimagining indigenous or pre-colonial ‘vernacular ideographic sign systems’ (Meier, 2015:216) and imagery synthesised with a modernist sensibility, as Prita Meier (2015:216) writes: “Artists in Africa’s large cities dedicated much of their practice to a similar synthetic project. They wanted to create a form of modernism based on what had been labelled local “tradition”. They, like most modernist artists working, perceived a difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ cultural production. Yet, unlike Western modernists, they wanted to create work anchored in their perceived traditions”. (Meier 2015:216).

The mediums used and the indigenous or ‘traditional’ signs, imagery and aesthetic motifs that these various schools and collectives of continental African modernists tried to reimagine related to regional cultural histories and heritages under the auspices of new sovereign nationalism. For example, the Ethiopian students of the Addis Ababa School focused on transforming iconic Ethiopian symbols such as Ethiopic script into a new language of painterly abstraction (see Ethiopia Unit 3) whereas the painters ‘associated with the Khartoum School transformed Arabic calligraphy’s formal and symbolic properties into modernist forms in large-scale easel paintings [FIG 04]. In Nairobi during the 1950’s and 60’s, East African modernists favoured a less conceptual and abstract approach [FIG 05]. Elimo Njau, for example, painted in a more figurative mode, using oil and acrylic paints in an expressive style. Speaking of his work, Elimo Njau states that his ‘pictures are not photographic, but the human beings are noticeable and clear’ (Elimo Njau, Nairobi Contemporary Art Institut, 2020).

 Modernist painting in Kenya is also set apart from other modernist movements due to the creative freedom individual artists employed in their solitary practice. 

There was a total lack of conceptual and aesthetic dogma common, say, in the Khartoum School in Sudan or among modernists in Ethiopia [see FIG 04]. This is illustrated well by John Robert’s comparison of three modernist East African painters – Eli Kyeyune, Asaph Ngethe, Elimo Njau – in Nairobi in the 1960’s:”‘These painters are extremely different from one another. Njau seems to be tending to a semi-mystical expressionism. Kyeyune makes bold and incisive statements about the appearance of things, using a palette, which inclines to pure and singing colours, and drawing emotion from the immense solidity and unexpectedness of life. Ngethe paints in dark, almost drab browns a harsh and grinding world, relieved by a Christian faith as dogged and tenacious as the Kikuyu peasants, who are so often his subjects. It is impossible to point to any quality in their work and claim that it links them, but it is equally impossible to suggest that their Africanness is not the basis of their work’ (Roberts, 1967:207-208).“

Although the painting styles and aesthetics of Kenyan modernist painters in the mid Twentieth Century vary greatly, the subjects of their works are often very similar. Their subjects are their fellow Kenyans and East Africans, often being depicted at work or conducting mundane, everyday activities. Their onus was to document the everyday lives of colonial and independence era East Africans. They explored the struggles and affliction of the majority poor, underpaid and marginalised urban dwellers seeking work in and around Nairobi and their disenfranchised relatives in the rural areas [FIG 6]. Asaph Ngethe should be considered Kenya’s first social commentator as his paintings often depicted social dynamics of central Kenya’s late stage colonial and independent rural communities in the 1960’s [FIG 07].

When we look at the first generation of critically recognised modernists in Kenya, we see that they were mostly from privileged families. Elimo Njau is one example of this. Born in 1932, he turned 92 years old in September 2024. In a retrospective interview in 2020, Njau stated: “I’m very fortunate because as a child I was born of a father and mother who were very enlightened” (Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, 2022). Njau’s use of “enlightened” obscures some of the complexities of his upbringing. His father was educated by the Germans and became a teacher of Kiswahili, German and Agriculture. His father was also one of the founders of the Lutheran Church in Tanzania (Odhiambo, 2014). In an interview with the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (2022) he explains how his father encouraged him to pursue a career in art: “Having an educated father who was himself a teacher, he said he would give a prize to the child who would do his portrait. I did the picture. And every neighbour said, ‘It looks like him!’ But when I finished (school), all this built up my need to go for further education in Makerere. And thank God, there was an art school there”.

Makerere College, University of East Africa (now Makerere University), was the most prestigious University in East and Central Africa at the time of Njau’s attendance. The colonial government made it an affiliate of the University College of London from 1949 until 1961, and the elite of East Africa attended and graduated there, including former Presidents of Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and Uganda. Makerere’s art school was founded by the British artist and educator Margaret Trowell (See Uganda Units 1 and 3). Opinions on Margaret Trowell vary drastically among art and cultural historians and East African modernists themselves.

To most of East Africa’s pioneering modernists of the 1950’s and 60’s, whose journeys began at Trowell’s school and whose aesthetic sensibility was largely informed by her tutelage, Trowell was a benevolent figure; an advocate, a mentor and a humanist. Elimo Njau reminisces that “[Trowell] liked my work very much. She encouraged me” (Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, 2022). Contemporary Africanist art historians view Trowell with more suspicion as a colonial agent of the British Empire who espoused the paternalist and condescending views of colonised Africans and their culture. Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa writes of Trowell’s comparison of the cultural and economic state of Ugandans in 1936 to that of Europe in the Middle Ages: ‘The Middle Ages were, Trowell claimed, the “door […] best fitted” to East Africans’ “stage of development” – a view which closely reflects the social evolutionist ideology that underpinned British imperial policy in this period, according to which, the brain structure and intellectual capabilities of Africans were believed to be far less developed than that of Europeans’ (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014:104).

Regardless of where one sits in the spectrum of opinions concerning Margaret Trowell’s motivations and sentiments towards East African culture, her impact on modernism in East Africa, and particularly on Uganda and Kenya, is evident. Not only did she train artists like Gregory Maloba, Elimo Njau and Asaph Ngethe, but she also provided them with their first opportunities to exhibit and showcase their work. For example, she was instrumental in commissioning Elimo Njau to paint his most recognized work, known as the Murang’a murals, in which he painted significant scenes from the New Testament on the walls of Saint James and All Martyrs Memorial Cathedral in Murang’a in 1959. 

In Murang’a, Njau painted scenes from the Bible, but in the context of central Kenya. The biblical figures in the paintings are Africans, and the sites of The Last Supper, the Crucifixion and the Baptism of Jesus, are all depicted by Njau as African landscapes featured in and around central Kenya, which would have been familiar to the Kikuyu congregants of Saint James and All Martyrs Church. For example, Njau states that the Baptism of Christ is ‘inspired by the Chania waterfalls’ (Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, 2022) in central Kenya [see FIG 05].

Njau and his fellow modernist contemporaries, who were trained at Makerere, are the most well-known and critically engaged early modernists in Kenya. This is partly due to their institutional training at a formal art school, and their recognizable motifs of canonical modernism. However, 

Their work is not exhibited in galleries or auction houses, and has been sidelined by canonical discourses as ‘curios’, ‘tourist’ and ‘hotel’ art. As such the work of these artists, many of whom work in collectives near the tourist hotels and resorts of the coast and in Nairobi’s city centre, 

For example, Akamba sculptors from Kenya were known globally in the early Twentieth Century for their wooden figurines, most notably their ‘Askari’ curios, which depicted black colonial soldiers and policemen from the colonial era. The sale of these sculptures to tourists was a huge industry, and ‘in the peak years of 1954 and 1955’ economist Walter Elkan estimated that “the people of one Kamba village alone (Wamunyu) grossed at least £ 150,000 and possibly as much as £ 250,000 from the sale of woodcarvings!” (Claessens, 2020). This tradition of woodcarving in its entirety can be traced back to a single man, as Robert Dick-Read (1964:20-21) writes:

“The beginning of commercial carving among the Wakamba is attributed to a man named Mutisya Munge who, before the First World War, was known throughout Ukamba (Ukambani or “Kambaland”) for his excellence as a craftsman. Before the war his work was confined to traditional objects such as stools; but whilst serving with the armed forces away from home he began to occupy his idle hours by carving “pictures” from his imagination, for his own amusement.”

These “pictures” were depictions of Munge’s immediate surroundings during the First World War: mainly black African soldiers, and members of his regiment in the colonial Carrier Corps. In his book entitled Sanamu; adventures in search of African art, Robert Dick-Read narrates how Munge’s ‘officers and other Europeans were intrigued by his carvings, and after the war he devoted more and more of his time to producing them for sale’ (Dick-Read, 1964: 21). Upon returning to Ukambani, he was reluctant to share his craft with others, but carvers in his village copied his patterns and successfully offered them for sale in Nairobi.

 The historian Bruno Claessens confirms that Mutisya Munge served with the British Carrier Corps in Tanzania. On a visit to a Lutheran mission near Dar-es-Salaam he first encountered the commercial and innovative potential of carving in the hardwoods of ebony and mahogany by Zaramo sculptors and the new forms of practice, which could be learnt from their work (Claessens, 2020). Indeed, when we look at Akamba sculpture today, we can still see traces of aesthetic input from members of ethnic communities who live in Mozambique and Tanzania.

When we look at the sculpture of the Zaramo community and those of Mutisya Munge, we see striking similarities, especially in the facial proportions of the figurines. Like those of Munge, Zaramo sculptural subjects have forward faced eyes close together and large protuberant ears, as exhibited by a Zaramo figurine from a French private collection. This Zaramo figurine [FIG 07] is almost identical to the one made by Mutisya Munge [FIG 08], but without the colonial ‘askari’ uniform and rifle donned by Munge’s subject and his metallic eyes. The similarities between this ancient Zaramo figurine and the figurine which Munge made around 1920 is evidence  that he observed the Zaramo sculptors keenly at their work during his visit to the Lutheran mission. The aesthetics of Akamba sculpture derived from the work of Mutisya Munge are unmistakable and precise, as Elsabeth Joyce Court (2011) writes: “The key characteristics of these figures are: a frontal pose like a stick or column; schematic representation of features like those of a soldier (unlike the more naturalistic representation of bicycling askari); a relatively large head, often with shining eyes and protuberant ears; fine execution and finish; subtle colouring, more like a stain than paint and strong attention to detail in clothing and other aspects of adornment”. 

What we see here is an example of how individuals from disparate, formerly autonomous African cultures intermingled as subjects of colonial empires during and after the World Wars. In the early ‘Short Century’, Munge’s sculptures were extremely popular within the global trade in African wood carvings. This popularity has continued to the contemporary; new generations of sculptors still make their living selling Munge-esque sculptures in his home village of Wamunyu today, a hundred years later. This is but one of the many examples 

Modernism’s origins in Kenya cannot be neatly mapped out in a linear progression from one year to the next, nor can one point to a unified method, style or conceptual framework that underpins the practice of all modern artists across the region. 

Modern art in Kenya is fundamentally the product of individual Kenyans, and each work depicts the unique, nuanced and complex perspectives which these individuals have on modern Kenyan life. We introduce modernism in Kenya as a period in which artists defy the canonical boundaries and well-worn tropes of ‘modern’ vs ‘traditional’ that plague the study of African art, as Joyce Nyairo (2018:2) cogently states:“We cannot  allow ourselves to be bogged down by these old arguments about the authenticity and purity of old africa and the contamination of that africa by rabid western influences, resulting in a contemporary art that is “inauthentic” due to its indistinct link to traditional or ethnic african work. However, to argue this way robs us of an opportunity to acknowledge the very idea of traditions as an ever-changing space of inventions and to celebrate the ingenuity and value of the hybridity that comes with contact zones. That ethos of contact, exchange and ingenious amalgamation has been at the heart of the growth of fine art in kenya.” The starting point for modern art in Kenya is the artist’s own subjective aesthetic sensibility. It is not condescending to state that modernist Kenyan artists are not concerned with whether the aesthetics of their work conform to certain schools of thought or aesthetic conventions of any particular genre or tradition. Rather, it allows Kenyan modernists the freedom to utilise whichever technique, method or conceptual framework they feel is best suited to tell their story.

 Furthermore,  modern art in Kenya is transnational and not conceptually bound within Kenya’s borders. The subject matter of Kenyan modernist work is undoubtedly Kenyans and their experience of modern life; however, Kenyan modernists amalgamate techniques, motifs, and aesthetic methodologies from East Africa and from international styles in order to tell a Kenyan story. 

Kenyan modernism is fundamentally commentarial as a direct exploration of the material lives of modern Kenyans. The subjects of Kenyan modernism are for the most part recognizable as actual people, the fellow citizens of the artists themselves. Therefore, 

In art which explores political ideals or social concepts, these subjects are never abstracted, but experienced in the portrayal of people who experience these phenomena in their everyday lives in postcolonial Kenya [FIG 10].

Recommended Reading

Court, E. 2011. ‘Akamba Mavisa Carving a local art world in East Africa’. The Open University [online]. Available at: https://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/ferguson-centre/sites/www.open.ac.uk.arts.research.ferguson-centre/files/files/ecms/arts-fc-pr/web-content/fc-memorisalisation-elsbeth-court-abstract.pdf

Wolukau-Wanambwa, E. (2014). Margaret Trowell’s School of Art. A Case Study in Colonial Subject Formation. Perception, experience, experiment, Knowledge objectivity and subjectivity in the arts and sciences, 45, pp.101–122.

https://another-roadmap.net/articles/0003/3069/eww-margaret-trowell-s-school-of-art.pdf

Chidumebi, D. (2024) Kenyan sculptor Elkana Ong’esa drives mission to elevate African art, Art News Africa. Available at: 

https://www.iol.co.za/saturday-star/world/kenyan-sculptor-ongesa-is-on-a-mission-to-elevate-african-art-ebb9cd0b-127b-4919-9ff1-cd0e451e2fd1

Recommended Viewing

Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute. 2020. Artist Portrait: Elimo Njau. Available at: https://vimeo.com/466077150