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.

One of its alumni, Asaph Ngethe, describes its humble origins: “The Art School that I had come to join had an interesting history. It started very casually in 1937 at the house of Margaret Trowell. She loved painting and she didn’t mind it when some people from nearby Mulago Hospital, as well as the Makerere students taking Diplomas in Education, Agriculture and Veterinary Science, came to watch her and learn from her. The informal classes eventually grew into the School of Art because Mrs. Trowell convinced the Principle of Makerere College to include Art among the courses taught at the College. The School of Art opened in 1940” (Macua, 2019:35-36).

Margaret Trowell, M.B.E, was a British artist and educator, who first came to Kenya in 1929, where her husband, a medical doctor, was posted to the colonial medical service (Court, 1985:36) [FIG 2]. Whilst in Kenya between 1929 and 1935, she lived amongst the Akamba, where she began to appreciate the significant role, which crafts have in the maintenance of daily life through the production of functional and ornamental objects as well as “the vitality of indigenous design and pattern” (Court, 1985:38).

There is no doubt that Trowell interacted with the Akamba sculpture movement, which was steadily on the rise during the time she lived in Ukambani. We explore Akamba sculpture in Unit 2 Kenya.But here Trowell also encountered the first of the two problems she dedicated much of her life to addressing: “In Kenya (1929-1935), I never saw or heard of any African who was taught art in schools.”

From 1937 to her retirement in 1958, Margaret Trowell dedicated herself to providing a formal fine art education to East Africans at Makerere University in Kampala. She also produced 5 books concerning the history of East African arts and crafts, mainly with a focus on Uganda. Her legacy within Kenya’s modernist production in the “Short Century” is palpable through her students Gregory Maloba and Elimo Njau, who directed the first Art Departments at Nairobi University and Kenyatta University, and Kenya’s first centres of art discourse like Chemchemi Cultural Centre (1963) and Paa ya Paa (1965)[FIG 03]. Indeed, her impact also extends to an intellectual and spiritual influence that continues to find expression in the work of successive generations of students (Court, 1985:35). Her aesthetic influence and intellectual direction in Kenyan painting require more study due to its pervasiveness. But it is also important to understand Trowell and her practice within the context of East Africa under colonial rule. In colonial Kenya, as in other settler colonies on the continent, like South Africa, it was a general rule that: “There is no place for him (the African) in the European Community beyond certain forms of labour” (Verwoerd, 1953).

It was a general misconception among colonial settlers that only Europeans possessed a genuine aesthetic sensibility and that “[t]eaching an African the art of a white man [was] not only a waste of time but a misplaced value” (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014:106). Furthermore, as explored in Unit 2, pre-colonial African traditions of art and aesthetic expression had no value, nor could they be considered art at all in the conventional Western sense. This sentiment is summed up by the Director of the New Stanley Gallery in 1967: “It is very difficult in a country like this, which has no tradition of art, for an artist to start from scratch and evolve his own artistic philosophy – it is impossible, because the artist must be a gregarious person: each artist learns from another, the idea of art revolves from a group. If you haven’t got an immediate tradition, then you have got to get your information from whatever source offers” (Roberts, 1967:211).

But Trowell saw potential in what she called East Africa’s sense of ‘design’, present in the functional and ornamental sculpture and textiles of local populations, and she saw “a golden opportunity of teaching design through their own crafts.” Trowell was a devout Christian, and shared a deep mistrust and contempt for modern, machine-oriented and industrial life, which she perceived as “alienating and spiritually impoverished” (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014).

She also rejected the ‘European post-renaissance segregation and hierarchical order of fine and applied arts, and the ideas of individual genius and sensibility. She saw art as a universal expression, which incorporated “all worthy handicraft” [FIG 04]:“Anything which man makes, his house, his tools, his pots, can be a work of art, and when we are considering the art of a people who had no paper, canvas or paint, we must use the word in its wider sense. Even the usual distinction of ‘arts’ and ‘crafts’ gives the making of utilitarian but beautiful things a lesser artistic value than painting or sculpture, a distinction which I think we should try to avoid” (Trowell, 1939:169-175).

This theoretical approach enabled her to appreciate pre-colonial East African traditions of art, which required no paper or canvas in the Western sense. However, Trowell certainly ascribed to the pervasive colonial sentiment that Africans were “the child races of the world”, belonging to undeveloped and primitive societies. As such, she perceived the culture which her students came from as “virgin soil”, as “there was no pre-existing tradition of figurative art” in East Africa that she could refer her students to ‘for aesthetic strategies, or indeed to build upon” (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014:111). Furthermore, she believed that her African students were “unspoilt” by the dehumanising mechanised modernity present in Western society. As her students came from fundamentally ‘un-modern’, agrarian “peasant populations,” she saw Europe in the 12th, and not the 20th century as the “most appropriate model”, as Emma Wolukau Wanambwa explains: “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).

Despite her beliefs of the inherent intellectual limitations of her students, as well as the aesthetic bareness of their heritage, she indeed possessed a ‘genuine appreciation of African cultures and cultural practices’ (Wolukau Wanambwa, 2014:111). Furthermore, her desire for those practices to not be “swamped beneath the inrush of Western goods and Western teaching” (Trowell, 1957:2) is rooted in colonial notions that Africans were prone to imitate the cultural mores of their ‘superior’ Western overlords (Lugard, 1929:70). She believed, as did most of her fellow colonials, that, if left unguided and unchecked, local Africans would simply proceed into independence,“ as if Kenya were a black England” (Roberts, 1967:205). Such a result would undermine the fundamental axiom of colonialism, which is that Africans were inherently different and inferior to their colonial masters. As such, Trowell saw it as her duty to help her African students create their own “true African tradition” of modern art, which was suitable to their own environments and cultures, rather than what Wolukau-Wanambwa assesses as a mere native performance of European cultural practice (Wolukau Wanambwa, 2015:118). 

This approach to teaching fine art to colonial subjects was a product of Trowell’s own instruction in England. She was educated at the Slade School of Art in London, and her mentor was Marion Richardson, a pioneer of the British New Art Teaching and New Education Movements (Wolukau Wanambwa, 2014:108). It was from Richardson that Trowell learned that she “must not criticise before I could understand; that I must put all my effort into seeing the visual world through African eyes, and further into trying to understand their spiritual and social attitudes towards their own works of art “ (Trowell, 1957:37). Richardson’s New Art Teaching methodology emphasised exploring and cultivating the student’s individual aesthetic sensibility rather than instructing them in the techniques of other artists and movements of the past. Richardson did this by largely abandoning the traditional art syllabus, which was based on object drawing, and instead replacing it mainly with compositional exercises based on her students’ mental visualisations (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014:108).

The syllabus, which Trowell developed at Makerere, largely mimicked that of Richardson’s New Art Teaching. Indeed, she consulted Richardson closely as she was developing it circa 1940. Life as a Makerere student under Trowell’s instruction began with being taught figurative drawing, painting and sculpture. Beyond this,

For Trowell the aesthetics of East African modern art had to be generated from the aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities of East Africans themselves. She sought to limit her own influence as well as the influences of other artists and global modernist movements on her own students, whom she attempted to stimulate “externally”[FIG 05]. Furthermore, Trowell saw the ability to “master the language and idioms of European visual expression” as a “positive threat” (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014:118) to the development of an authentic indigenous modernist aesthetic.

As such, she actively discouraged any imitation of Western-style modern art in her teaching.

Additionally, Trowell described any attempt by her students to imitate or reference Western art conventions in their own work as “poor” (Trowell, 1937:51). Gregory Maloba, for example, was actively discouraged by Trowell for his affinity for Catholic iconography from Victorian Europe and sought to “counteract the plaster saint influence” in his work when she instructed him (Trowell, 1957:104).

Trowell’s refusal to expose her students to other conventions of modernist art in the short century throughout the globe is undoubtedly informed by her belief in the supposed inherent cognitive limitations of her students. To Trowell, the “native African” adult possessed an intellectual capacity equivalent to “the unspoiled European child”. Therefore, she felt that exposing them to modernist conventions of art in 19th and 20th century Europe would “overburden” them, as they could not intellectually engage with the “conventions and accretions” which underpinned Western art in the short century. Rather, she felt her students should only be exposed to certain archaic forms of art making, such as ‘reproductions of images like “medieval illuminated manuscripts”, “some of the early adorations” and “Japanese colour prints…simpler forms which are more easy to understand than European painting from the Renaissance upwards”, as she stated in 1937: “That the unspoilt English child, or native African, will, if not interfered with, produce for his own pleasure, works of the nature of such things as the Bayeux tapestries or the illuminated manuscripts of the old monasteries” (Trowell, 1937:49).

Margaret Trowell’s pedagogical approach ignited some of the aesthetics of modernist art production and methodologies of subsequent art education in Kenya. Little critical and in depth scholarship has been undertaken in order to gauge how the art education she trialled at Makerere translated into the aesthetics of Kenyan modernism in general. Terry Hirst (2015:66) wrote that “in 1963, at Independence, there were only five formally trained and qualified Kenyan artists; Gregory Maloba, Peterson Kareithi, Francis Ndegwa, James Bukhala and Louis Mwaniki” [FIGs 06 and 07]. 

Njau still lives in Kenya today. These artists were the first to be recognised as professional artists in Kenya, and they had all been educated at the Makerere School of Fine Art under Trowell’s instruction. The impact of Trowell’s pedagogy is most overtly visible in the emergence of painting on canvas, board and paper in Kenya throughout the ‘Short Century’. It could even be argued that Trowell is partly responsible for introducing these mediums to the East African region (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014). 

Modernist painting in Kenya and East Africa has many unique markers, which remain regionally distinct. As mentioned in Unit 1, modernist painting in Kenya is characterised by a heterogeneous array of aesthetic and methodological approaches by independent artists. Although these artists all shared the experience of Makerere, their training did not result in a conceptual and aesthetic cohesion, which would mark them as a Kenyan artistic school, unlike the Khartoum School in Sudan or the École de Dakar. John Robert’s comparison of three modernist East African painters in Kenya – Eli Kyeyune, Asaoph Ngethe, Elimo Njau – in Nairobi in the 1960’s illustrates this by opining: “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 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).

I suggest that the individualism in their practices is a product of Margaret Trowell’s approach to pedagogy. As students, these early Kenyan modernists were self-directed to a large extent, as Trowell ‘rarely if ever’ referenced other artists or personally demonstrated how to achieve certain aesthetic techniques or effects to her students (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014:121). The starting point for most of their work produced at Makerere was their own imagination, as Trowell relied on ‘storytelling’ when instructing her students:  “At the start of each class, Trowell recalled that she would deliver a carefully prepared description of a scene, or a poem or story, “vivid enough”, in her words, “to create a picture in the pupil’s mind and yet sufficiently vague to allow full play to his own imagination”. The idea was that the pupil would “learn to sit with his eyes shut, searching round in his mind until he [could] realise his picture clearly as a whole and in its various details”, then set to work to get it down on paper” (Trowell, 1937 quoted in:Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2014).

Trowell expected her students to project their own subjective ‘mental visualisations’.  Paradoxically, she introduced non-African sources such as “Japanese colour prints” as distant reference material to her students. These are additional elements, which inform the compositional nature of Kenyan painting in the early twentieth century and indeed its contemporary manifestation. Although she refrains from references to European modernist avant-garde examples which had reached their global zenith in this period, she endorses a racialised Orientalist aesthetics in the work of Kenyan modernists from the 1940’sto the 1960’s, which relates to colonial cultural tourism and the imperial legitimisation of cultural appropriation under the mantle of ‘primitivism’ (Avcioglu/Benjamin, 2003).

At the same time, the subjective choices meant, that elements of abstraction, such as geometric abstraction, were rarely explored by modernist Kenyan painters in the Short Century.   An exception is the work of Louis Mwaniki, which adapts geometric abstraction. It is important to understand that concurrent Euro-modernist painting for the most part rejected perspectival compositions, naturalism and other artistic practices that underpinned artistic production for centuries’ in the West. Contrastingly, Trowell through a parochial British lens and in line with Orientalist practices endorsed naturalism and nativist narratives in line with other colonial era art educators. Modernist painting in the early Short Century in Kenya is fundamentally figurative, and it is centred on depictions of Kenyan people as well as local wildlife, as in the case of Theresa Musoke. 

Trowell’s idea of modern artistic subjectivity influenced many art teachers, curators and educators in Kenya. For example, Elimo Njau, an artist, curator and teacher saw individual authenticity as paramount to being a successful East African artist, and like his former teacher, felt that artists should strive to realise their own ‘unique visions’ in their work; ‘I formulated the following policy: “Do not copy. Copying puts god to sleep” (Elimo Njau,1963). This phrase is on a sign on the wall of the Paa ya Paa arts centre, which Njau founded in 1967.Njau stated that with this policy he started his career as an artist and teacher (Njau, 1963:17).

From 1940 until 1965 the Margaret Trowell School of Fine Art was the only specialised art school in East Africa. As George Kyeyune details in Unit 1 Uganda, Trowell retired in 1598, and was replaced by Cecil Todd, a British lecturer, who previously headed the art department at Rhodes University in Apartheid South Africa. Her former students became heads of the newer departments of Fine Art at Kenyatta University and the University College, Nairobi (now the University of Nairobi), which, until 1969, was the only university offering anything close to tertiary and vocational art education in Kenya. It was primarily a school of architecture, where “all art courses were geared to assisting the Department of Architecture” (Miller, 1975:68). But it briefly offered students a radical comprehensive multidisciplinary foundation course in design taught by South African artist and academic Selby Mvuzi in partnership with British Architect Derek Morgan between 1964 and 1967[FIG 08].  

Unlike Uganda, which was a British protectorate, Kenya was a settler colony, with rigid racial and class divides similar, but not as viciously repressive, as those of Apartheid South Africa. Nairobi was certainly a segregated city until Independence. As such, the University College of Nairobi (the Royal College of Nairobi prior to independence), was a “still colonised university” when Mvusi arrived as a faculty member in 1964. The University was run “entirely by Europeans, primarily British expatriates” (Magaziner, 2018:608), which included the Faculty of Art and Architecture. Derek Morgan was such an expatriate who arrived in Nairobi in 1954 and began lecturing at the college in 1956. Furthermore, just as the Makerere College became an affiliated University with the University College London, so too did the Department of Art and Architecture at University College, Nairobi enter into a special relationship with the Liverpool University School of Architecture. This affiliation was intended to bring Kenyan students to do post-graduate work in the UK, while also funding British and other expatriate lecturers to work in Kenya (Magaziner, 2018). 

Morgan was an architect and Fulbright scholar, and he was deeply critical of the architecture curriculum that he found at the College, which he thought was “little more than derivative of tired European practices” (Magaziner, 2018). As an architect, Morgan was a quintessential modernist, and attended the Illinois Institute of technology. As such, he was conversant with the modernist movements of architecture and design of the early and mid 20th centuries, particularly with the Bauhaus movement. Selby Mvuzi was the epitome of a transnational modern artist; he was the ‘first African to lecture in art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology’ (Magaziner, 2015:266) [FIG 09].

 He was a commanding and fierce intellectual, as well as a skilled multi-disciplinary artist. He also lectured in South Africa, the United States, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Kenya from the 1940’s until his untimely death in 1967 in Nairobi (Magaziner, 2015:266). What made Mvusi’s achievements more remarkable was that he was an outspoken anti-apartheid activist during the inception of apartheid by South Africa’s National Government from 1948. Apartheid eventually forced him to leave South Africa to teach and practice in exile. His own artistic practice was radical and he was the ‘first black South African painter to experiment with non-figurative abstraction, while still in the country.’ (Magaziner, 2015:266).

He insisted that there were already too many studies focused on man’s past and too few on “his out-reaching into the future” (Magaziner, 2015:266). To Mvusi, the conventions of design and art making made by pre-colonial Africans were of a bygone society and time. He believed that the cultures that informed those traditions were irretrievably situated in the past, and no longer made sense in a mechanised, industrial society. His statement (circa 1960) that “structures that men set up at any given time may characterise men, but they do not define men” (Magaziner, 2015:266) was revolutionary, especially in the racialised political environment of the time which determined African culture as inherently limited and incompatible with the modern world. 

Mvuzi and Morgan’s pedagogy was in stark contrast with Margaret Trowell’s approach at Makerere as well as their peer educators at the University College in Nairobi [FIG 10]. Mvusi saw Africanness as a made-up phenomenon and advocated that Africans needed to be open to all, that there was and had been, rather than being afraid that the “winds” would “blow the culture out”. He stated “culture …is living people. Culture is you me, here and now. There are no longer any static, intact, ‘primitive’’ cultures ‘out there’ We are ‘here and everywhere” (Mvusi, Magaziner, 2018:614-615). Furthermore, he openly challenged colonial notions of the ethnic autochthony of Africans and their culture.

Mvusi and Morgan, as scholars and teachers, were not interested in simply imparting technical expertise to prospective artists, architects and industrial, interior and graphic designers.

“The problem to be resolved—the commitment to be recognized—the question to be answered … is what is Our Time?” Across three terms of the academic calendar, architecture and design students would collectively try to figure out who and when they were: first by learning the rudiments of form and content analysis; then by placing themselves and their community within the stream of social and cultural developments stretching back centuries and ranging far from East Africa; and finally, by embarking on a series of so-called “man/ environ” projects, which called for students to study how contemporary East Africans used and interacted with the spaces and objects they encountered in daily life” (Magaziner, 2018:603).

Mvuzi and Morgan’s foundation course was certainly more theoretical than practical. It consisted of lectures that were ‘richly detailed, dense with learning, and enormously complex for any student’ (Magaziner, 2018:616) [FIG 11]. Whereas Trowell underestimated her students abilities to grapple with the ‘conventions and accretions’ of European art, Mvuzi and Morgan plied their students with incredibly dense and complicated theories like network theory – the theory of social life as a constructed code – which also unfolds in space (Lefebvre, 1974). Most of the students’ time was spent attending lectures on social/ cultural analysis designed to explore the idea that people and their objects are “expressive fragments” of a tangled, overlapping web of connection (Magaziner, 2018:63). Due to the complex theoretical nature of their course, a purported lack of practical training, and charges from other lecturers that “the students did not understand what was taught”, the director of studies cancelled the course in 1967. In 1969, the University created a separate department of Fine Art. 

The first university course in Fine Art was created at Kenyatta College (now Kenyatta University) in 1965. It offered “a general course in art methods” (Miller, 1975) [FIG 12]. Kenyatta College was primarily a teachers’ training college, and ‘by 1970 more than sixty art teachers had graduated’ from its program (Miller, 1975:69). The second Department of Art was opened at the University College, Nairobi in 1970. It was directed by Gregory Maloba, where Louis Mwaniki also lectured. Similar to the foundation course created by Mvuzi and Morgan, the course offered at Kenyatta College was described as liberal and innovative.  “Students painted murals on the art building which are continually overpainted as they age or fade. A 1968 exhibition included works in over twenty media. Traditional crafts are examined and new materials used in their creation”(Miller, 1975:68).

These studies included “Kikuyu Songs from “the Emergency”, “Luo Pottery”, “House Construction in Meru”, Hindu Temple Structure”, “Kalenjin Ornaments” and “Calligraphy and the Koran” (Miller, 1975:69). Terry Hirst was the head of the Art Department at Kenyatta College. It was Hirst who personally developed the course, its methods and its materials. British by birth, Hirst was the Head of Art at a comprehensive school in Nottingham (Wanjiru, 2014). He was invited by Kenya’s first independent government to create a teacher-training course at Kenyatta College in 1965. He spent the rest of his life in Kenya as a naturalised citizen. He was a multi-disciplinary artist and teacher, and was Kenya’s first hugely popular comic book artist and political cartoonist in the Daily Nation from the 1970’s to the advent of the new millennium.

Like Mvuzi and Morgan, Hirst was critical of old colonial models of art education. He acknowledged that archaic forms of European art education trained artists to produce work for a clientele of patrons that no longer existed in the industrialised, modern and mechanised world of the 20th century. He cited English art critic John Berger, who stated that ‘a tragic farce’ existed in English art schools where artists were being trained to create work like easel paintings for patrons who no longer exist. In order to make a living as a formally trained artist, Hirst stated that ‘the easiest option is to become a teacher, and the best artists get jobs in art schools, and “teach artists to teach artists!” (Wanjiru, 2014). By 1970 more than sixty art teachers had graduated from Kenyatta College. Despite Hirst’s new approach to art teaching, and his critical role in documenting and preserving elements of Kenya’s visual and cultural history [FIG 13]. 

He was sharply criticised by his fellow lecturers at the University of Nairobi and internationally acclaimed East African artists, mainly by Sam Ntiro at Makerere and Gregory Maloba at the University College, Nairobi. Both thought Hirst’s course had departed too far from the British art school ‘model’ they had enjoyed and favoured – the ‘farce’ of training people to be artists, and then expecting them only to teach, whether they have a vocation or not (Wanjiru, 2014). Sam Ntiro, like Maloba, was one of the first students at the Makerere School of Fine Art[FIG 14].. A Tanzanian, he went on to become one of the country’s most recognised and revered modernist painters[ FIG 15]. He completed a postgraduate degree at the Slade School of art in London, where he was classmates with other influential African modernists Ibrahim El Sallahi (Sudan) and Menhat Helmy (Egypt). Both he and Maloba worked as staff at Makerere upon completing undergraduate studies. Maloba is one of the most influential African artists and intellectuals.

He is credited as the artist behind East Africa’s most iconic artworks, such as Uganda’s national monument, which he cast whilst working at Makerere [FIG 16]. Margaret Trowell’s successor, Cecil Todd, praised his intelligence and artistic talent. He had sculpted since his childhood in Western Kenya, as did ‘most children’ in clay or mud to fashion objects. “My interest just happened to be greater than theirs. Nothing would stop me”(Maloba, 1963). Born in 1922, he was deeply affected by Catholic plaster Saints which he interacted with in childhood. He made a statuette of the Virgin Mary, which he carried with him for protection to St. Mary’s School, Yala, a catholic boarding school, which he enrolled in aged 14. In 1940, Sir Henry Moore (the 20th governor of colonial Kenya) visited the school. After seeing his art, Lady Moore and Brother Morris recommended that Maloba pursue further art education at Makerere Art School’ (Maloba et a, 1963) (Kakande, 2008) (Kayem, 2020).

Maloba was Trowell’s first ‘professional’ student (Kakande, 2008). Prior to his arrival in 1940, Makerere’s school of Fine Art began as “art classes for volunteers, mainly civil servants, before she persuaded the Makerere establishment, and government, to allow Makerere students to pursue it as an extra-mural (if recreational) activity” (Kakande 2008). Thanks to Trowell’s persistence, it became a certified undergraduate course in 1940, with Maloba being its first attendee. He would go on to become her colleague at Makerere, lecturing in sculpture. Whilst lecturing, he also practised as a professional sculptor. Asaph Ng’ethe recalls “the intensity of his work as he fired clay in the kilns and welded different metals into shape” (Macua, 2019:109-110).

Upon the death of Mvuzi, and the resignation of Morgan from the College, Maloba became the chair of the new Department of Fine Art and Design as well as the Dean of the Faculty until 1971. Due to his training and sensibilities Maloba attempted to drive Design towards Fine Art and he abandoned Mvuzi and Morgan’s development of a local methodology and aesthetic of architecture and industrial design (Pido et al, 210). Maloba moved to Kenyatta College in 1972 and Nathan Shapira, a Triestian industrial designer, moved from California to head the Department at the University of Nairobi (Pido et al, 2020:210).

The artists and lecturers/teachers explored in this essay were part of an elite in postcolonial Kenyan society. In his writing, Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes this class as ‘neocolonial elites’, in his books and plays such as Matigari ma Njuurungi (1986), Petals of Blood (1977) and Ngaahika Ndeenda (1970). Wa Thiong’o argued that Kenyan elites filled the vacuum left by the settler colonial establishment once Kenya gained Independence. Makerere University at its inception was a colonial institution, which “offered a western-style education to the children of the indigenous elite” (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2015:101). It was an institution, where local Africans across the region with the financial means, familial prestige and connections to the colonial establishment sent their children to “learn the skill of the European” (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2015:101). 

Artists like Gregory Maloba and Elimo Njau belonged to this class: Njau’s father was a first generation convert of a Lutheran mission in Tanzania, and was a teacher [FIG 17]; Maloba attended one of Kenya’s elite Catholic mission schools, where he was scouted by the headmaster and the colonial governor of Kenya. They represent the vanishingly small percentage of local Africans who had access to study at places like Makerere due to their close proximity to agents of the Empire. The most pressing issue at hand for local East Africans after the First World War was to equip their children with the education and skills necessary to compete with Asians and Europeans in capitalist markets and institutions of government, which were set up by the colonial establishment. As such, ‘arts and crafts occupied the most inferior position in the hierarchy of subjects’ (Wolukau-Wanambwa 2015:101).

Today Independent Kenya is just 60 years old, and still a developing, middle-income nation. As such, the above sentiments are still pervasive today among Kenyan society. Furthermore, for the same reasons, ‘the colonial governments of East Africa…gave art projects a low priority rating’ (Miller, 1975:67). Margaret Trowell founded the school of Fine Art at Makerere through sheer will and her own convictions as an artist. She was able to convince the colonial authorities and directors of Makerere University to create a school of Fine Art because she believed that formal art education was ‘key to the success of Britain’s “civilising mission” (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2015:103). 

Trowell saw East Africans through the lens of an agent of the British Empire; her duty was to try and raise standards of living. She believed by elevating local craft and craftsmanship among her students, they would in turn “really set to work to improve their local conditions” by making the things that their communities needed for “better living” (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2015:103). But the fact there was any tertiary education in the arts in East Africa was due to her initiative and the trust the local elites were willing to offer her (Miller, 1975:67).

Selby Mvusi and Derek Morgan had similar aspirations for their students in their comprehensive ‘Foundation Course’ at the University College, Nairobi. They saw the potential of comprehensive design in line with Bauhaus theoretical frameworks as a means to inculcate a sensibility within their students, and enable them to create objects, architecture and art that would foster an authentic, modern, postcolonial visual culture and identity for East Africans in the “Short Century”: ‘As Mvusi told the students: “The problem to be resolved—the commitment to be recognized—the question to be answered … is what is Our Time?”. 

Like Trowell, Mvuzi was concerned that the majority of industrialised products, which East Africans used and consumed, as well as their built environments in cities like Nairobi, ‘had not been manufactured with them in mind’ (Magaziner, 2018:618). To address this, he taught his students to thoroughly research and understand understand the cultural mores and social contexts in which Kenyans lived across the colonial-class divide, from the “manicured gardens of Muthaiga (one of Nairobi’s richest suburbs) to the “dirt and squalor of Kariokor” (at the time one of Nairobi’s neglected lower-income residential areas) (Magaziner, 2018:617). Only then could they design and create for Kenyan people. Mvuzi and Morgan saw their students as a “microcosm of the East African macrocosm – in turn the microcosm of the world macrocosm” (Magaziner, 2018:613). To be a modern East African artist, designer or architect, therefore was to be part of a global community of creatives in a “linked and co-dependant postcolonial world” (Magaziner, 2018:613). 

To Trowell, her students hailed from “peasant populations”, which had not developed beyond the economic and social state of medieval Europe (Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2015:103). As such, they could not compete in a modernist world, nor could they grapple with the ‘conventions and accretions’, which informed modernist art and visual culture, particularly in the West. Trowell believed that they should rather aspire to create “the vigorous craftsmanship of a healthy peasant population”, like that of Europe in the Dark Ages. Attempting to unpack Trowell’s sentiments towards East Africans or critique her assertions with a postmodern or anticolonial lens would take us beyond the impact of her ideas on modernist Kenyan art.

In line with Terry Hirst and John Berger’s assertions, Trowell in effect imported  a tragic farce, which existed in English art schools into her practice as head of Makerere’s School of Fine Art. Here, from 1940 until today, artists were being trained to create work like easel paintings for patrons who no longer existed in Europe, but who effectively never existed in Kenya prior to the arrival of Europeans. We have explored the pre-colonial economies of Kenyan communities in Unit 2 Kenya, and how Kenyan communities were effectively transformed into a peasant class of cheap labour during Britain’s creation of a colonial capitalist economy in the region. As such, apart from a handful of local individuals and settlers, virtually no one had the means to patronise mainstream art as Trowell taught it at Makerere.

Artists belonging to the first school, Trowell’s former students like Gregory Maloba, Asaph Ngethe, Louis Mwaniki, James Bukhala, Francis Ndegwa and Elimo Njau certainly exhibited and sold their work locally [ FIG 18]. But their clientele was limited to their fellow elite peers in Nairobi. Therefore, it unsurprising that Maloba was commissioned by Uganda’s first government to create their Independence monument and the Kenya government to cast public works and monuments. 

Njau founded Paa ya Paa with fellow artists, writers and intellectuals and exhibited works by East African artists successfully throughout the ‘Short Century’. Furthermore, artists like Mwaniki, Maloba and Njau also exhibited their work internationally, in Europe, the United States and even in Asia. Asaph Ngethe personally presented a painting titled Harambee, the president’s political mantra, a swahili phrase which means ‘all pull together’. Ngethe writes that in 1964 he “felt the urge to meet Prime Minister Kenyatta…I made up my mind very quickly and decided to paint his portrait and another painting that I called Harambee” (Macua, 2019:120). Ngethe was able to meet Kenyatta thanks to his position at the East African Community Services Organisation. (Macua 2019:120). 

But these artists are almost totally absent from contemporary Kenya’s public consciousness. Indeed, whereas the legacy of modernists like Mutisya Munge and members of the Ongesa family are readily visible across the country in contemporary curio and figurine sculpture, the works and legacies of pioneers like Louis Mwaniki, Samuel Wanjau, Elimo Njau and Gregory Maloba are not only incredibly difficult to find, but in some cases, completely unknown both by the general public and by contemporary visual artists.

 The veteran cartoonist, academic and visual artist Terry Hirst wrote in 2015: “In East Africa there are no artist’s autobiographies, and even biographies are still rare, being mostly concerned with outstanding politicians, fondly remembered teachers, and other ‘big’ people, but never artists”(Hirst, 2015:67).The factors that inform this absence are multi-faceted and complex. But elitism is one factor. The education that these artists received from Margaret Trowell’s school of Fine Art was not accessible to the vast majority of their fellow Kenyans. Combined with the self-directed nature of their studies, they developed their practice in almost complete isolation. They were erudite, transnational intellectuals, at a time when only a small percentage of their population had access to higher education. Trowell’s own pedagogies were directly in conflict with the culture that informed Kenya at the beginning of the Short Century, such as her insistence on comparing East Africa’s cultural milieu to that of mediaeval Europe. 

The nature of Trowell’s teaching practices may have led her students to develop an aesthetic that was almost completely unfamiliar to their fellow East African citizens. Makerere’s first generation of artists strived to amalgamate techniques, motifs, and aesthetic methodologies from East Africa and from international styles in order to tell an East African story. Elimo Njau’s Murang’a murals, which were commissioned in 1959 by the Anglican Church to honour loyalist civilian casualties of the Mau Mau rebellion, depict important New Testament narratives in an indigenous setting; the landscapes are depictions of the topography of central Kenya [FIG 19]. In Njau’s ‘The baptism of Christ’, Jesus is not baptised in the Jordan river, but in the basin of the Chania waterfalls. The Chania river is an important border marker and water source to the Kikuyu of central Kenya who are the congregants of the church that houses Njau’s murals.

Asaph Ng’ethe’s work depicts 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 20]. I am introducing some of Kenyan art history’s complexity here. Some recent commentators have recently criticised their practice as perpetuating a Eurocentric colonial worldview. But a more sophisticated reading of their practice is that they were trying to forge an independent postcolonial identity, which drew on multiple worldviews in order to narrate and critique the lives of modern Kenyans in the twentieth century.