MALIZA TAKES PRIDE IN HER FAMILY'S SHARED ANCESTRY

ARTIST TAKES PRIDE IN HER ANCESTRY

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (margaretta.gacheru@gmail.com)(May 29, 2021

Having transformed a hay-filled barn into a giant home studio, Malisa Kiasuwa has been working throughout the COVID lockdown preparing for two exhibitions currently underway overseas. One is in Washington, DC, while the other is in London.

Both sharing the theme, ”The Pride of Origins’, the Naivasha-based Malisa has previously exhibited in Nairobi at Circle Art Gallery and at Alliance Francaise. But Amy Morton of the Morton Fine Art Gallery in Washington actually found Malisa on Instagram, the social medium currently accommodating many local fine artists. Nonetheless, while visiting Kenya in 2019, Morton found her way to Circle Art where she got an even better impression of Malisa’s organically-based artistry.

“Amy was and still is interested in featuring contemporary African art at her gallery, which is how she got to know me,” says the Belgian-Congolese artist whose 21 collages and wall hangings are featuring in her first solo show in DC from June 2^nd to 22^nd.

Meanwhile, another 16 of Malisa’s collages are featuring now at the Sulger-Buel Gallery in London, where the artist has set her soulful spotlight on not just the Pride of Origins but specifically on the notion of Ancestry.

Malisa works with an array of mixed media, including organic materials like raffia grass, sisal rope, handmade papers, scraps of fabric, and threads made out of cotton and silk, silver and gold. She blends them together with found objects that she collects during her frequent walks around the lake and around Naivasha town.

The upcycling of found objects appeals to the artist’s concern for conservation. Her use of organic materials reflects her desire to stay close to the purity of nature. But during the lockdown, Malisa reflected upon all the many clashing contradictions festering in the world, including the ‘virus of racism’ and the coronavirus, the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of white supremacy.

Her desire is to see the reconciliation of these extremes, a coming together of disparate elements in the name of peace. “I see myself as an example of reconciliation since my background is both European and African,” says Malisa.

In a sense both exhibitions are about Identity, reconciliation, and ‘the pride of origins’. These themes are symbolized most visibly in her London show where she includes collages that combine engraved portraits of 18^th century European aristocrats upon whose faces Malisa has affixed wooden West African masks (the kind that enthralled Western artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse).

“I found the engravings of my [Swiss] husband’s ancestors in an attic of his family’s home,” says Malisa who saw the etchings had been forgotten, so she brought them back to Kenya where she and her family have been living since 2013.

Treating them like the other ‘found objects’ that she uses to upcycle into her art, the masks superimposed on the faces of these bourgeois white men are meant to symbolize what reconciliation might look like. Yet the juxtaposition of the two-dimensional etchings and the three-dimensional masks could also be interpreted in other ways, either to amuse or to annoy.

There’s an irony of her embellishing the men’s portraits with African masks which had once been used in sacred rituals and infused with mystical powers. At the same time, Western aristocrats are not the only ‘nobility’ in the London show.

Malisa herself comes from West African nobility. “My father’s ‘tribe’ is Ndongo, the same one as Queen Zinga [or Nzinga] of Congo,” she recalls. Noting that Zinga was renowned for her military and diplomatic leadership which is credited for fending off Portuguese colonialism and slave trade for over 30 years.

Zinga is often identified as coming from Angola, but Malisa explains the Ndongo kingdom, prior to the colonial carving up of Africa in the 19^th century, traversed northern Angola as well as southern Congo.

“Our people had lived on the border of what is now Congo,” says Malisa, adding that she wants her children to take pride in their shared ancestry.

In both exhibitions, there is at least one explicitly autobiographic collage featuring a mug shot of the artist wearing a crown, either made of hand-made paper or animal skin. As if enthroned in her exhibition just as Queen Zinga headed her vast kingdom, the letter ‘Z’ is emblazoned on each crown, standing at once for Zinga and for Zaire, which was the name of her country at the time that she was born.

MALISA MAKES WAVES ACROSS CONTINENTS

                                                     MALIZA GOES GLOBAL

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (published 28 May 2021)

Coincidentally, Maliza Kiasuwa has two solo exhibitions going on simultaneously, one in London, the other in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, she still has her art at Circle Art Gallery here in Nairobi where the curator of Morton Fine Art Gallery, Amy Morton is giving the Belgian-Congolese artist her first DC solo show from June 2^nd to 22nd.

“Amy actually found my work first on Instagram, which led her to Circle Art,” recalls Malisa who has had shows at Circle and Alliance Francaise since she first came to Kenya with her family in early 2013.

Speaking from her farm in Naivasha where she has been fortunate to live through the COVID lockdown amidst the quiet of nature, Malisa says she has pondered many things this past year, everything from the virus of racism to pandemic fears. The result has been a rich outpouring of artworks, 16 of which are in London at her Ancestry exhibition at the Sulger-Buel Gallery, and 21 in the Morton Gallery in DC.

“Both are entitled ‘The Pride of Origin’ but the London show focuses more on our ‘Ancestry’, while the DC exhibition is slightly more abstract,” says the artist.

Both shows have a great deal in common. Both use materials that are either recycled, organic, or handmade like the Washi paper from Japan and the homemade paper that she’s made herself. And both reflect the issue of Identity in ways that compel us to consider how clashing cultures, customs, convictions, and even colors can be reconciled.

“Coming from a mixed background myself, I want my own children to be proud of their ancestry, their identity,” says Malisa who admits she doesn’t classify herself as either/or European or African, since she is both.

Seeing herself as essentially an embodiment of reconciliation, she hopes that by stitching, weaving, and blending contrasting elements together, her art can reveal the beauty of merger.

Yet her two exhibitions are quite different despite their shared theme, use of mixed media, and mutual forms given that most of the works are collages. Nonetheless, she also has several three-dimensional pieces in Washington. They include her kimono-like wall-hanging entitled ‘Imperfections’, made with Washi and handmade papers, gold threads, and assorted stitched fabrics.

Personally, I found the London show both ironic and amusing while her DC one is more cerebral, organic, and abstract. What is marvelous about many of the pieces up at Sulger-Buel until mid-June is the self-mockery of works like ‘The Proud of Origins Collection I and III’. Both pieces feature engraved portraits of her Swiss spouse’s distant relations that she found in a family attic and brought back to Africa like other ‘found objects’ she picks up during her walks around Lake Naivasha and then employs in her art.

It was on top of these 18^th century images that Malisa superimposes West African masks. It’s as if she’s making good fun not just with her own people but with European colonial culture that she feels has to embrace or at least accept the reality of African culture, whether they like it or not.

The other evidence that Malisa intends for her art to make a power statement about the equal footing that African and European cultures share is contained in her two self-portraits, one in either show. Both blend black and white fabrics, although in London she weaves in more tweed while in DC she uses more hessian. But both use the same photograph, the artist’s mug shot, looking quite stern. The big difference is the crown worn by this dreadlocked lady on which is her regal logo, Z, short for Zaire, her original African homeland.

One might have expected Queen Z to be in the London exhibition. But after placing African masks (the kind Picasso and Matisse adored) over those European faces, the sensibility of her show might have shifted from being ironic and witty to abusive and easily misunderstood.

The London show actually has several self-portraits of Malisa although they are understated with Africanized ‘crowns’ made of animal skin or plastic fishnet mesh mixed with organic fabrics.

The handmade and the manufactured stand side by side in Malisa’s art. Be it black and white, realistic and abstract, dynastic and libertarian; or even bourgeois and peasant, in Malisa’s world, the time for reconciliation has come, not through wars but through art, imagination, and improvisation.

For her, it’s all about accepting and reconciling our differences since for her, there really is no other way for the world to survive and thrive.

 

KENYA WOMEN'S LACROSSE TEAM REACHES CHAMPIONSHIP

 KENYA’S FIRST FEMALE LACROSSE TEAM MADE THE CHAMPIONSHIP IN CANADA

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 25 May 2021)

Cinematographer Timothy Mwaura didn’t even know the producer of his recent film, ‘Sleeping Warrior’ had entered him in a global competition for best documentary cinematographer. So when Nina Ruiz phoned him in Malindi where he was working on his latest film project for the EU, he was initially stunned, then elated and finally overwhelmed with the notion of winning anything.

“That [international] award is the first that I’ve ever won,” Mwaura told BD. But he was promptly corrected by his wife Vale who reminded him he had received special mentions for his cinematography both in ‘WAZI? FM’ and the 2016 documentary about epilepsy entitled ‘Subira’. And at this year’s Kalasha Film Market, he won the documentary ‘pitch’ for his film project, ‘Nairobi by Night,’ about street children and sex workers.

Then Nina further reminded of his past life as an award-winning spoken word poet, when filmmaking hadn’t even crossed his mind.

“Back then, we were part of WAPI? an arts project funded by the British Council,” recalls the man whose winning words had taken him all the way from Denmark to Zimbabwe and Japan.

                     Tim Mwaura, award-winning Kenyan cinematographer.Photo by Janet Wells

But Mwaura soon understood that winning prizes in poetry wouldn’t provide him a sustainable livelihood. “I realized that just as I was taking my second trip to Denmark,” he says. With that in mind, he decided to hold onto the stipend his sponsors gave him for his stay in their country.

“I saved it all and before I left Copenhagen, I used those funds to buy myself a Canon 70 camera including one battery,” he adds.

That humble Canon is nothing like the Red Epic Dragon that he now owns and which he says is what most Hollywood cinematographers use. But even with his Canon, Mwaura was determined to become the best cinematographer that he could be. And now, he has begun to fulfill that dream as ‘Sleeping Warrior’, the documentary film about the making of Kenya’s first female LaCrosse team, is winning awards right and left, including the one he just got from the European Cinematography Association based in Holland.

‘We have already received awards from film festival in Toronto, Chicago, Houston, and just this today, (May 24) we heard we won at the Cannes World Film Festival,” says Nina proudly.

It was serendipity that got her and her filmmaking partner Janet Wells together with Mwaura. “It all happened from London where both Janet and I are based,” says Nina who heard about him from a friend who had met him in Kenya. They called him on the spot and explained their plan. Their friend was heading to Western Kenya to recruit and train the country’s first female LaCrosse team. They wanted their film to capture that transformational process, focused on its impact on the young women’s lives.

(                               L-R) Janet Wells, Tim Mwaura, Nina Ruiz and Belete Negusie

“I had been to Kenya several times before. But having a sporty background myself, I was intrigued with the idea of filming the actual process of starting from scratch and getting those girls all the way to the 2019 Women’s World LaCrosse Championship in Peterborough, Canada,” says Nina.

“They didn’t win, but they were the first team from Africa to reach the championship, and the crowd loved them,” adds Janet.

But winning wasn’t the point of the film. “We wanted to get the back-stories of the girls. And that is what Tim was so good at,” says Nina who focused specifically on three young women whose desperate lives have been transformed by being on the team.

Sharon, Maureen, and Maclean all have heart-wrenching stories that have left nary a viewer of the film with a dry eye, according to Janet. “All came from dire situations,” adds Nina who with Janet has set up an Education Fund to assist these girls with school fees and enable them all to get to university.

As for Mwaura, his training in filmmaking is what he describes as being ‘self-taught.’ Yet he adds that he’s had excellent film coaches first with Chris King, whose film ‘The Letter’, made with his singer-filmmaker wife Maia, had been up for an Academy Award in Hollywood. He also learned a great deal from Jared Rehm helping him make the film ‘Sarakasi’. So by the time he met Nina and Janet, he had already been making doc films for everyone from the ILO and UNICEF to CARE and FAO.

“I initially thought I was making a sports film, but soon I realized ‘Sleeping Warrior’ was about the personal lives of these strong, but vulnerable young women,” says Mwaura.

‘Sleeping Warrior’ will be screened in Nairobi at Westgate Mall on June 1st.

 

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MARTIN KIGONDU: ALL ROUND THESPIAN TURNED FILMMAKER

 ALL-ROUND THESPIAN SHIFTS TO FILMMAKING

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 24 May 2021)

Ever since 2014 when the Kenya government ruled that the local broadcasters had to screen at least 60 percent local materials for their programming, the country has witnessed a flood of fascinating films and sit-coms all produced, directed and scripted by Kenyans themselves.

Among those who have combined all three, scriptwriting, producing and directing short films is Martin Kigondu. Best known for being a playwright of scripts such as ‘Who’s Your Daddy’, ‘Of Cords and Discords’ and ‘Matchstick Men’ among others, Martin began making the transition to filmmaking even before the COVID lockdown. But given that his fourth short film, ‘Contained’, addresses the effects of the lockdown on everything from relationships and family life to mental health and domestic violence, Martin has clearly drawn inspiration from both the trials and triumphs of Kenyans’ everyday lives.

“It took me a long time to get into filmmaking,” says the thespian who started his professional acting career when he joined the Travelling Theatre that stages set texts and caught the theatre ‘bug’ in the process.

“I resisted [making films] because I’m devoted to live theatre, especially after working with committed thespians like Millicent Ogutu, Gilbert Lukalia, and Keith Pearson,” says Martin who cultivated his directing and producer skills while working with professionals like these.

But when he started teaching Performance and Theatre arts to children in schools like Rose of Sharon Academy, he began recording their performances as a learning tool.

“’Red Carpet’, my first film, had a cast that was almost all children,” he says, noting he scripted a story that related to the delicate topic of a girl getting her period while in class. “It hasn’t been released to a wider public,” Martin adds.

But it was less than a month ago that he released, through his new production company BeeYond Entertainment, his latest short film entitled ‘Contained’. Inspired by both the COVID lockdown and the passing of a dear friend, ‘Contained’ is just 19 minutes and has very little dialogue. But it reveals a wide array of issues that have deeply affected Kenyans during this pandemic.

“Kui’s passing hit me hard, but ultimately, it had a cathartic effect on my writing. It convinced me that storytelling is so much a part of me that I can do it as well with filmmaking as I can on stage,” he says.

Crediting his cinematographer, Jackson Kangethe, who also helped him make two of his other films, ‘Sand Castle’ and ‘Gatarashini’, Martin says he was delighted to make ‘Contained’ with Akinui Oluoch.

She and Martin co-star in a playful yet poignant story of lovers living in close quarters during the lockdown. Initially they illustrate how a loving, happy couple can find limitless things to do and share even in the narrow confines of a one-bedroom flat. But the sudden turn of events is something the public should see for themselves as they now can do by finding Martin’s channel on YouTube.

Akinyi also co-stars in Martin’s 2019 film, ‘Sand Castle’ in which she is married to Bilal Wanjau’s character. “The idea was to illustrate the impact that divorce can have on children,” he says. The breakup of the parents in his film isn’t physically violent. But the emotional violence affects the delicate minds of the children quickly and cruelly. The little boy () and his big sister () both are traumatized, making the film serve as a modern-day morality film. Not that Martin moralizes in a preachy or pseudo-religious sense. But the message comes clear, that parents need to think twice about the delicate beings they bring into this world. There’s an implicit responsibility there, and in his ‘Sand Castle’ one has the sense that modern-day marriage in Kenya is as ephemeral as the sandy mounds that children make which get washed away easily and assuredly once the tide comes rolling in.

The other recent short film that Martin made, assisted by Kangethe, is ‘Gatarashaini’ (‘At the small bridge’ in Kikuyu). It’s a comedy of sorts. It’s also a contest between the manamba (matatu conductor) boyfriend (Collins ‘Ayrosh’ Irungu) and the father (Stephan Kimani) of the tout’s girlfriend (Edith Kanini). The father disapproves of his young daughter’s infatuation with the tout. But the daughter prefers the guy to her dad, which makes the dad look like he’s in a losing battle.

Again, ‘Gatarashaini’ is a short film, just eight minutes, but Martin is a master at packing in emotions, experiences, and visual anecdotes in small spaces of time.  

LOCAL ARTISTS FLOCK TO PHOTIZO GALLERY IN VALLEY ARCADE

 LOCAL ARTISTS FLOCK TO PHOTIZO GALLERY

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

Tucked away upstairs at the far end of Valley Arcade is a tiny gallery that makes the most of its minute space.

Photizo Art Gallery has been around since 2013. but its founder and chief curator, Belalel Ngabo, hasn’t spent a lot of time promoting his art space in the media.

“I’m an artist first and foremost, and I think that is where I put most of my energies,” says the painter who has exhibited all over Nairobi and abroad since 2002 when he first arrived in Kenya from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“I manage the gallery with my wife, Lydia.” says the Congolese painter who studied at the Academy des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa before spreading his wings and coming to Kenya.

“I am actually a multi-tasker so I have been promoting the gallery, especially among the artists in East and Central Africa who we are now hosting on our website,” says Bezalel. “We have over 50 [regional] artists that we host. The majority are Kenyans and Ugandans, but we also have artists from the DRC, Tanzania, and Sudan,” he adds.

What’s interesting about Photizo is that it didn’t need a pandemic to take all of its artists and their exhibitions online. “We have been showing and selling artists’ works online since we opened [in 2013]. It is one of the reasons we have new works arriving in the gallery all the time,” he adds.

Currently, Photizo is exhibiting three artists whose works will be on display, both inside and in front of the gallery for another week. Samuel Njoroge Njuguna, Dickson Nedia Were, and Ronnie Chris Tindi initially seem like an eclectic set of artists to exhibit together since they don’t seem to have an immediate affinity.

Yet Bezalel the painter saw the painterly qualities in each that are similar. For instance, all three are colorists who clearly love to amplify the bright, bold colors of equatorial Africa. That is clear in works like Tindi’s ‘Market Day’ where the women are dressed in beautiful full-length frocks designed in turquoise blues, regal reds and dampled yellow hues. And while Samuel Njuguna also has a ‘Market Day’ scene which is quite dissimilar from Tindi’s, his other works, such as ‘Lamu Fishers’ and ‘Peugeot Matatu’ share similar shades and hues. Meanwhile, Nedia likes to combine all those colors in his portraits, making the child in ‘Impassivity’ look like she’d been playing with bright primary colors and making herself a face-mask out of them.

The other thing the three have in common is their choice of subjects. Steering clear of abstract air, the three all focus on events, activities and people closer to home. They all highlight the here and now, which means they are relatable to local collectors just starting to appreciate art.

For instance, Nedia’s portrait of ‘Woman Power’ is a black beauty with an elusive ‘Mona Lisa’-like smile. And Njuguna’s country bus scene in ‘Relic’ is also easily understood and so is Tindi’s “From Buruburu to Tao’ matatu stage scene. These are all scenes out of East Africans’ everyday lives.

What’s more, all of their paintings very consciously do not make a political statement of any kind. Their works are strictly ‘art for art’s sale’, art that only conveys a positive perspective on the region without a hint of complaint about the status quo or the powers that be.

The one artist who you might have expected to be on display at the Gallery is Bezalel’s since Photizo is his. But he says his gallery is there to promote other African artists, not only himself. So one will only find his art on the website. “One could also see it in Paris right now, since some of it is there with Lydia who took it to be in a Paris Art Fair called ‘Art 3F’,” says Bezalel.

Surprisingly. He seems to share some qualities with the three painters he is currently exhibiting since he also seems to like painting portraits of beautiful African women dressed in gracefully patterned West African designs. But he also explores subjects such as wildlife, and he doesn’t shy away from abstract and semi-abstract art. Works like ‘Servanthood’ reflect gently on his religious background while ‘Sing song soul’ also reveal his deep-seated love of music which again he cultivated while growing up singing in church.

 

 

PAELLA, THE SPANISH EQUIVALENT TO PILAU, ONLY SWEETER

 CELEBRATE WITH ‘SPANISH PILAU’ KNOWN AS PAELLA

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

What better way to celebration the opening of a new photographic exhibition of African Ceremonies at Strathmore University than to have a celebration of one’s own.

Sarah Mehrgut, head of Languages in Strathmore’s School of Humanities and Social Science had, from the outset, been involved with the exhibition of photographs donated to the university by Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith, authors of 17 books on Africa, including their latest on African Ceremonies. So it seemed fitting that she would provide the most essential feature of the celebrations. And that was the food, a very special food, indigenous to her homeland of Spain.

Paella (prounced ‘pay-ee’-ah’) could be described as a Spanish pilau since it’s a rice dish made with special flavorful spices. But there are major differences between the making of paella and pilau.

“There are many different ways to make paella, depending on which part of Spain you come from,” says Sara as she pulls out a huge skillet-like pan fit for cooking a dish meant to serve a minimum of ten.

She suggests that paella originally came from Valencia, Spain. But it has taken root as a national food all over the land. Her cooking friend and fellow Spaniard Deyanira adds that the variations include cooking it mainly with seafoods, especially prawns and calamari, or mixing chicken and fish, or making this marvelous dish primarily with rabbit or pork.

“Many Spaniards like to make paella with pork, but then they do not include fish since the tastes clash with one another,” Deyanira says.

The meat variations are not the only differences in the way people cook this delightful dish. The choice of oils in which to cook the meat and a wide range of fresh vegetables is also a key difference in the cooking.

“In my [Spanish] home, we only made paella with olive oil, but the [official] recipe often uses both olive oil and sunflower oil,” says Sara. Meanwhile, in Deyanira’s family, paella was only made with sunflower oil.

But what’s most impressive about paella is the precision with which it is made. Sara says she rarely cooks paella in Kenya. But she remembers well what her grandmother taught her about how to heat the oil and then first cook the chicken breasts and drum sticks (“Any part of the chicken will serve the purpose,” she says.). Once they are nearly fully cooked, she removes them, and then brings out the king prawns. She places them in the same oil used to fry to chicken. “That’s because the flavor of the paella will blend all the ingredients to create the taste we love,” she adds.

As she watches the prawns cook, she tells BD Life that you can know when they are done because they change their shape into the curled letter ‘c’. “When they are overcooked, their shape turns into a zero,” she adds.

Now is the time for all the vegetables to get a quick fry. They include everything from onions, garlic and bell peppers to cucumbers, French beans, and peas. And while those are cooking, Sara pulls out 2.5 liters of fish stock which she had prepared the night before.

“I cook the stock with bones from tilapia and sometimes with the fish heads,” she says. But today, as there will be nearly 20 people at the celebration, she will make two batches of paella.

Before she starts cooking the first kilo of rice with the fish stock, Sara adds the precious ingredient, the paella spice which she says she cannot find locally. “I get it from friends whenever they go and come back from Spain,” she says..

“Saffron is one of the key ingredients of the paella spice. It’s the ingredient that gives the rice its warm yellow color,” says Sara. “There is also some paprika,” adds Deyanira who explains how this spice is not hot, only flavorful. “Most Spaniards are not big on hot spicy food,” she says.

Then after the rice cooks for ten minutes, Sara adds all the meat, fish (apart from the prawns) and vegetables into the rice and mixes them all together so they can cook evenly.

Letting this mix simmer for ten more minutes, Sara then lets the savory mixture cool before she pours this colorful blend into a sizeable bowl.

“We will decorate the top of the paella with the king prawns and sliced half a red bell pepper. They will add to the beauty of our national dish,” says Sara who graciously shares the recipe with me.

 

BAD PARENTING

DIARY OF A WAYWARD PARENT:

How not to do good parenting.

By margaretta wa gacheru (margaretta.gacheru@gmail.com)(posted to DN 12.5.2021)

We often hear about how to be a good parent; about all the things you ought to do to ensure your child excels in school, and is prepared to enjoy a healthy, happy, fulfilling, and successful life.

We are assured children benefit most when parents give them ‘quality time’, feed them healthy food, give them warm clothes, and a consistent routine of hours in which they can do their homework, ideally assisted by parents who might even share a good book or story or even a prayer with them every night before they go to bed.

Good parenting involves work, especially to keep track of your child. It isn’t easy these days to ensure your child is disciplined, but it helps if you the parent are able to keep track of where they are, who they are with, what they are up to, and when they are fulfilling the daily duties you ask them to complete in order to be responsible members of your family.

If this sounds theoretical and old fashioned, it probably is, but that doesn’t make it outmoded. On the contrary, monitoring your child’s whereabouts and what they are putting into their heads is the reason some parents are concerned about letting their children into social media before they are mature enough to handle the language, the imagery and some of the issues tackled by social media, including pornography and other unhealthy ideas.

Whether all parents are this strict or consider all of the above as essential skills required to be a good parent is not my concern. What I am an expert in is the what NOT to do to be a good parent.

Frankly, you will rarely hear about what not to do since there is such a big stigma and so much shame attached to not being a good parent. It would seem that parents, especially mothers get judged by how successful are their offspring. In this regard, women get a bad deal. First off, they are stigmatized if they are barren and don’t have kids. Childbearing still seems to be a major consideration for measuring a woman’s goodness or worthiness in society. But then if she does have kids, how many? If she only has one, she is selfish because the one deserves to have a sibling, the logic goes. And if she has too many, whether it is more than two, four, ten, or more, then she’s in trouble with the World Bank or some other international population agency that determines what number is required in our day and age.

The main thing about being a so-called ‘good parent’ seems to be the ability to make sacrifices for your child’s well-being and future. Sacrifice requires selflessness on the part of the parent, and selflessness means caring about another more than one cares about one’s self. Selflessness is what we more often see manifest in motherhood. Frankly, fathers in these times often seem to be skipping the scene once they are asked to make too many or even any sacrifices for the sake of the child and even for the woman who he ensured would give birth to the child he will claim, and possibly even boast about (if the mom does a good job parenting the child).

But sadly, men tend to be the ones who have “better” things to do than parenting. Historically, they do not change nappies, bathe babies, feed them, or put them to bed. All that is considered the work of a mother or house maid. And even though times are changing, and some men are even seen holding their child in shopping malls or on the streets. But that is either because they have been school abroad and have seen that Western men are responding to women’s demands they share in the work of child care. Or else you see men carrying a child when the wife is walking just behind carrying at least one child in her arms, and possibly having another one on her back and another one holding her hand as the family treks from one insecure home to another place who knows where.

As it turns out, the typical male who becomes a deadbeat dad embodies much of what NOT to do to be a good parent. But I contend that there even worse things than one parent not paying the rent or buying the baby food or rarely being around. All those things reflect an insensitivity to what’s required to be a good parent. But there are other factors that one needs to know about what not to do to be a good parent.

Starting from the beginning, one should take care not to listen the critics who complain about various personal things in your life. They may criticize your relationship with your new partner. These are people who could be family members or close friends, but their comments can be poisonous. They may not like the partner’s nationality, height, weight, career, non-career, accent or prospects for providing a solid future financially. All of these criticisms are superficial and materialistic; so what not to do is listen to their ugly remarks. Be careful who you allow to know about that prospective partner because you will be judged, rumor-mongered, and discussed by every Tom, Dick and Harry, every Wanjiku, Atieno, Mweu and Halima that you may know.

So that is first. Be wise about who you let into your listening ear. Their poison can be subtle and sly. It can be ruinous, especially once the prospect of a baby comes into the picture.

Those same critics will have lots to say about pregnancy. For men, their buddies might view the partner as a conquest and get the guy to look as his mate as more of a sexual object than he had originally. If it’s a woman who ‘starts to show’, people will definitely have opinions. But again, don’t listen. If you do, you may suffer for the rest of your life. Why?

Because some so-called friends or family may advise you not to have the kid. Now I am not speaking as one who is against abortion. I will not speak on that topic except to say I believe a woman must be free to make her own choice about what she does with her body. But the critics who didn’t like the partner in the first place may have limitless comments about how you will be destroying your possibilities in life by staying with that person and having their child. They might claim they care about you and know you had other plans, so why not put those plans first. Forget about making the sacrifices required to be a parent. They will tell you it won’t be worth it. You have better things to do.

And okay, once you have a child, the critics may also claim you can still give that baby up. They will remind you that is what orphanages are for. They may tell you the child will be better off in a foster home or with an adoption agency that will place your child with people who really want your baby.

Again, do not listen. Bad parenting begins with listening, even when those speaking to you seem to be benevolent and caring. What are they caring about? Not good parenting for sure.

Let’s be clear that historically, children in Kenya were treasured. They were raised not just by one father and one mother. They were raised by a community so they had multiple aunties and uncles, many family members and friends who felt responsible themselves to look after your child, be it to give them food, to guide them on their way, and to love them as if the children were their own, which back then, they were.

Let’s also be clear that the proliferation of divorce among married couples contributes immensely to bad parenting. One needs to consider deeply whether separation or divorce is the best way to go, both for the parents as well as the kids. For the so-called friends may tell you that the child will be okay when it at least has one parent looking after them. But that is a difficult argument to make. We hear about success stories of single mothers like Kanye West’s mom and Usher’s mom and even Tupac’s mom. They did valiant jobs raising their children and proved that good parenting can be achieved by a single parent. But even in those cases, the parent had to struggle and get help wherever they could.

One might look at all the women who have stayed in a marriage that was utterly unsatisfactory. The spouse was rarely around, was unloving, uncooperative, and most of all, non-communicative. The temptation to see those women as sacrificial lambs who are victimized by their spouse is easy to believe. Her staying in an unhealthy marriage is not necessarily ‘good parenting’ in any case. Why? Because the children can see that their mother is wasting her vast potential being subservient to a nasty man.

But before you decide you don’t want to stick in a marriage because the spouse is ‘useless’ or unloving or not meeting your expectations, I recommend you not judge too swiftly. If domestic violence is involved, then I frankly would help that mama to get out of that relationship and fast. If the spouse is an alcoholic or a druggie or addicted to any obsessive habit, then there may be grounds there for walking away from the mate.

Bottom line, the point is that good parenting may involved many things that can be defined materially. But the real issue is where is the love? Where and how can one be the most loving, first to one’s self but also to one’s offspring. What’s most important in all this is to remember that we make choices. We are the agents of our destinies, whether we feel God is guiding our lives or fate is in charge or Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus Christ is the master of our circumstance. We are still the one who has to listen for the ‘still small voice’ whether one calls it intuition, insight, or God.

Making choices to be a good parent starts way before you actually have a child so it makes sense to plan ahead. Not that you need to figure out who your mate will be before you meet him or her. But most people know whether they want children and want to be excellent parents or whether they really don’t want kids because they have other priorities in their lives.

Becoming a parent ‘by accident’ is the most hazardous thing that a person can do with their lives which is why I am a proponent of quality sex education. I believe in advising young people about the consequences of their messing around sexually. The women and girls are the ones who suffer the most since guys can easily disappear once they are called upon to take responsibility for their lust and their egotistical assertion of manhood on a child, teenager, or adult. So teaching children at the earliest age possible about the goodness of staying safe (meaning not getting pregnant) is something I would advocate.

If you believe bad parenting involves teaching your child about sex, I would disagree. Keeping silent on one of the most important issues of human life and the life of your child is cruel, especially because adults know what could be the worst thing to happen to their son or daughter.

So I am convinced that by learning about a few bad parenting habits, parents can get a better of view of what’s truly involved in good parenting. It all begins and ends with love.

 

TAMING NAIROBIANS’ RAGE ON FILM

 By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted to DN Life&Style 10 May 2021)

Kenyans have just a few more days in which to watch one of the best films recently made about the lives and struggles of ordinary Nairobians.

‘Tales of the Accidental City’ has already been shown at international film festivals in New York, San Francisco, and Cannes. And in July, it will be shown at the Durban International Film Festival.

Currently, it’s being streamed at the Freiburger Film Forum website for free through Sunday, May 16. It’s part of a Festival of Transcultural Cinema so it’s watching just to see this ingenious film written and directed by Maimouna Jallow and starring Wakio Nzenge, Eddie Kimani, Mercy Mutisya, Martina Ayoro, and Tana Kioko with a cameo appearance by Sitawa Nambalie.

The story was originally meant to be a play about four very different Nairobians whose commonality is only that they all have been ordered by the court to attend an Anger Management class. Their ‘crime’ is an inability to control their emotions resulting in damages done to other parties.

But then, the play was transformed into a three-part audio drama by Maimouna once COVID led to the shut down of local theatres, It’s still online and also featured at the Ake Cultural Festival in Ghana.

Now in its third and most captivating iteration, ‘Tales’ has been re-imagined as an ingenious 55-minute film that blends humor with truth-telling to reveal many facets of Nairobi’s underbelly.

What’s more, the Anger Management class itself is conducted on Zoom, so that the ales’ are told on a split screen, as if in real time. We’re able to see Counsellor Rose (played with ironic amiability by Wakio Mzende) as she tries to steer a delightfully raucous session featuring four fractious characters.

The four come from disparate socio-economic backgrounds, their meeting being just as ‘accidental’ as the city that’s contributed to both their woes and outrage. But Counsellor Rose does a valiant job trying to keep order as each takes a turn revealing the hard times and emotional stress that many Nairobians may easily identify with.

For instance, Jacinta (Mercy Mutisya) is a businesswoman (and former house maid) who found her spouse Boni not only had a girlfriend who slept in her bed while she was out. He made off with the cash she had worked hard to save and stash under their mattress. That’s what really set off her rage.

“Teaching him a lesson” is the vengeful motive that both Jacinta and Diana (Martina Ayoro) pursued and which got them both into trouble. But Rose’s message is there are better ways to cope with one’s anger than by violence and revenge. Whether her ‘new age’ techniques work for any of them is left up in the air.

In graphic detail Jacinta tells how she got her CID cousin to track Boni down, corner and cuff him with two more CID cops so she could give him a healthy slap. Diana’s payback to the woman who kidnapped her child in Gikomba was a stone thrown in the woman’s eye, blinding the kidnapper.

Louis’ (Eddie Kimani) crime is technically running over the Mayor’s dog. However, the backstory is more complicated even as it exposes the corruption in his former workplace. Throughout the class, he doesn’t hide his disdain for having to attend Rose’s session. But he is also ‘paid back’ with taunts from Jacinta who calls out this ‘former’ City Councilman for his claim he was only in the Council to clean up corruption in City Hall.

The last storyteller is Sarah (Tana Kioko) who admits she only landed at this zoom session accidentally and wasn’t sent by the court. But her story sums up the pain of poverty and of living as a vulnerable street girl who gets pregnant and gives up the child.

These are stories that rarely if ever get brought to the stage, leave alone featured in Kenya’s fledgling film industry. Yet they give some of the truest pictures of the trauma that Nairobi city life brings to some of the most vulnerable urbanites. The street vender, ex-house maid, and single mother unnerved by Nairobi’s hustling city life all are given voices in Maimouna’s ‘accidental city.’ And while nearly all the ‘tales’ give voice to women who are normally voiceless, even the former City Council man has a story we never hear, that of one ostensibly honest politician who tries but fails to fix a broken political system that’s beyond repair.

 Here’s the link to buy tickets and watch the film during the festival: https://freiburger-filmforum.culturebase.org/en_EN/films/tales-of-the-accidental-city.18796

 

ANGER MANAGEMENT OF KENYANS INSPIRED FILM

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted to BD 10 May 2021)

‘Tales of the Accidental City’ had a short run in Nairobi before it had its world premiere in March this year at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Since then, this so-called ‘experimental’ tragicomedy has been invited for screenings in New York, Cannes, and Accra. And in July, it will be shown at the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa.

Currently, from the Freiburger Film Forum in Germany, the film is streaming as part of a Festival of Transcultural Cinema which we can now watch online for free until Sunday, 16 May.

After that, we will have to wait until late this year to watch Maimouna Jallow’s brilliant film about Nairobians’ love-hate relationship with their once-upon-a time ‘City in the Sun’ which has sadly become a poor people’s wasteland.

Exploring the lives, struggles, and frustrations that many Nairobians may identify with, these ‘Tales’ centre around an Anger Management class that four disparate Kenyans have been sent to by the Court for their anti-social conduct.

Jacinta (Mercy Mutisya) is a former house maid while Diana (Martina Ayoro) is a single mom, and Sarah (Tana Kioko) is a young female street hawker who accidentally landed in their zoom session and found the storytelling too juicy to depart. Then there’s Louis (Eddie Kimani), the former spokesman for Nairobi City Council. Each has a story more outrageous than the next. And all have been charged for their inability to control their emotions, especially their rage that’s been vented violently.

Meanwhile, they all are meant to be tamed and taught tolerance by Counsellor Rose, played with beguiling charm by Wako Nzenge. But it’s a task that this trained therapist cannot easily fulfill, given the depth of the emotional turmoil that all four have gone through.

As traumatic as the script may sound, Maimouna has interwoven comedic moments with tales of love, loss, corruption, and compassion. Having both written and directed the Tales, the former BBC producer and MSF (Doctors without Borders) media consultant has been in the storytelling business ever since she founded Positively African in 2015. Since then, she has organized Re-Imagining the African Folktale Festivals, published contemporary folktales and children’s books, and performed stories with fellow storytellers all over the world.

‘Tales of the Accidental City’ was originally meant to be a play. But when the COVID pandemic shut down all the theatres, she re-imagined it as a three-part audio play that worked well. It was (and still is) online and featured last year at the Ake Art and Book Festival in Nigeria.

But Maimouna saw the script had far more potential than simply being a radio play. These tales said so much about the emotional depths, distress and injustices that a wide cross-section of Nairobians feel and endure, she wanted to put their stories on a wider platform. Thus, the film project evolved with support from the African Cultural Fund and the African Publishing Innovations Fund.

Still working on a shoestring, and under pandemic virtual circumstances, the screenplay now features a split-screened zoom session starring a vibrant team of gifted local actors who prove that zoom can actually be a venue for staging films as well as plays during these days of periodic lockdowns.

The foursome look quite innocent initially. Yet one blinded the eye of a child snatcher; another beat up her spouse, and another ran over the Mayor’s cat as a consequence of his inability to cope with the contradictions of working in a corrupt City Hall. All are culpable, but what’s intriguing about the tales are the backstories of each of these lives which offer insights into the varied frustrations that Nairobians endure every day.

‘Tales of the Accidental City’ is Maimouna’s ingenious creation, but it also evolved as a team effort. It began with a group of talented local writers working around the theme of Nairobi as a city (like others in the region) that wasn’t really planned to serve the interests of Africans. Instead, it grew up ‘accidentally’ during colonial times, so what stories could be told about the city from local Kenyans’ perspectives. That led to the creation of four tantalizing short stories by Maimouna, Sitawa Namwalie, Kevin Mwachiro and Margaret Muthee.

After that, Maimouna blended bits of all four to create a bittersweet story that exposes issues of injustice, inequality, and class at the same time sustaining an edgy air of humor and hope.

Here’s the link to buy tickets and watch the film during the festival: https://freiburger-filmforum.culturebase.org/en_EN/films/tales-of-the-accidental-city.18796

 

 

 

 

MIKE KYALO’S ART HITS A TURNING POINT

                     MIKE KYALO WON AT MANJANO AND AT BONHAM'S IN LONDON

   

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 7 May 2021)

Mike Kyalo is a busy man. His molten plastic painting, ‘Garbage Collectors’ just won third prize at the annual Manjano Nairobi County Art Competition which was recently on display with other winning works at Alliance Francaise.

Kyalo has also got a solo exhibition at the Banana Hill Art Gallery entitled ‘Turning Point’ which will be up through the end of May. Incidentally, he also had his paintings in last weekend’s KMS Affordable Art Show at Nairobi National Museum.

But as proud as he is about all the above, Kyalo just made his first international sale when his painting was sold at Bonham’s Contemporary African Art Auction in London for 402 Euros.

                                                               Kyalo's Garbage Collectors won at Manjano 2021

That’s quite a contrast from when he first started winning art competitions in primary school.

“Art wasn’t on the syllabus, but me and my classmates used to chip in 50 cents each and compete for who could create the best drawing,” says Kyalo who was inspired by local cartoonists like Gado and Madd. He never made a fortune from those contests, but he says he invariably won.

Then at Matungulu Boys Secondary, Kyalo founded the Art Club and was elected club chairman. “And after I painted a portrait of the school’s Principal, we were given an art room of our own,” he says proudly.

He was still in secondary when he first went to the GoDown Art Centre and met Patrick Mukabi who would become his mentor for several years.

                                                                             Kyalo's Road Workers sold at Bonham's

Kyalo says his first big breakthrough was winning a one-month artist residency through the Kenya Arts Diary Foundation in 2012. “I spent a month working at Kuona Trust, which ended with my first solo art exhibition,” he recalls.

Kyalo has been working non-stop ever since. Mukabi was a masterful mentor, and one can see his influence in Kyalo’s art. But from the beginning, he’s been cultivating his own distinctive style which one can see most vividly if they make it to Banana Hill Gallery.

There he has almost 50 paintings coming in all sizes with practically all of them focused on the same theme. And that is ordinary Kenyan working people. It’s a subject that increasing numbers of local artists have picked up on, but none do it in the same distinctive style as Kyalo.

He started off some years back painting boda boda motorcycle taxis, and they are still a popular subject of his work. But his art has branched out into portraits of other kinds of transport.

In his Banana Hills show which he entitles “Turning Point’, he paints all sorts of local transport services apart from automobiles. He paints everything from bicycles, mkokotenis, and two-wheeled trolleys to tow trucks, wheel barrows, and backpack carriers. In every case, the transport person is loaded with luggage, be it sugar cane, bread crates, cabbages, or boxed-up precious cargo which might be cash, company shares or even a carefully-packaged birthday cake.

His subjects are what we might now call ‘essential workers’, those without whom the entire commercial system would practically fall apart. Granted, such workers are not glamorous. But they are definitely hard working. Kyalo’s paintings give them the honor and attention that they deserve.

Asked what he means by ‘Turning Point,’ Kyalo says he rarely had painted women before, only working men. He also has tried his hand at landscape and wildlife. But his forte is his portraits of busy Kenyans, most of whom are laborers on the move delivering everything from rocks in a wheel barrow at a construction site to water, people, and personal luggage, all of which could be loaded onto someone’s bike, back, trolley, or rickshaw-like mkokoteni.

But given that Kyalo is painting Kenyans in the here and now, he also paints a few portraits of families in lockdown. Their situations seem more static. But one can also feel there are important deliberations going on, like how are we going to cope when our breadwinners don’t have work during COVID?

Where one will be able to see another ‘turning point’ in Kyalo’s art is at Alliance Francaise. There is where his first ‘plastic painting’ won for its stunning approach to up-cycyling plastic trash.

“I would boil the plastics in three separate sufuria,” says Kyalo. “One for each primary color, red, blue, and yellow. Then I would paint with the hot [liquified[ plastic,” he explains.

Taking his art to another level with this more environmentally-conscious approach is one more turning point we can see in the award-winning work of Mike Kyalo.

OPEN AIR AFFORDABLE ART EARNS MILLIONS

                                                                       IT'S AFFORDABLE

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 7 May 2021)

Rather than scale back on the number and kind of art exhibition that they’ve normally had in the past, the Kenya Museum Society chose to hold two Affordable Art shows during this financial year, not just one.

“The first one was held in October [2020] when we had nearly 500 people attend during the three-day exhibition,” says the Show’s coordinator, Dr. Marla Stone. The second transpired this past weekend.

“But having two shows in a year is definitely a one-off event. We will go back to having just one annual show after this,” she tells DN Life and Style.

                          By Gaia (same image also seen in Kenya Arts Diary 2019 by Lee Gitare

Both the artists and the audiences were delighted to have the opportunity to see and sell affordable Kenyan art out in the open air of Nairobi National Museum’s courtyard.

But things were very different, logistically speaking, this year. “We of course followed the Ministry of Health protocols,” says KMS chairperson Patricia Jentz. “That meant we had to scale everything down according to social distancing guidelines and masks. It also meant that where we previously had up to 500 artworks in a show, this year’s was nearly half that size [or 223],” she adds.

The biggest change in the Affordable Art Show this time round is that rather than KMS putting out an open call to all artists to bring their art for vetting and possible inclusion in the exhibition, the 139 artists whose paintings were on display had specifically been invited.

                                                                                        Moses

“We invited only those artists who had participated in [affordable art] shows in the past, and those whose art had specifically sold,” says Dr. Stone who admits that KMS like most businesses worldwide has been hit hard economically by the pandemic.

“KMS exists specifically to support the Museum, but currently, we need to raise funds just so we can pay our staff,” she adds.

Yet local artists feel just as grateful to have a public venue in which to display and ideally sell their art. Granted, some artists don’t like the constraint that KMS puts on sales since no one can sell their work for more than Sh99,999.

“We also advise artists if they’d like to sell their work, to keep their prices moderate. But they see that for themselves,” Dr Stone adds.

This year, only one artist put a price tag of Sh95,000 on her painting. At the same time, there were other artists who had previously sold their work for several hundred thousand shillings but came down dramatically price-wise.

Keeping their price tags down proved to be effective in seeing 20 percent of the exhibition sold on the opening Friday afternoon, April 30^th.

“We made more than Sh1.5 million that first day, and that was with an audience reduced by the COVID protocols,” says Dr. Stone who explained the open day only ran from 3pm to 6pm in one-hour intervals.

“We allowed only 40 people in per hour, and they too attended by invitation only,” she adds. Saturday and Sunday were open days so that people could come in at their leisure and walk around the courtyard where every wall was filled with art.

“We couldn’t have [standing] sculptures this year. But if an artwork could be hung, it was included,” she notes, alluding to metal works by artists like Alex Wainaina and Evans Ngure.

Otherwise, the paintings were grouped according to animals, people, specifically women, the environment, and miscellaneous pieces. The curatorial work was done by Dr. Stone and Wendy Karmali of KMS together with Lydia Galavu, art curator of the Nairobi Museum.

With KMS members being all volunteers, they each have their reasons for sticking with the Society and the Affordable Art show. For Dr Stone, she says she has two main reasons for continuing to serve as the show’s coordinator. One is because the stress on ‘affordability’ is meant to encourage Kenyans to come see and buy the art of their fellow Kenyans. “It’s also to let them see you don’t need to be a millionaire to own Kenyan art,” she says.

The other reason she enjoys spending her time and effort on the show is because it’s meant to give young, largely unknown local artists a chance to expose their work to a wider audience.

“This year we couldn’t do that because we had to meet Ministry of Health’s requirements of identifying who will be in the show. But hopefully, next year we’ll be able to open it up to all young Kenyan artists as we have always done before.”

DESPITE LOCKDOWN, ARTISTS EXHIBIT ALL OVER TOWN

     ONE OFF, CIRCLE ART, ALLIANCE FRANCAISE AND MANJANO WINS IN NAIROBI

                                                                                Matatu by Dennis Muraguuri

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 7 May 2021)

COVID protocols have compelled most art centres in Nairobi to either shut down or go about their business quietly, without attracting much attention.

Yet there have been several outstanding group exhibitions underway in part of April and May that deserve wider recognition. Just one is ongoing, that of ‘Contemporary Reflections’ at One Off Gallery. Meanwhile, the works of the winners and finalists in the Manjano Art Competition were on display until early this week at Alliance Francaise.

                                                                                     Mike Kyalo's Garbage Collectors

 And the exhibition of 16 Ethiopian artists at Circle Art Gallery also just came down in Lavington.

Fortunately, galleries have gotten much better at putting their exhibitions online so one can still see the artworks from the ‘Addis Contemporary Six Years On’ show at the Circle Art website. One can also catch a portion of the eight Kenyan artists’ works in ‘Contemporary Reflections’ at the OneOff website.

                                                                                   Meron Hailu"s Landscape

Not so with Manjano which had none of even the winning artworks on the website which is too bad. I was glad to see the show at Alliance Francaise just before it closed, although only the more ‘established’ artists were on display, not the category of students. Artworks by the three winning artists were hung, although there was no catalogue or indication of who they were (apart from reading every painting’s caption to figure it out).

Fortunately, word had already gone round that Eddie Ochieng won the first prize of Sh150,000, while Benson Gicharu was the first runner up winning Sh75,000 and the second runner up, Mike Kyalo was awarded Sh37,500.

                                                                            Dickson Nedia's Black Beauties

There were many original pieces in Manjano this year, including an installation by Kevo Stero paying homage to his dear friend and fellow member of Maasai Mbili Artists Collective, known as Tola. The other installation that stood out included six colorfully painted papier mache busts of beautiful women by Dickson Nedia Were. The women all looked like chic young African beauties with each bust perched on a metal pole as if each was an elegant trophy.

The other exhibition that just came down at Circle Art was a dazzling show curated by Mifta Zeleke who had brought an entirely different selection of artists’ works to Circle six years ago. I can’t compare the two shows. But what I must say is that these works exuded an air of aesthetic confidence, revealed in the artists’ use of color, their bold brush strokes, diverse subject matter, and even their use of various mixed media.

                                                                                  David Thuku's Papercut art

One might not be surprised to find contemporary Ethiopian art being so advanced, given the country has a history of religious painting that goes back centuries. Artists also had government patronage from the time of Menelik in the 19^th century. And with 20^th century Ethiopians going abroad and returning home, the country has had fine art schools since the 1950s.

Personally, I found the two women artists in the exhibition most appealing. Selome Muleta painted young women veiled in green leafy curtains while Meron Hailu created landscapes out of colorful yarns and textiles. But there were many more stunning works in the show, such as Eyasu Tilayeneh’s ‘Reputations of Color’ and Amare Seifu’s Untitled black and white line game.

                                                                         Eyasu Tilayeneh's Reputation of Colors

Meanwhile, at One Off Gallery, the eight Kenyans had also been busy during the lockdown, each delving more deeply into the subjects, styles, and techniques they are best known for. For instance, Dennis Muraguri is renowned for his matatu woodcut prints, but the one at One Off has a different face, hue and monumentality to it. David Thuku’s paper cut paintings have also gotten more colorful and narrative, while Alan Kioko’s ‘Monday Blues’ are more cartoonish satiric than I had known him to be.

But I have to say, the lockdown has given several artists the opportunity to discover more of their latent creative resources, like Justus Kyalo whose abstract acrylics on canvas have a muted tonality suggestive of a lovely sunrise and Xavier Verhoest (a Kenya resident) also created an immortal Baobab tree that feels timeless and fruitful.

                                                                              Elias Mung'ora's Cattle in the City

Anthony Wanjau is the only sculptor in the show, but he doesn’t disappoint with his classic theme of Mother and child. Wanjohi Maina is still focused on street venders. But just as the venders are ever changing in their sales items, so Wanjohi manages to keep up with their newest street promotions, like the sale of children’s guitars. And Elias Mung’ora, who is one of the rising stars on the local arts scene (and who recently joined the OneOff clan of artists) also shared Nairobi street scenes, his most unusual being his diptych portrait of Cattle grazing in the City.