NURU BAHATI: Portrait Artist Par Excellence

http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Nuru+Bahati+Artist+who+has+popularised++biro+portraits+/-/1248928/1963886/-/vvmh7g/-/index.html//BIRO ART THAT’S NOT CHILD’S PLAY BY Margaretta wa Gacheru Nuru Bahati Shukrani admits he started doing biro art in secondary school in Mombasa. “Our art teacher, Mrs Otieno, assigned us a school project to showcase our national heroes by drawing them with biro pens,” said Bahati who’s been specializing in Biro Art ever since.

“That was in 1998, and my biro drawings were so successful, they earned me awards in several art competitions at the Coast, including those in school and two at the Reef Hotel in 1999 and 2000,” added the artist who came to Nairobi from the Coast to attend Buru Buru Institute of Fine Art in 2003 and has been in the capital city ever since.

Having majored in painting and drawing, Bahati’s time at BIFA simply confirmed something he already knew, which was that he had a special talent for drawing life-like biro portraits. They’re portraits drawn in the most common biro colours—black, blue, red and occasionally pink and green; but it’s the delicate realism of his drawings that has earned him an ever-expanding client base. “I don’t put a price tag on my art,” said Bahati who trusts that people will pay him according to both the value of his work and the client’s capacity to pay. “My clients also know i take a philanthropic approach to my art,” he said. “I give 10 per cent to fellow artists who may be stuck or in need of a bail out for some reason. Then i give another 40 per cent to various orphanages.”

That means he only takes home half of what his clients care to give him, but Bahati says his philanthropic approach to his art reflects a wider vision of how he values contemporary Kenyan art. “To me, art isn’t merely for decoration. I see it as part of our heritage and i believe Kenyans are increasingly coming to see it that way too.” Bahati’s commitment to creating and promoting art that is by, for and about Kenyans takes on tangible form in the label he established several years ago called ‘Mkenya’. “Basically i launched Mkenya in order to sensitize my fellow Kenyans through art of all kinds to take pride in their identity as Kenyans,” he said.

Acknowledging that “everything about my life has to do with art,” Bahati isn’t just an artist whose main medium in the biro pen, although he’s definitely an advocate for the ink pen, be it a Bic, Speedo, ballpoint or fountain pen. He also enjoys helping other artists, be they poets, painters, graphic novelists, sculptors or storytellers to plan and execute their public events. Sometimes he’ll serve as their master of ceremonies as he did recently for the three ceramicists, Caroline Khakula, Emily Nyabere and Lilian Barongo who call themselves the House of Nubia and had an exhibition at the United Nations Recreation Centre. On other occasions, he’ll take on larger tasks as he did last year when he worked closely with the graffiti artist Swift Elegwa to give the Paa ya Paa Art Centre an artistic ‘uplift’ by helping to paint PYP’s long mabati fence in colourful imagery and organic graffiti. He does some his best work for fellow artists working behind the scenes as he did last week, assisting visual artist Sammy Lutaye with the organization of his one-man exhibition ‘Different Strokes II’ which is currently up at the Michael Joseph Centre. He played a comparable role assisting the creative team of Ihara Kihara and Maurice Odede in the production of their first graphic novel, The Adventure of Lwanda Magere, published by African Comics (Kenya). One of the high points of Bahati’s artistic career came when he took part in the Heart of Art exhibition and silent auction, organized by Zihan Kassam and Joy Mboya with support from Hamed Ehsani, Managing Director of the Village Market. It was a show in which he and more than a dozen Kenyan artists donated their artwork to assist hunger-stricken communities in Northern Kenya. The other ‘worthy cause’ that Bahati has plenty of time for is the poets, particularly those who participate in the open mic and forum currently happening every Friday afternoon at PAWA254 called ‘Fatuma’s Voice.’ Fatuma has been compared to Wanjiku, the ‘every woman’ [wananchi] figure who’s been popularized by Gado. But according to Bahati, the Kenyan poets (including himself) who take part in Fatuma’s Voice perform poetry aimed at raising awareness about current social issues and promote positive change. “People come to Fatuma’s Voice to share their problems and seek solutions. In the process they channel their emotions through poetry.” Bahati’s biro portraits start from KSh10,000, but he says the price is always negotiable.

OLIVER LITONDO: FROM HOLLYWOOD WITH LOVE.//

http://www.nation.co.ke/life+style/DN2/Oliver+Litondo+From+Hollywood+with+goodies/-/957860/1961216/-/w9rdxcz/-/index.html. // / AWARD WINNING KENYAN ACTOR COMES HOME FROM HOLLYWOOD/// By Margaretta wa Gacheru. Published in Daily Nation. 21 August 2013 in DN2// Oliver Litondo is easily the best known Kenyan in Hollywood. Having won countless accolades internationally (and several here at home) for his performance in the BBC-US film The First Grader (playing the part of Kimani Ng’an’a Maruge, the octogenarian who took President Kibaki at his word when he promised of free primary education for al

One was a nomination for ‘Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture’ at the 43rd NAACP Image Awards, the other was the Best Actor’s award in the category ‘Movies for Grownups’ from the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons). “Competing for the same [AARP] award were George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Eddie Murphy, but it was Oliver who won!” said Litondo’s wife Beldina who like her husband earned her first degree in Communications from American universities. His are from University of Iowa and Harvard University’s Loeb Center for Performing Arts, hers from University of Tennessee. Both are back in Kenya briefly before they return to the States where Oliver will be making his next film and she’ll go back to work in Washington, DC. Litondo could be just as proud of the Best Actor awards that he received at international film festivals held in Milan, Durban and Nairobi; and glad to share in the film’s winning ‘Audience Awards’ in Doha, Durban and Toronto with fellow cast members like Naomi Harris (who was recently named the latest ‘007’ Bond beauty). And after all these years, he must feel good about winning the Kalasha Lifetime Achievement Award, especially as he has worked in the Kenya media since the late Sixties when he got his first job as editor of the East African Journal. After that, he worked for everyone from Voice of Kenya radio and TV to KTN, Citizen, Nation and Standard to Deutsche Welle, Voice of America and BBC. But he certainly got special satisfaction being called to Hollywood by the NAACP and AARP after personally working in film with such stars as Sidney Poitier, Michael Caine, James Earl Jones, Brian Dennehy, Isabelle Rossellini and Poppy Montgomery. Yet Litondo nearly didn’t make it to Hollywood. In fact, if he hadn’t been on his way to another film shoot, this one for Italian television, (the hit mini-series, Orzowei, il figlio della Savana) he thinks he probably would have accompanied his boss, JM Kariuki to the Nairobi Hilton Hotel on the day JM got picked by hit-men and never lived to tell the tale. Litondo had met JM in 1970, soon after his return from work and studies in the US and Sweden (where he’d staged his own play, Happy Faces at Stockholm National Theatre). They hit it off and JM invited him to become his press secretary. “We were quite close and that day I’d met him just as he was on his way to the Hilton to meet someone. If i hadn’t been on my way to Wilson Airport, I probably would have gone with him,” recalled Litondo. If he had, he said he might not be here today. “They might have taken me along with JM,” he quipped. On the other hand, if he had, JM might be here today. The other close call came five years later in 1980 when Litondo was working with Gordon Parks, Jr. (creator of the film ‘SuperFly’) on the film The Bushtrackers. “I was meant to be on the plane that exploded at Wilson Airport in which all seven cast and crew of the film perished, including Gordon,” he said, recalling that he and his wife had a tiff that morning. “She delayed my departure from my house, arguing that i need not go to the Mara that day,” Whether hers was a premonition or mere petulance on her part, we’ll never know. All he knows is that losing Parks was a major loss not only to himself (as the African American filmmaker was a personal friend as well as his director and mentor) but to Kenya as well. “Gordon had wanted to build his film empire from Kenya. He said he wanted to bring Hollywood here to this country.” The film was ultimately completed by its producer Gary Streiker. It was even launched by the then Vice President Mwai Kibaki at the Kenya Cinema, and won an award at Cannes that year. “But it never got the exposure it would have if Gordon had lived,” the actor added. Litondo went on to make several more Hollywood films; however they were mainly the kind that played on the stereotypes associated with Africa. There was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (1984), The Lion of Africa with Brian Dennehy (1988), and The Ivory Hunters (1990) with James Earl Jones and Isabelle Rossallini. During the 1990s, when the political climate was harsh and a corrupt Kenya government had placed so many restrictions and taxes on film companies that few of them wanted to come to Kenya, Litondo did a lot of media freelance work. He anchored and did news reporting for KTN as well as serving as the station’s marketing manager. And in 2001 he went to work for Royal Media (Citizen Radio and TV) as its Marketing Manager, but it was a period in Kenya when times were especially tough for anyone trying to tell the truth through the media. But even as he understood his employer was having hard times, after waiting for a year to be paid, Litondo quit and left town. He went back home to Shikunga village, not far from Kakamega town, and started a new life for himself, taking on the role of full-time farmer. The Shikunga people welcomed him home. They were proud of the sacrifices they had made in the early Sixties after he’d been accepted at University of Iowa but had no means to fly there. “This was years before anyone had heard of ‘Harambee’ but the people got together nonetheless and raised funds for my tuition,” Litondo said, adding that one of his former teachers from Kakamega High who was studying for his doctorate in the States also assisted him to make his way to Iowa. Now that he had returned home, Litondo said he might have remained in rural areas where he had come to enjoy keeping cows, chicken and pigs and growing maize, beans, fruits and vegetables. “If it hadn’t been for my old friend Lenny Juma, I might still be there,” he said. Litondo had heard that someone in Nairobi was looking for him, but not until he got a call from Juma, one of Kenya’s most respected and long-standing talent scouts, did he take the message seriously. “Lenny told me i was wanted right away to audition for a new film, and they would be sending me airfare,” recalled Litondo who ended up taking an overnight bus as he wouldn’t have gotten to Nairobi in time otherwise. Taken straight from the bus station to the film studios at Ngong Racetrack, Litondo was introduced to the British film director Justin Chatwick who handed him a script and asked him to take a few minutes to read through a specific section of it. Shortly thereafter he was doing a dialogue, speaking Maruge’s lines with an actress he didn’t know. “Chatwick made no comment on what we had done, but he did tell me to take the script home, study it and then come back the following day, which I did.” At the end of that second reading, Chatwick told him quietly that he had the part. He would be playing Maruge. Chatwick had been looking for the right person to play Maruge for weeks. He’d looked among African American actors in the States. He then went to the UK and again searched for someone who’d fit the role perfectly. He even went to South Africa but to no avail. Why it took Chatwick so long to look in Kenya for his man is a mystery. He was just fortunate to meet Lenny Juma who had worked with Litondo, who was already making films like Mlevi and Membo, way back in the late Sixties. The rest of the story is history as they say. It took them six weeks to shoot the film which is all about an old man’s struggle to learn how to read and write, set against the background of Kenya’s freedom struggle. As soon as the film was shot, Litondo went back to Shikunga to his farm, but many times he was called to come promote the film at film festivals, either in Canada, Qatar, Italy, UK, US or South Africa. The only event he didn’t make was the American premiere of the film in Washington, DC when the National Geographic took charge of its distribution. He had problems getting admission into the US. It took a phone call from the then Kenyan ambassador to the US, Elkanah Odembo, to the American consul in Nairobi to finally get permission to return to that country. “I missed the [Washington] DC premiere of the film but fortunately, i arrived in time for the [February 2012] awards ceremonies hosted by AARP and NAACP both in Hollywood. Since shooting The First Grader, Litondo hasn’t been in want of work. First he worked on TV film series called Changes in the US; then he acted in The Rogue Priest back in Kenya about the life and death of the Catholic priest, Father Kaiser. Then once he received his Best Actor award from AARP he went straight from California to Philadelphia where he was in another film entitled North Bend, scheduled to come out later this year. Following Philly, he was called to the UK by a film company that makes movies for charities. The Truth about Stanley, (in which Litondo plays Stanley) was made specifically to highlight the problem of homelessness in the UK. It was a short film, only 27 minutes, but it’s long enough for Litondo to give a deeply moving performance playing a homeless old man who befriends a 14 year old run-away. They become close and Stanley sits all day telling the boy stories about his life. The boy figures out the stories are mostly make-believes and calls out the old man for telling lies. Stanley is crushed by the boy’s challenge and doesn’t live long after that. The film’s available on YouTube, but at the launch of the film, it was the Duchess of Kent who gave the royal stamp to the event. After that, Litondo even did a voice-over for EcoNet in South Africa. Most recently, Litondo’s work on the popular CBS ‘prime time’ Sunday night TV series, Unforgettable, was aired this past weekend on American television. In the hour-long show in which Litondo is a special guest actor, he plays Dr Dimko, a West African human rights activist who has been invited to New York to receive an award from a major human right group, based in the States. The NYPD has detected a plot hatched by the Big Man back home to hire a paid assassin to kill Dimka as he’s giving his thank you speech. He says the ceremony will go on since he’s gotten death threats in the past and he’s not afraid. Fortunately, the quick-thinking NYPD cops manage to curtail the killer before she succeeds in bumping off Dimko, but the detective thriller has offered the American and international audiences yet another chance to see Oliver Litondo in action doing Kenya proud. So while our athletes are busy making their mark in Moscow and at marathons all around the world, we may also boast a bit about another Kenyan who is breaking into the global media scene. It’s been a long road for Oliver Litondo, but he clearly hasn’t reached the road’s end. In fact, it could very well be that at 65, his lifetime achievements story has many more chapters to unfold. He’s got his own screenplays to produce, films in the pipeline and a Kenyan film and theatre community that he says he’s happy to mentor if asked.

Cajeton Boy's gripping play BACKLASH at Phoenix Theatre

BACKLASH, A BRILLIANT REMINDER AIDS IS A KILLER// BY margaretta wa gacheru. Published in Saturday Nation. Aug 17.13// Phoenix Players’ new General Manager David Opondoe was right when he observed there couldn’t be a better way to celebrate 30 years with Phoenix and 50 years with an independent Kenya than to stage a show scripted by one of the country’s leading playwrights Cajeton Boy.

Backlash is an enigmatic name of a play Cajeton wrote sometime back when the AIDS pandemic was major news and Muijiza Players were supporting young talents like him to write creatively about the problem. The intent was to generate public awareness and enlighten Kenyans as to the dire consequences of getting infected with AIDS. The beauty of Boy’s script is that he’s not heavy handed or preachy about the pandemic. On the contrary, AIDS isn’t even mentioned until the last few minutes of the play, but the context in which it’s revealed is stunning, even to us who have been familiar with the AIDS story for many years. On the surface of things, Backlash seems to be about a domineering mother in law (Victoria Githora) who’s a serious control freak. We quickly learn she not only controls her husband (David Opondoe) and the family company. She also intends to take complete charge of her son Toby (Nick Ndeda), his new wife Kesha (Fridah Muhindi) and their brand new baby boy whom the grandmother insists on naming Noel after her dead (and formerly favoured) son. Kesha also insists on naming her own child. It’s one of the few ways she can resist the mother in law’s mania for power. As the show opens, we already can see Kesha’s being put through hell by an in law who pays no heed to what other people want or think. Mother (as she insists on being called) has got her own agenda and Kesha is only of value as a baby making machine to provide the family with an heir. As the show opens, Kesha has just given birth but her new husband Toby is nowhere to be found. Nor is he on hand to take sides with his new wife against his mother who’s a major bully. ‘Mother’ is also one of the ugliest creatures that I’ve seen on the Nairobi stage in quite some time. But this is to the actor’s credit as she’s meant to be despicable. My only problem with Mother is that she lacks any sort of subtlety which makes her something of a cardboard caricature of the mother in law stereotype. Nonetheless, her domineering ways effectively intimate everyone, all except Kesha, who resists as best she can. Friday Muhindi gives a sensitive performance of Kesha as she refuses to accept being at Mother’s mercy. She’s fallen in love with Toby despite their getting hooked up on a ‘blind date’ and in spite of Mother insisting on examining whether Kesha is a virgin or not. Cajeton’s clever use of flashback scenes (directed well by Eugene Oyoo) enables us to discover key elements of the wider plot. They also serve to effectively unveil a slew of hidden motives, particularly the ones related to why Toby’s parents were so keen on their only son getting married and having a baby before the two were wed. We also learn there’s some sort of sick, twisted logic to the mad Mother’s reasoning. Her sinister schemes all boil down to a fixation for blood and for ensuring there’s an heir to carry on the family name. The plan of Toby’s parents is almost foiled however once they learn the bitter truth about their son, a truth I won’t relate. It leads to their threatening to disinherit Toby unless he follows through with their inhuman scheme which directly involves an unsuspecting Kesha. The fact that Toby goes along with his parents’ plot at the expense of his wife and brand new baby boy is the sort of low blow that Kesha can’t cope with once it’s revealed to her. Don’t worry. i won’t spoil your appreciation of Backlash by telling you how it ends. Suffice it to say, Cajeton intended for viewers to learn large lessons from his play. Phoenix’s professional cast make Backlash one of the most memorable shows that i have seen all year. It also clarifies how special Cajeton is as a seriously gifted playwright whose scripts deserve to be produced more consistently on the Kenyan stage. This weekend, don’t forget to make it to Alliance Francaise to see Hearts of Art’s premiere performance of Walter Sitati’s new play entitled “What is your Price?’ which most certainly has to do with corruption in Kenyan politics and family life as well. Also, at Kenya National Theatre, Festival of the Creative Arts has brought back the madcap comedy Birthday Suite this weekend.

VEVE, new Kenyan Action Thriller FILM from the Producers of NAIROBI HALF LIFE

Veve: another Kenyan action thriller on the way/// Posted on May 16, 2013/// Story By Margaretta wa Gacheru// Veve is the fourth film project of the production team that made Nairobi Half Life, Soul Boy, and Something Necessary. One Fine Day Film (OFDF) and Ginger Ink (GI) are still keen on developing a thriving film industry in Kenya, including local casts and crews that can measure up to international standards. “And the best way to do that is by making more films while training Kenyan filmmakers in the process,” said Sirika Hemi Lakhani, the managing director of OFDF, the non-profit company started by award-winning German filmmaker, Tom Tryker, and his wife, Marie. It is a film that is already generating quite a buzz since many believe that the screenplay by Natasha Likimani has the potential to become as big a hit as Nairobi Half Life, even bigger. “Veve, (which is a sheng term for miraa), has all the ingredients for success,” said Rukenya Njiru, one of the production unit trainees on the set. “It’s an action thriller with just enough romance and political intrigue thrown in to make it even spicier and juicier than any of the previous (OFDF/GI) films.” What adds to the appeal of Veve, which is still in the early stages of production, are the many fresh new faces that will be seen on screen when it come out next year, including Emo Rugene, Adam Peeves, and Victor Munyua, all of whom have leading roles in the film yet come from various backgrounds. Rugene is a fashion designer and model, Peeves just completed his studies at Hillcrest school, and Munyua is a law student at the University of Nairobi. Yet their youth is balanced by the experience of seasoned film, TV, and Internet actors like Conrad Makeni, Lizz Njagah, and Gerald Langiri. At the core of Veve is one of Kenya’s biggest cash crop and the question of who will control its trade. At the outset of the film, it is the local member of Parliament, Amos Munene (Lowry Odhiambo), who has the upper hand, but there are other interested parties who are threatening the MP’s monopoly control on the trade. There is a reckless young white Kenyan called Cliff, a big-money Somali trader, and the biggest miraa farmer in Meru who wants a more equitable return on the sale of his crop. When the MP feels these competing forces closing in on him, he makes a malicious decision which trigger a stunning series of events that I will not give away. Suffice it to say that the MP has enemies, including Kenzo (Emo Rugene), who has a personal grudge against Munene that leads him to get his revenge in ways I, again, will not reveal. Promising to be another award-winner for One Fine Day Film and Ginger Ink, Veve is definitely a Kenyan film to look forward to. margacheru@gmail.com

CHINESE QI LIN upgrading Kenyan Polytechnics

. Colleges facelift shifts focus to technical skills//// BY MARGARETTA WA GACHERU Published in Daily Nation: The Springboard March 11, 2013//// In the past few months, President Mwai Kibaki has launched 15 new public universities, all with a view to achieving the goal set in Vision 2030. Yet the fact that all the 15 came into being as a result of upgrading colleges and polytechnics has generated mixed feelings among a number of educationists and education-loving Kenyans. Some have questioned the wisdom of such a rapid shift at the institutional level. They wonder whether there will be sufficient faculty to teach these new burgeoning learning institutions. But numbers are not the only issue being raised. Will the quality of education be diluted, now that the focus seems to be more on quantity than quality? The other question being asked relates not so much to quality as to the learning experience. Do Kenyans need more academic learning, which is what universities normally offer, or does the country need more technically qualified youth equipped with practical skills — the sort that were previously being taught at the polytechnics and colleges that are now part of the university system? Some critics will say that question is a no-brainer since universities tend to turn out prospective white collar workers, while Kenya’s more urgent need is a technically-skilled workforce equipped to start up their own small businesses. Fortunately, the Ministry of Higher Education has not forgotten about vocational training for Kenyans despite the obsession with expansion of the university system. A whole slew of new vocational training institutes are being established through an agreement signed by the governments of Kenya and China to upgrade rural youth polytechnics to the rank of technical training institutes (TTI). From Bungoma, Kakamega, and Kisii to Meru, Machakos, Muranga, and the Rift Valley, the Kenya-China Technical Vocational Education Training programme (TVET) has been equipping rural polytechnics with machines and trainers contracted through the Chinese firm, Avic International — the same engineering company that is constructing the new Terminal Four at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi and supplying fire-fighting equipment to the National Youth Service. “So far, we’ve been helping the ministry to establish 10 new technical training centres all across Kenya,” says Qi Lin, the project manager, who has just completed the first phase of training Kenyan instructors in operating machinery brought in from China. The trainee instructors came from 10 technical training institutes, nine of which were recently upgraded from youth polytechnics. They include Bushangala TTI and Shamberere TTI in Kakamega County, Kisiwa TTI and Matili TTI in Bungoma County, Wote TTI in Machakos, Kirua TTI in Meru, Keroka TTI in Kisii, Murang’a TTI, and Rift Valley Institute of Science and Technology in Nakuru. “Once we have installed all the machines and trained the Kenyan instructors, we’ll move on to Phase Two of the project, where we will conduct similar installation and training in 40 new vocational training institutes,” adds Lin, who has been in Kenya since 2010, overseeing the $20 million (about Sh1.7 billion) project. Having hit the ground running since arrival, Lin has clocked thousands of kilometres travelling by road to vet and select 10 local polytechnics (out of the 20 suggested by the Ministry of Higher Education) and 24 best qualified instructors in the fields of mechanical and electrical engineering to benefit from the project. The instructors are trained both in China and Kenya on how to operate the new machines. It is a major technology transfer project and the 28-year-old aeronautical engineer has overseen the importation and installation of 153 container-loads of three different types of machines meant not only for the training of qualified Kenyan technicians, but also to upgrade Kenya’s manufacturing sector. A portion of the machines have already filled electrical and electronic labs. Others are still being installed in mechanical engineering departments//// A whole slew of new vocational training institutes are being established through an agreement signed by the governments of Kenya and China Colleges facelift shifts focus to technical skills SPECIAL REPORT So far, we’ve been helping the ministry to establish 10 new technical training centres all across Kenya Qi Lin, the project manager of the Kenya- China rural polytechnics upgrade// CONTINUED ON PAGE 2

ELIMO NJAU. PIONEERING EAST AFRICAN PAINTER-SCULPTOR

Elimo's story was published last December, but as i didnt get a chance to put his story here and I 'lost' my memory stick that held this story, i felt i had to put it online for posterity/// http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Long-walk-for-Elimo-the-artist-without-borders/-/539444/1637108/-/owch1xz/-/index.html.//// Long walk for Elimo, the artist without borders/////Published Decemb er 8, 2012 in Business Daily/// Elimo Njau, a sculptor, painter, art teacher and founder of Paa ya Paa Arts Centre. Photo/MARGARETTA WA GACHERU/// In Summary: Mr Njau taught at Makerere University and the University of Dar-es-Salaam before he came to Kenya in the late fifties. He launched Kenya’s first indigenous African art centre, Paa ya Paa, which still stands today, an icon and evidence that expatriates did not “discover”, invent or construct East African art. He turned 80 last August but Elimo Njau is still going strong. He sprints around his compound at Paa ya Paa Arts Centre like a jack rabbit, enthused over life and the idea of seeing art in everything he does. Mr Njau’s creativity isn’t confined to canvas or clay, media he taught at Makerere University and the University of Dar-es-Salaam before he came to Kenya in the late fifties, commissioned to cover the Fort Hall (Murang’a) Anglican Church walls with indigenous Christian iconography. Mr Njau’s artistry extends all the way from Paa ya Paa Lane (newly named shortly before graffiti artists Swift Elegwa and Lionel Njuguna volunteered to cover his mabati front fence with brilliant colours and designs) to his herb garden from which he daily draws lemon grass, mint and other assorted herbs to make his special tea, just as his father Filipo did before him.//// Humble beginnings: The big difference between him and his father is that his father’s herb garden was on the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro while Mr Njau’s is on the outskirts of Nairobi, just off Kiambu road at Ridgeways. In all humility, Mr Njau takes a touch of pride in proclaiming he’s still a subsistence farmer, as his family had been before him. “We never went hungry then, nor do we now,” says he, referring to himself and his African American wife Phillda, who has been with him since the early 1970s, first as a professional photographer and volunteer from the Presbyterian Church who was keen to do research on Mr Njau’s Christian art. Subsequently, she became his wife and now serves as the Paa ya Paa gallery’s archivist, curator and tour guide, taking visitors all around their three-acre compound. Their Ridgeways home-cum-art centre was acquired from the Oxford University Press after the rents shot sky high on Koinange Street where Paa ya Paa first resided. It served as the hub of cultural activity in the second half of the 1960s when it was frequented by the likes of Okot p Bitek, Philip Ochieng, James Ngugi (now Ngugi wa Thiong’o) and Hilary Ng’weno among other Nairobi notables. Having endured decades of benign neglect even as the local Nairobi art world got inundated with Asian shopkeepers and expatriates from Europe and America who sought to make a quick buck off the art of “naïve” Africans, Mr Njau has seen countless artists, who once worked at Paa ya Paa get whisked off and subsequently “discovered” by expatriates out to seize control of the fledging field of East African art. Fortunately, Mr Njau could never be classified as a fledgling or a naïve novice having come from Makerere’s prestigious Margaret Trowell School of Fine Art in Uganda where Trowel herself recommended the 24-year-old to paint the Murang’a murals back in 1958. He returned to Uganda but came back to Kenya in the early 1960s, first to work as an assistant curator to Sir Mervin Sorsbie of Sorsbie Gallery and then, collaborating with a brilliant team of five other poets (Feroze Nowrojee, Jonathan Kariara, Terry Hirst, James Kangwana and Charles Lewis), he launched Kenya’s first indigenous African art centre, Paa ya Paa, which still stands today, an icon and evidence that expatriates did not “discover”, invent or construct East African art. Yet his esteemed background has been as much a blessing as a curse for Mr Njau, whose artistic initiatives have elicited envy, jealousy and malice from various colonial and neocolonial corners, since his very existence serves to debunk the myth that expatriates fully dominate the Kenyan art world. “If Elimo had lived in another country, where the arts were valued and understood, he’d be a rich man today,” said one Kenyan art lover. Yet Mr Njau refutes the notion that he is not rich. “I am rich in spirit; I’m surrounded by beauty and natural artistry,” he says pointing to Paa ya Paa’s lush green garden filled with banana clusters and avocado and eucalyptus trees. “You know it was the coloniser who came here and planted eucalyptus trees because the land was swampy and the trees’ roots sucked up the water and then shot sky high, standing taller than all the indigenous trees. “But whenever storms came and winds blew, it was always the eucalyptus trees that were the first to fall, since their roots are shallow and easily uprooted,” said Mr Njau, who remains a poet-philosopher who uses nature as an obvious metaphor for the conditions in Kenya’s art world. Like exotic trees that seem to do so well while the sun is shining but are short-lived when times get tough, Mr Njau has seen the expatriates come and go, depending on which way the winds blow. Living proof that the Kenyan art world wasn’t born yesterday, he is fully aware the eucalyptus are still around claiming to control most if not all of the local art world. But he finds solace among mainly the young artists who come faithfully to Paa ya Paa to be mentored by the master painter-sculptor of Ridgeways. Inspiration: More important, his primary source of peace and spiritual nutrition is the Bible. It’s that life-sustaining power that he first learned from his father who was among the first Africans converted by German Lutherans. Also a teacher, linguist and wise man, both father and son are like indigenous trees, deeply rooted and fully aware of who they are — free-spirited Africans unfettered by colonial bonds, who still serve as inspirations to those who seek an authenticity that’s enduring and impossible to quash. That’s Elimo Njau, the richest man on Ridgeways, who still welcomes art lovers to Paa ya Paa where he, Phillda and an ex-priest Roger Sanchez, just recently restored ‘the ruins’ (which were destroyed by fire in 1998), renovating the gallery to its former glory.

MUTHONI GARLAND'S STORYMOJA LAUNCHES CREATIVITY CAMP FOR KENYAN YOUTH

STORYMOJA’S CREATIVE HOLIDAY CAMP EARNS PARENTS’ AND KIDS’ PRAISE// By Margaretta wa Gacheru. PUBLISHED in business daily, august 9, 2013/// Muthoni Garland is one member of Kenya’s emerging ‘creative economy’ who is not only innovative, enterprising and artistic; she is also a pragmatist who understands that people normally buy necessities first and luxuries after that. The founder of StoryMoja Publishers also knows that not every Kenyan feels reading is a necessity, which is one reason why she campaigns for a ‘reading revolution’ in Kenya and why she encourages school children not just to read but to write books of their own. She’s even launched a program to stimulate schools to ‘start a library’ on their sites and offers tangible ‘how to’ assistance as well. But one thing most parents do feel a need for during school holidays especially is to find creative ways to entertain their children during the break. Keeping kids busy—and safe—between school terms is a special challenge for working parents, since they don’t want their children getting into trouble nor do they want them to be bored sitting at home. Muthoni’s been musing over this problem for some time and with her Storymoja team came up with the concept of a ‘creative arts holiday camp’, which she tested out earlier this year in two pilot programs: one at Riara School for three Saturdays in May and early June attended by 75 children; the other at Peponi Primary over a two day period for children in standards four through seven. “The idea was to find out what children are interested in,” said Muthoni who also authors books of her own, [like The Battle of the Shidas] under her maiden name Muchemi. That was done during the pilot by running a series of creative workshops and asking children what they liked doing best: Was it storytelling, dance, art and illustration, theatre, poetry and performance, song writing or creative writing generally? Or did they like the practice of ‘publishing your own book in two hours’? The students’ response was overwhelmingly positive. They liked everything but they also wanted a workshop on public speaking. The result from running those pilots and listening to the children’s (not just parents’ or the teachers’) points of view is a series of Creative Arts August Holiday Camps, which will start next Monday in the Curiosity Centre at the StoryMoja offices in Spring Valley. Aimed at inspiring confidence, creative and critical thinking among youth (ages 11-14), the first of three 30-hour Camps will run from next Monday through Friday, August 12th through 16th. Two more camps are scheduled for the following two weeks. “So far, the response from both children and parents has been good,” said Muthoni who added that children especially want to do creative writing in both English and Kiswahili. And parents are pleased to find their children will be engaged in creative and fun activities that are also educational over the school break. One added bonus Muthoni plans to have during every camp is for a published writer to attend a storytelling session and share a bit of his or her writing. Recently, Storymoja conducted a storytelling session at the Michael Joseph Centre in which the award-winning Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina shared his writing with the youth. “We also intend to invite 14 year old Vaishnavi Ram Mohan whose first book, The Incredible Adventures of Pisho Pencil was published when she was just 12,” added Muthoni who also encourages children to write their own stories and send them to info@storymojaafrica.co.ke for possible publication. Each 30-hour Holiday Camp will cost KSh15,000. Meanwhile, Muthoni and her staff are putting finishing touches on the 2013 Storymoja Hay Festival, which will run from September 19th through 22nd and feature no less than 40 events, getting bigger and better every year. The Nairobi National Museum will again host the Festival which was launched in 2008 by Muthoni after she attended the original Hay Festival that takes place annually in the UK. Seen as a four day celebration of Kenyans’ stories and contemporary culture, the festivities include storytelling, book fairs, lively fora featuring writers from all over the world, workshops, debates and discussion, live music and stage performances as well as literary competitions And like the original Hay Festival, the Storymoja fete will also feature a wide array of political and socio-economic as well as cultural events. The central theme of this year’s celebration will be ‘Imagine a World.’ Business-wise, there will be workshops and panels on a range of topics including a talk about Kenyan businesses that have gone global and career options for all ages.

NYATITI PLAYER, DANCER, SINGER JUDITH BWIRE LAUNCHES NEW CD

JUDY BWIRE LAUNCHES NEW CD/// By margaretta wa gacheru. Published August 9, 2013 in Zuqka, Daily Nation Nairobi/// Nyatiti player and singer Judy Bwire launches her first ever CD tonight at Alliance Francaise. Entitled Judith Bwire, Mama Africa, the former dancer-choreographer turned singer-composer- nyatiti instrumentalist makes sweet music that fuses traditional Luhya, Luo and Swahili songs with funky pop sounds to create a soulful sound that is wholly Kenyan. Produced by Namacheke Music, all eleven tunes on Judy’s CD are her original compositions. They’ll be among those that she’ll perform tonight backed up by the Gravity Band. Soon after tonight’s show, Judy flies out to Germany to perform live in Dusseldorf and Cologne.

NAIROBI THEATRE SCENE THRIVES AS DOES SCHOOLS DRAMA IN NAKURU

URBAN THEATRE SCENE THRIVES IN NAIROBI/// By margaretta wa gacheru. Published in Zuqka August 9, 2013/// While theatre activity is going strong in Nakuru where the Kenya Schools & Colleges Drama Festival is under way, several professional and semi-professional shows have either opened this weekend, are opening next week or are ongoing as in Heartstrings Kenya’s hilarious new production, Kenya Pigs, Cats and Dogs.. At Kenya National theatre, Better Pill Productions opened last night in Man of Steal and will run throughout the weekend. Devised by the troupe the drama is all about one Kenyan town controlled by one small Big Man who controls all the vital services in the area, including the transportation and water systems as well as the bank. Okello has only one want and that the most beautiful Christian girl in town, Charity. She of course is inaccessible initially, but you’ll have to go see the play to find out what happens to the town, the Big Man and the clever girl Charity. Due to the overwhelmingly positive response to the Arts Canvas production of For Colored Girls is happening at the Michael Joseph Centre on August 16th. Mumbi Kaigwa’s troupe of seven amazing Kenyan women will also be performing tonight at the Karen Club, but as it’s a members’ club you’ll need to go with someone who pays their dues. During their two week run at Phoenix, For Colored Girls performed almost every night to packed houses. So the decision to extend the show offers the public who may have missed seeing Mumbi and company set the Phoenix stage on fire (figuratively speaking) now have the chance to see the revival of a big Black American hit from the Sixties prove that a brilliant script and a powerful cast can make a show feel brand new. Meanwhile, over at Phoenix Theatre, Backlash, a script by Kenya’s own Cajeton Boy opened last night starring Nick Ndeda, Fridah Muhindi, Victoria Gichora, David Opondoe and Veronica Waceke. The other show that has an extended run is the Heartstrings Kenya production of Kenya Pigs, Cats and Dogs. Consistent with its past performance, Heartstrings mixes social criticism with sassy and sometimes silly ensemble work that never fails to entertain full house crowds. The butt of their humor this time round is the Marriage Act about which both women and men complain about. But the ‘benefits’ of the new Bill are also exposed, benefits will could serve both sexes’ interest, or maybe not. Next weekend, its Hearts of Art that opens this coming Friday night at Alliance Francaise. Walter Sitati once again shows his creative ‘stuff’, having not only scripted “What is your Price?’

KUONA PRINTMAKERS WORK WITH SWEDISH ARTIST ANKI KALLSTROM

THE SAGE OF THE SWEDISH PRINTING PRESS/// By Margaretta wa Gacheru. Published August 9, 2013 Business Daily/// The saga of the Swedish printing press is a story with a happy ending. It took the shape of a series of printmaking workshops run by the Swedish painter-printmaker Anki Kallstrom in June and July, culminating in a fascinating exhibition of original prints on paper and cotton cloth produced by more than twenty Kuona-based artists, most of whom had little or no experience with printmaking before. The exhibition entitled Discoveries Within was originally named Discoveries around the Corner since Kallstrom had found the objects that feature most prominently in her side of this compact yet eclectic show ‘around the corner’ from Kuona Trust where she has been a visiting resident artist since June. But while conducting the week-long workshop with fellow artists from the Trust (the others were done for the public), the Swedish printmaker accepted the group’s consensus call/point of view which was to name their exhibition in relation to the notion that nearly all the art in this one show comes from within Kuona itself. And in fact, what i found most impressive about this showcase of intaglio and collr...prints is the way the artwork/it (exposed) offered a sort of snapshot of each artist’s creative styles. For instance, Cyrus Ng’ang’a who is currently sculpting his ‘c-stunner’ shades (glasses) in scrap wire (and other miscellaneous paraphernalia) took the opportunity afforded by Kallstrom’s crash course to translate his wire works into prints. Dennis Muragori is big on matatu art just now, so his prints featured vehicles and gears from the thoroughly Kenyan mini-van. Rosemary Ahoro of late has been painting colourful portraits of sweet short-haired girls; what’s intriguing about her print portrait is that in simple black and white, it’s almost more striking than otherwise. And the award-winning painter Wycliffe Opondo whose painting of the Kibera railway won him the Manjano first prize this year also chose to replicate the railway image on the hard paper that passed through the printing press. In fact, Opondo has known Anki Kallstrom from his first days in Sweden where he’d been invited as one of the Maasai Mbili artists to attend another print-making workshop in Stockholm? Since then, ‘Wiki’ (as he’s known) has moved over to Kuona Trust, but he was still working in Kibera with the ‘M2’ when the saga began and one Swedish Foundation offered to send Maasai Mbili artists their own printing press. Initially, the press was supposed to arrive in November 2011. That is when Kallstrom first came to Kenya to introduce the first print-making sessions on the new press in Kibera. “But the press never came. It went ‘missing’ and it took my going back to Sweden to find its whereabouts,” she said. As it turned out, the bottleneck wasn’t in Kenya but rather back home in Sweden. It took her many months to sort out the red tape involved with Swedish shipping, but the press finally arrived early in 2012. Unfortunately, in spite of the Foundation have given the press as a free gift to M2, the process accrued many more costs that the Kibera-based artists couldn’t afford. The only way they could eventually get the press out of Customs was to get a loan from Kuona Trust. But as M2 hasn’t yet paid back that loan, the press is being stored at the Trust for the time being. In the interim, Kallstrom applied for and won a two-month art residency at Kuona and finally got to run the workshops on the Swedish press that she had initially been commissioned to hold. At the same time, she has been preparing her own prints to exhibit later this month with Wiki Opondo at Le Rustique restaurant. Some of her work will also go back to Sweden where she’ll be mounting a one-woman exhibition in Ocotober in Stockholm. “Most of the work for the Swedish show is complete but i wanted to include prints from my time in Kenya which are representative of everyday Nairobi life,” she said. This being her third trip to Kenya and the one that’s finally allowed her to fulfil her assignment, to run workshops for Kenyans on the Swedish press, Kallstrom was still baffled about what was the best subject matter for her own print series. “Then I went around the corner from Kuona and that was where i found heaps of garbage,” she said. “I began picking up used plastic bottles which seemed to be everywhere.” She also found plastic bags too prevalent to ignore. So garbage became the striking subject matter of her art. Transforming ugly garbage into exquisite cloth prints (the cloth collected from Toy Market off Ngong Road), Kallstrom has managed to make amazing semi-abstract designs using crushed bags and water bottles exclusively. She’s hardly the first person to create art out of found objects. Kenyan artists like Nganga, Muraguri, Kioko and Wainaina among others have experimented using different kinds of trash. But when her art hangs side by side Wiki’s later this month, she’ll have gone back to Sweden but her personal brand of ‘junk art’ will place the final stamp on the sage of the Swedish printing press.

TRAYVON MARTINS: a tragic case of racism in America

TRAYVON’S CASE IGNITES A NEW CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, OR DOES IT?/// BY Margaretta wa Gacheru. Published in Daily Nation’s DN2 8.2013/// Just as the OJ Simpson trial captured the attention of Kenyans who, nearly a decade ago, closely watched the way race relations played out in the American judicial system, so Kenyans have been equally gripped by the ghoulish American story of a brown man (one who Malcolm X would have described as a ‘house nigger’), armed with a gun and honorary title of ‘neighbourhood watch man’, who shot and killed a teenage black boy whose only ‘crime’ was wearing a hoodie and walking through a gated community carrying a bag of crisps, bottle of ice tea and cell phone. Trayvon Martin had been talking to his Haitian girlfriend when he felt someone following him. He expressed his justifiable concern to her just before some sort of scuffle broke out followed by a gunshot which the girl heard. She was the last person to speak to Trayvon before he died. And one might imagine that her testimony in court would have sealed the fate of George Zimmerman, the volunteer cop who openly admitted to killing her friend. Yet Zimmerman claimed in court that he felt ‘threatened’ by the black boy who supposedly attacked him. That he shot Trayvon ‘in self defence’ seemed unbelievable to people of colour, especially to African American men whose very existence was described over a century ago by the Black scholar W.E.B. DuBois in his classic The Souls of Black Folk as “a problem to be dealt with, managed and controlled but never solved.” Zimmerman was charged with second degree murder, but a six women jury made up of five white women and one Puerto Rican Latina, voted unanimously for his acquittal of all charges. The only person of colour on the jury has since stated on national television that she believed ‘Zimmerman got away with murder’ but in good conscience, she claimed she had to obey the controversial ‘stand your ground’ law which entitled Zimmerman to shoot Trayvon since the Pervian-born armed watchman claimed he felt endangered by the unidentified black man. It was a verdict that has enflamed raw emotions all across America among people of colour, including liberal whites, who are incredulous and stunned that race relations in America are apparently still as backward and biased as they were when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the civil rights movement in the 1960s. But while Blacks are protesting all across America, even holding a Million Hoodie March across the land and conducting sit-ins against what they see as the racist ‘stand your ground’ law, the mainstream (corporate) media (especially the powerful Fox News station, mouthpiece for Rupurt Murdoch and other Tea Party Republicans) have sought to vilify Trayvon and absolve Zimmerman of any hint of guilt. The media, including CNN, even tried to raise doubts as to whether the killing of the 17 year old boy had anything to do with race relations in America! Wanting desperately to retain the unreal narrative that America has moved beyond the civil rights era and is now a ‘post-racial society’, the mainstream coverage of the Trayvon case sought to ignore the nationwide protests and the multiple voices insisting that the tragic case of Trayvon Martin has ushered in a new era of civil rights protests, this time against racial profiling and ‘stand your ground’ laws, the proliferation of guns and racist efforts to curtail minority voting rights. For African Americans and other people of colour, there was no question but that race played a critical part not only in Trayvon’s death and the deaths of countless African American men such as Rodney King, Emmett Till and Amadou Diallo; but also race had everything to do with the jury’s selection and its verdict, which many cynical social critics claim was ‘inevitable’ given Zimmerman’s role of ostensibly protecting the private property rights of wealthy elites from one ‘suspicious’ black man walking in the wrong place at the wrong time. What mystified me is how that decision could have been left to a jury of practically all white women. I apparently wasn’t the only one questioning the wisdom and justice of choosing a jury which seemed so flagrantly ‘stacked’ in favour of Zimmerman. One only needs to recall the way countless Black men have been lynched historically by white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan for supposedly lusting after their white women. The brutal bludgeoning and killing of the black teenager Emmett Till aroused so much outrage among African Americans in the 1950s that it is said to have been the spark that ignited the Civil Rights era which is being celebrated this year in light of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I have a Dream’ speech which was given exactly 50 years ago in 1963. Emmett Till was an innocent teenage boy who is said to have had a slight lisp, which was interpreted by one Southern white woman shopkeeper as a suggestive whistle which she reported as the boy’s unsolicited sexual advance. Emmett was grabbed and brutally murdered without being given a moment to defend himself. When his body was shipped back up North to his mother, she intentionally had an open casket at his funeral. His mangled body so shocked and appalled the Black community that the outrage served as the catalyst that is said to have activated the nationwide civil rights movement which was led by Dr. King. To ensure that Black rage elicited by the perceived injustice of the jury’s verdict not re-activate the same sort of passionate activism witnessed in the 1960s, the American corporate media, including its supposedly liberal wing, CNN, sought to explain that the six women were picked according to laid-down legal procedures. There was supposedly no bias involved in the court’s selection of the six, claimed another white woman commentator. The fact that the one woman of colour on the jury has finally come out and confessed she believed George Zimmerman was guilty of murdering Trayvon serves as some consolation for those who believe the same thing. And yet, the Latina woman known as Maddy claims she had ‘no choice’ but to obey the ‘stand your ground’ law. Her opinion has been strongly contested by African American lawyers like Seema Iyer, a specialist in constitutional, criminal and civil rights law, who says if Maddy had held her ground, the verdict would have been a ‘hung’ jury and that would have been more accurate. Nonetheless, another one of the six jurists also came out on national TV and had the gall to claim Trayvon ‘got what he deserved’ since he shouldn’t have been walking there in the first place. This is to say that racism still persists in the USA, no matter how hard the media spokesmen and women may argue that race ‘had nothing to do’ with Trayvon’s death. One of the reasons that President Barack Obama has received so much flak in the media for having empathized in a recent speech with Trayvon is because he challenged the narrative of the dominant class which wants to pretend that America is a ‘post-racial’ society so it no longer needs affirmative action laws that protect people of colour from racist bigotry and the rolling back of rights acquired when African Americans actively engaged in non-violent civil disobedience. Much has been made of President Obama openly identifying with dead boy and stating that “Thirty-five years ago, Trayvon could have been me.” Yet critics like the African American professor Cornell West feel however courageous Obama’s message might seem, he has done little to nothing to reverse the “new Jim Crow laws” that have indeed begun to roll back civil rights legislation protecting Blacks. His critics have also noted that those few words have been the only ones on the topic of race that he has uttered since his famous “Race Speech” given during his campaigning for the presidency in 2007. Yet however little or late Obama’s remarks on race may have been, they served to debunk the myth that America has become a ‘colour blind society.’ The Trayvon tragedy has played an even more disruptive role in exposing the reality that African American people have never been in doubt about. For as the Rev. Dr. Calvin Butts III, Pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem put it after the Zimmerman case’s verdict was read: Now we know “we are not in a post-racial society.” Yet Black Americans don’t need convincing that racism isn’t dead. One only needs to check out a few statistics to be convinced. For instance, while Blacks make up 13 per cent of the national population in the US, more than half of America’s homicide victims and culprits were Black in 2011. And out of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in American jails, no less than one million are Black. And since the collapse of the US economy around 2008, minority communities have been harder hit than white ones, according to Michael Scherer and Elizabeth Dias writing in Time magazine’s July 29 issue. “From 2007 to 2010, according to the Urban Institute, black family wealth fell by 31 per cent, compared with an 11 per cent decline for whites.” Finally, the unemployment rate among Black Americans, which is 13.7 per cent, is more than twice the 6.6 per cent rate of whites. In the view of Dr Eddie Claude, Jr, Chairman of Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies, “[Blacks] are experiencing what I would call a black Great Depression.” What is perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the Trayvon Martin case is that it has left many Black parents feeling helpless and hopeless to protect their children, especially their sons. According to Jeannine Amber, a senior writer for Essence magazine, the moment parents watched George Zimmerman walk out of court a ‘free man’ thanks to the jury’s ‘not guilty’ verdict, they knew no matter how hard they tried to protect their boys, they could be stopped and treated like criminals by police even when they had committed no crime. Prior to the verdict, Amber said, Black parents at least held out the hope that they could counsel their boys on how best to behave in the presence of armed police: stay cool, cooperate fully and don’t put your hands anywhere near your pockets lest a cop believes you are going for a gun. But now, in light of Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict—despite his openly admitting he shot Trayvon, parents don’t know how to protect their sons since the new ‘stand your ground’ laws has opened the door wide to not just police but civilians shooting anyone they deem ‘dangerous’ or suspicious looking. Nonetheless, there seems to be a correlation between Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin in the sense that both their cases have served as catalysts to spark social movements that have the capacity to bring about meaningful social change in the US. Already there have been demonstrations all across the country, protesting the verdict and giving the one Latina jurist the nerve to come out and admit she was pressured by the other five to vote alongside them. Already, Black clergy in black churches all across the country are committing themselves to waging non-violent campaigns against racial profiling and the impunity associated with ‘stand your ground’ laws. In Florida, there’s already a four week old sit-in at the state capital to demand that Governor Rick Scott remove the state’s ‘stand your ground’ law from the books. The sit-in could very well serve the new civil rights movement in a way similar to the Sixties’ sit-ins turned the tide of public awareness in the early 1960s. It has been painful for both of Trayvon’s parents to speak in public about the tragedy of losing their son in such a cruel and callous fashion. But his mother, Sybrina Fulton, has asked that her son’s death not be in vain, but that it serves as an incentive for the public of all shades and colours to come forth and demand that racial profiling come to an end, and that America finally live up to its potential to become a truly pluralistic, non-racial society. It’s a tall order but perhaps parents and children will see that no child or adult is safe in America unless the madness of murdering, maiming and incarcerating innocent black men and boys come to an end.

ARTERIAL NETWORK KENYA HOSTS THE CATCHUP: BECOMING (AND STAYING) AN ARTIST IN KENYA ON 17 AUGUST

BECOMING (AND STAYING) AN ARTIST IN KENYA/// The cultural CATCHUP Sunday sessions that The Creativez made such an important venue for artists and art lovers of all varieties to attend has been shared with the Arterial Network Kenya Chapter. This coming August 17 at 2pm at the Kenya Cultural Centre, the timely topic of discussion will be ‘Becoming (and Staying) an Artist in Kenya’ To talk about everything from Kenyan film and contemporary dance to jewlry making and the visual arts and performance both live and on TV, this month’s CATCHUP will feature Judy Kibinge, creative director, writer and film maker, Mathew Ondiege, professional actor, dancer, director and choreographer, Muturi Njee is a painter, jewellery designer and a mentor whose passion is in encouraging and motivating artists into taking their art profession seriously, Sylvia Gichia, Director at Kuona Trust Centre for visual arts in Kenya and Tabu Osusa of Ketebul Records representing the music industry. The Catchup is free of charge, so do come and expect to find an eye-opening conversation among some of the artistic giants of Kenya’s dynamic cultural scene.

ERITREAN PORTRAIT ARTIST PAINTS KUONA-BASED KENYAN ARTISTS

PORTRAIT SHOW OF KUONA ARTISTS TOO SHORT/// By Margaretta wa Gacheru. Published in Business Daily July 2013/// Ermias Ekube has only been in Kenya for a year, but in that relatively short span of time the nomadic Eritrean artist has made a large impact on the Nairobi art world. But it’s not only because he has had two substantial solo art exhibitions in that time—one at the Alliance Francaise, the other at Talisman in Karen. Nor is it just because he’s also participated in several group shows—one at the Kenya Cultural Centre’s Visual Art Gallery and two at the Village Market where his portrait painting earned him a substantial second prize purse at the Manjano Nairobi County Art Competition. Nor is it simply because he’s run three months’ worth of Saturday morning printmaking workshops at Kuona Trust that Ekube has left an indelible mark on the Nairobi art scene. All of these events have affected the appeal and popularity of this Addis Ababa-born artist. But the quality of his art, particularity his approach to portrait painting, definitely has shaped the public’s perception of this gifted painter who will travelling shortly to Sweden to start up a new artistic adventure over the next few month. Ironically, it is his last and most short-lived one-man exhibition of portraits that in my view, best sums up the remarkable grace, generosity and artistic gifts of Ekube. It’s ironic because it ought to be an exhibition that lasts for at least a fortnight, if not a month or more, given the content, quality and location of the show. Instead, it opened at Kuona Trust last Friday and shuts down today. Ekube takes responsibility for the timeframe of this important show. “The Sweden trip was planned long ago, but I hadn’t expected the departure date to be moved forward as quickly as it was,” said the father of three whose children start at new schools in a new country next month. He humbly agrees with me that it would have been best for this show to run longer since it features almost the entire cast and crew of resident artists and art administrators of Kuona Trust itself. Never before has anyone taken the time and trouble to focus exclusively on the most important component of Kuona. And that is the artists themselves. Ekube has been doing portrait painting even before he attended Addis Ababa University’s School of Fine Art and Design. But he’s never planned such an ambitious portrait series as he devised early this year when he began asking each and every artist and art administrator at Kuona to ‘sit’ for him. “The idea was to include every one of them,” said Ekube who didn’t get the chance to paint Kuona’s dynamic director Sylvia Gichia as she never seemed to have the time to sit long enough for the artist to at least create a sketch of her. Ekube might have taken a photograph of Sylvia and worked from that, but he much prefers working from real life in order to tune in to the texture and tone of both the sitter’s appearance and their mental ambience. Noting that some artists paint portraits in a ‘formulaic’ style which can lead to one portrait looking quite like another, Ekube prefers to come fresh to each subject that he’s about to paint. It’s that fresh, intuitive approach that permeates most of the portraits in his current Kuona show. At their best, Ekube’s art embodies the artist’s spirit or life force. It doesn’t happen in every case, as the artist freely admits.”I had to work fast towards the end of the series,” he said, implying that a few of his portraits deserved greater attention to detail and visual design. Nonetheless, what also makes this show so special is its focus on artists who rarely find ‘the shoe on the other foot’. In other words, they are normally the ones painting or sculpting their subject, not vice versa. To me, it would have made more sense for Kuona to reschedule some of their July exhibitions to make room for this exceptional exhibition as it’s a show that truly celebrates this specific group of Kuona’s visual artists—including sculptors like Anthony Wanjau, Gakunju Kaigwa and David Mwaniki; surrealist and semi-abstract painters like John Silver Kimani, Gor Soudan, Fred Abuya and Sidney Mang’ong’o; and women artists like Beth Kimwele, Maryann Muthoni, Jacqui Karuti and Rose Mukabi. Ekube expects to be back in Kenya shortly, but just as his arrival and artistic activities in Kenya were serendipitous, so we can assume that his adventure in Europe will lead to many fine opportunities and more nomadic detours along the way back to Nairobi.

GALLERY WATATU has a glorious history but is in limbo today

http://www.nation.co.ke/Features/DN2/Good-old-Gallery-Watatu-in-limbo/-/957860/1936768/-/p6ukrq/-/index.html//// GALLERY WATATU A CENTRAL HUB OF CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE THE SIXTIES///. By Margaretta wa Gacheru. Published in Daily Nation, August 5, 2013//// Gallery Watatu wasn’t the first contemporary art gallery that opened in Nairobi’s Central Business District in the 1960s. There was Paa ya Paa, which opened on Koinange Street in 1965 and was formed by six local art lovers including Oxford University Press Editor Charles Lewis and Terry Hirst who’d been sent by the British Council to start an Art School at what was then Kenyatta College. Then there were Kenyan art lovers like Jonathan Kariara, James Kangwana, Hilary Ng’weno and the Tanzanian art professor Elimo Njau who remains the Art Centre director to this day. Studio 68, which was run by a South African lady named Sherri Hunt, was also there as was the New Stanley Art Gallery which was situated right inside the hotel. But Gallery Watatu was the first CBD gallery to feature both international and local artists. Founded in 1969 by two artists and one graphic designer, its strategic location, halfway between the New Stanley and the Hilton Hotels, meant that from the beginning Watatu was frequented by global tourists as well as locals of all types. And contrary to the common misconception about the Gallery, that it was essentially an ex-patriot enclave which only exhibited art by whites, one of the three co-founders Yony Waite, recalls how from early on the gallery exhibited artworks by Africans like the late Louis Mwaniki , Asians like Usam Ghadan, and Semitic painters from around the Middle East. Paa ya Paa also attracted an eclectic assortment of mainly Pan African painters. And in its heyday, it also attracted Pan African poets, dancers, musicians, comedians and celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory and Alvin Ailey. What made Gallery Watatu distinctive when it opened in 1969 was that the two passionate professional painters, the late Robin Anderson and Yony Waite (who was then known as Jony) simply wanted space to show their own art. Both women were prolific and also impatient at having to wait in line for exhibition space at the New Stanley (which is actually where the two first met). “So we agreed the only alternative was to start a gallery of our own,” recalls Waite who admits that she and Anderson where very different. (Waite was something of a ‘hippie’ who studied fine art at University of California at Berkeley and in Japan and Anderson came from a conservative colonial background.) But the two women shared a passion for painting which transcended their differences. The Gallery quickly attracted art lovers from all over the world, many of whom admired the art of Anderson (who painted elegant wildlife scenes on silk batik) and Waite (who also painted Kenyan wildlife only in oils on mainly canvas). The women together with the third ‘mtu’ of the ‘watatu’ troika David Hart readily opened up their space to visiting artists from everywhere, including East Africa. Contrary to the oft repeated myth that Watatu only began exhibiting African artists after the German American curator Ruth Schaffner bought the gallery from Waite in 1985 (Anderson had sold out her shares in the early 80s after which several women bought stakes in the gallery for short periods of time, including Rhodia Mann and Shari Saitoti), the gallery didn’t discriminate except in terms of the quality of art exposed. Thus, a number of Makerere-trained artists had major exhibitions at Watatu, including Frances Nnaggenda (who actually headed Makerere’s art school), Eli Kyeyune, Teresa Musoke and Jak Katarikawe (who technically didn’t go to Makerere, but was mentored by the Makerere art professor Sam Ntiru). Among Kenyans, the Italy-trained sculptor Louis Mwaniki was the first one to exhibit there. But then came Ancent Soi whose art Yony initially saw in the Nairobi City Market in Soi’s converted vegetable stall. Sane Wadu and Etale Sukuro were also among the first Kenyans to exhibit at Watatu in those ‘early days’. Africans from elsewhere in the region who exhibited at the Gallery included Jonathan Kingdon from Tanzania and Charles Sekano from South Africa. What changed when Ruth Schaffner took over the gallery in ’85 was a more intense focus on cultivating contemporary Kenyan art. She would run workshops for fledgling painters like Shine Tani (who currently runs the Banana Hill Art Gallery) and she also provided aspiring local artists with paints, brushes and papers that they would use to create art which they would then sell back to Ruth for a few hundred shillings. Ruth was also a brilliant businesswoman and marketer of Kenyan art. After she passed on in 1986, the Gallery sadly went downhill. Run for a time by her late husband, the Ivorian businessman Adama Diawara and finally by the Ghanaian journalist Osei Kofi, the status of the Gallery is currently in limbo as it had to move out of Lonrho House. And what remains of Watatu’s collection (including unpaid-for art by Kenyans) now sits in the Ongata Rongai Police Station awaiting Kofi’s return from a fundraising mission abroad.

SIMON OGETO: PASSIONATE PROMOTER OF KENYA FROM THE DIASPORA IN CHICAGO

PASSIONATE DIASPORAN PROMOTER OF KENYA/// BY Margaretta wa Gacheru. Published August 2, 2013 in Business Daily/// Even before he got a full four-year scholarship to study Marketing and Media Relations at Chicago’s Columbia College in the US, Simon Ogeto was busy putting Kenya’s best face forward promoting tourism on a global scale for travellers from all over the world. The president of the college was just one of many travellers who went on individualised safaris that Ogeto designed in the early 1990s while still working at Pollman’s Tours Ltd in Nairobi. But the recent Utalii college graduate so impressed Columbia President Duff that he encouraged the 22 year old to apply to his college and ask for a full scholarship as well. “I was hesitant at first because I’d met all sorts of people who’d been so impressed with Kenya they showered promises on us tour guides before they left, but then we’d never hear from them again,” said the tall lanky Kenyan from Nyamira who’s been a Chicago resident for nearly 20 years, since 1994. What caused him to think twice about the president’s generous offer was the phone call that came a week after Duff’s departure and return to the US. It was from the admissions office at the school, asking where they could send their application forms. “So after they sent the forms by fax, i decided to fill them out, and within a few days, i received word I’d been admitted and also received the full four year scholarship,” he said, noting that even getting a visa from the US Embassy was a breeze. But four years turned out to be just long enough for Ogeto to complete not one but two university degrees in marketing and media communications at Columbia. “For my masters, i wrote a thesis that outlined what I’m doing today,” said the founder and CEO of the Seed Africa Group. “We do three things, all revolving around promoting Kenyan tourism: we market and design individualized tour packages; we do media promotions, and we run language workshops especially for travellers on their way to Kenya. The Kiswahili language training workshop that he just finished running in late July was especially designed for Lawyers without Borders, a band of American human rights advocates who have been following Kenyan politics and current events for the last few years. But they are just one of the groups that Ogeto has assisted since he completed his course at Utalii, went to Pollman’s and then found his way to the States where he’s worked at both Columbia College and the University of Chicago inside both schools’ international students departments. And while the bulk of his promotional work for Kenya has involved working with non-Kenyans who he says quickly come to love the country, Ogeto has also served as a sort of agent for Kenyan cultural groups who’ve gone and performed in the US, especially in the Chicago area. They include everyone from the Jabali Afrika Band and Dance Africa to the Kenyan comedians ‘Ridiculous’ and Kenyan filmmakers like Albert Wandago. So while Ogeto has effectively settled down in the States, (He’s got a wife, two young kids and a flat in Hyde Park), his connections with Kenya grow stronger year by year. In fact, he wishes he could advise the Kenya government on how to change a few of their policies to make them more traveller-friendly. That would also make his work slightly easier. But until he is called upon to offer his advice, Ogeto will simply be one of Kenya’s most passionate diasporan promoters whose love of his country is infectious and inspirational as well. Symon Ogeto’s website is www.seedchicago.com.

EDWARD NJENGA'S AMAZING MAU MAU TERRACOTTA DETAINEES AT MUSEUM'S 50TH

http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Museum-celebrates-Kenya-50th-with-clay-and-oils/-/1248928/1933936/-/sy4uqdz/-/index.html.../ PORTRAITS OF KENYAN PEOPLES IN CLAY AND OILS AT NATIONAL MUSEUM/// By Margaretta wa Gacheru. Published August 2, 2013 in Business Daily, Nairobi/// At 91, Edward Njenga is the elder statesman of Kenya’s burgeoning art world. Less renowned today than his junior, octogenarian artist Elimo Njau, Njenga had his heyday in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties during his tenure as director, first of the Friends Community Centre and then at the Eastleigh Social Centre. Those were the sites where this self-taught sculptor observed and assisted the underprivileged who would subsequently become the subjects of the life-like miniature sculptures that he is currently exhibiting at Nairobi National Museum’s Cultural Dynamism Gallery. The show is called ‘A Son’s Dedication.’ Teaming up with the Ugandan painter Leonard Kateete who is also exhibiting art work that he created some time back, both Njenga and Kateete realized long ago that it would take time before the true value of their art would be appreciated and understood. Hopefully that time is now! Kateete’s art features a wide representation of Kenyan communities, most of which were commissioned by the Nation Media Group and lent to the Museum especially for this exhibition, entitled ‘Humanity through My Eyes' and situated next door to Njenga’s in the Ecology Gallery. Most of the paintings are normally displayed on various walls inside the Nation Centre. “The original idea was for me to paint all 42 Kenyan communities, but then the project got stalled before I was done,” the artist had told BD Life back then. The roadblock apparently had to do with critics contending the project ought to be carried out by a Kenyan not a Ugandan. Unfortunately, there was no follow up to find a Kenyan artist to complete the work, which is not to say that no one existed who could fit the bill. The current NNM show reveals why Kateete was sought after in the first place. Like Njenga his works are realistic and reflective of Kenyan people’s culture and physical features at certain moments in time. Kateete’s art attempts to depict Kenya’s pre-colonial cultures while Njenga’s derives from his own experience of everyday life when he served as a social worker living among impoverished Kenyans whose lives he’d sought to improve through the activities of his community centres. Njenga’s art features everyone from parking boys and mkokotene carriers to nursing mothers and the infirm who came to Eastleigh’s health clinic for help and relief. Each ceramic sculpture is poignant and unsettling as their realistic depiction of the challenges poor Kenyans face on a daily basis give one pause. Interestingly while the two artists can be seen as visual chroniclers of Kenyan culture, both past and present, their backgrounds are very different. Kateete is a graduate of Makerere’s Margaret Trowell School of Fine Art while Njenga’s formal education was cut short by the Emergency and his two years detention in colonial concentration camps. Nonetheless, his linguistic and administrative skills enabled him to navigate through the Fifties and subsequently find work, first through the Friends and then with the Presbyterians as a skilful and sensitive social worker. Having been raised by a mother who made pots to earn her son’s school fees, Njenga used to prepare her clay, although he never created one sculpture until he went to the UK in 1963 to study social work with the Friends. It was there that he found an art school where he was encouraged to create with a different kind of clay. The artist still retains that first sculpture of a Kenyan child as it was the work that enabled him to actually see his own latent artistic talents. From then on, he employed those inherent gifts to create art that merits being kept intact and retained in a public collection, possibly the one established by the National Museum. Also showing currently are artworks at Alliance Francaise by GoDown artists such as Patrick Mukabi, Tom Mboya, Dickson Otieno, Dixon Kaloki and Charles Ngatia among others. At Kuona Trust, original prints by Kuona artists who attended workshops conducted by the Swedish printmaker Anki Kallstrom who also curated the exhibition entitled ‘Discoveries Within’. She’s just completed an art residency at the Trust. At Le Rustique, Oliver Okoth is exhibiting paintings. Finally, in another gallery at the Nairobi Museum are colourful works by Yassir Ali and Fawaz El Said.