Works alluring in their simplicity
The Kenyan artist Rosemary Karuga was one of the most influential of her generation
Avast chapter of the still mostly untold story of women’s art in Kenya starts with Rosemary Namuli Karuga. Karuga passed away on 9 February 2021 at the age of 93. She was one of the pioneers who made major contributions to contemporary art on the continent and is recognised as one of the finest East African artists of her generation.
Karuga is known for her collage works depicting pastoral and domestic African scenes, commonly villagers, farmers and animals. They would go on to be shown internationally, but she only began to produce commercial art in her 60s, when she had retired from teaching.
She was even less known than other pioneering women artists of Kenyan origin such as Magdalene Odundo, the ceramicist and academic — and a former student of Karuga’s — and Wangechi Mutu, the Kenyan-american artist working across painting, sculpture, film and performance. But Karuga deserves equal recognition. Many artists in Kenya know of her, though few met her in person. Yet art practices evolved around her work and scholarly works have been inspired and influenced by her practice.
Early life
Karuga was born on 19 June 1928, in Meru, Kenya, to a Ugandan father and a Kenyan mother. Her artistic journey began when an Irish nun at her primary school noticed her talent and later recommended her to study at the School of Fine Art at Makerere University in Uganda. Karuga would, by all accounts, be the influential school’s first female student.
Between 1950 and 1952 she studied design, painting and sculpture at Makerere. After graduating, she moved back to Kenya to become a full-time teacher until she retired in 1987. Karuga did not engage in artmaking for more than 30 years after graduating. She married in 1953, had three children, taught in a local school, became a subsistence farmer and had grandchildren.
It was not until the late 1980s that one of her daughters encouraged her to pursue her art practice. The Kenyan art scene in the early 1980s lacked gallery presence, with Gallery Watatu and Paa Ya Paa Arts Centre being the only two active galleries in Nairobi. It was through an residency position at Paa Ya Paa that Karuga’s work began to be more widely seen. Despite her reported failing eyesight and hearing, she had embarked on her professional artistic career.
Layers of colour
Karuga’s artistic expression is very personal, with a unique technique that is inspired by Byzantine mosaics. Her medium of choice includes coloured paper scraps — from newspapers, glossy magazines and packaging materials — that create elevated torn and cut paper collages, mostly figurative portraits and landscapes, of rural Kenyan environments. Her innovative collages harness extraordinary details and alluring simplicity.
Artist, writer and curator Mbuthia Maina, who wrote on Karuga in the
book Thelathini: 30 Faces, 30 Facets of Contemporary Art in Kenya, describes Karuga’s style: “I will never forget Karuga’s description of how a lion comes alive in her collages. First she makes a forest from the colours that she has cut up … Then, from among the trees and the thicket, a lion slowly emerges and she follows it with glue and cut-up paper until it is as real a lion as one would encounter in a photograph or a movie. Suddenly the viewer begins to see layers of content upon a rainbow of colours with inlaid text in varying fonts and hues … Imagining all this, the viewer can almost hear the chirping of the birds on the thorn tree.”
Karuga links past and present women artists, like Mutu, in East Africa today. She does so through adopting contemporary mediums and forms like collage. She expanded what was possible in the field.
International breakthrough
Karuga’s international breakthrough came in the United States in 1992 with a group exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York called Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition. Karuga was the only female artist on the show.
In 2017 she was given her due at home when she was featured as the first artist of the month by the National Museums of Kenya. Her work today forms part of their collection, and is also held by the Kenya National Archives and the Red Hill Ant Gallery, among others.
This article was first published in The Conversation
Live-streaming and collaboration have been the buzzwords of lockdown music. Despite no gigs, no gatherings and no venues, players with the skills and resources have still come together to make music for digital stages.
Something else is emerging from those joint ventures too. The apparently fixed categories of the legacy commercial music scene — roles, models, genres and more — were already feeling contingent pre-covid, as new technology reversed old value chains. Now, some collaborations are simply dissolving them.
For trumpeter Marcus Wyatt and bassist Romy Brauteseth, what began as one duo session streamed from their shared Sophiatown home in April last year has turned into “In Concert @ House on the Hill”: almost a year of streamed performances in collaboration with South African small groups. Their work asks questions about performance aesthetics, band hierarchies and financial models.
For bassist Shane Cooper, the improvised Happenstance collaborations he recorded at the Centre for the Less Good Idea interrogate not only hierarchy and genre, but even what we call “music” and what we might dismiss as “sound”.
At House on the Hill, they film and record music and initiate archiveable artist conversations for, in Brauteseth’s words “a different documenting process that shows a more intimate side of the music and highlights each person’s character.” Next up is Tlale Makhene on March 11.
That the two know many of the artists so far featured helps (although they hope to extend the roster, particularly to less-publicised and oldergeneration players); so does their small, friendly home studio setting. “By the time we get artists onto our little yellow couch for the conversation,” Brauteseth says, “they’re relaxed enough to talk freely”.
Wyatt feels the setting supports honest performance. Rather than encouraging people to “step in front of the audience and become somebody else,” this quiet, intimate setting “allows musicians not to be that ‘Version B’ — that’s what we’re going for.” The duo use the acoustics of the space and their engineering skills to support what Wyatt calls “light and shade and silence in the music”, rather than instrumental bombast or sound values better suited to “rock music played in a barn”.
Even although they use home resources such ventures need support — and artists need to eat. Brauteseth and Wyatt made various approaches, and the first four concerts were funded by the Goethe Institute, which immediately appreciated the concept “with absolutely no strings, except their governance rules don’t permit monetisation”. A similarly supportive, hands-off donor they prefer not to name will carry the concerts forward.
Wyatt tried to evaluate various business models: “I looked for the numbers — but there are no relevant numbers! Ideally, of course, we shouldn’t give music away for free, but we’re still building a brand.” at the 2020 Africa Synthesised online conference exploring the sonic possibilities (“the possibilities are born out of the limitations”) of collaging tape from an analogue, reel-to-reel recorder with input from only two microphones, a vintage device he’d inherited from his father.
Now, with lockdown lifted slightly, “I could invite collaborators into the same room. People could really listen to themselves acoustically, without the studio barriers of booths and headphones,” he says.
The result was three sessions — Static, Skins and Tongues — in which collaborators created spontaneous music in response to discussion and visual scores, plus a fourth, Ecotones, drawing on sounds from nature. Musicians each receive an equal “That happenstance created the session fee, irrespective of being seedlings. Then I spent weeks afterwards bandleader or member. Wyatt sees alone, cutting up the tapes, a future role for sponsor-supported, experimenting, scrapping, creating fixed, equitable fees too, in breaking loops, all from that generative starting the tyranny of the “door deal — point,” says Cooper. “I was looking because after Covid that’ll come back for ways to make the musical with a vengeance”. transitions sound true.”
T
“As musicians,” says Brauteseth,
“we definitely understand the he centre is not designed for value of earning. But having an recording, so the first rigid online presence can support future envelope to go was studio bookings too. We consulted about sound. “It’s a big room with whether posting free online was lots of reverb, not insulated: you can undercutting [other offerings], and hear the traffic outside. I worked to the feeling was it’s more important incorporate those ‘sonic blemishes’ to to have performances accessible … become sonic textures,” Cooper says. and for it to be something artists are For each session, he collaborated proud of.” with musicians he knew and some
Cooper was also fortunate to he didn’t, including classical cellist have no-strings support — from the Daliwonga Tshangela. The elements Centre for the Less Good Idea — for from Tshangela’s sound and style in four Happenstance collaborative Static, he says, “speak towards one sound projects, two of which are language for collaborations”. scheduled for an April 26 release on Cooper’s leadership role in vinyl from Uk-based Kit Records. Happenstance was also highly fluid.
Cooper had already created work Although his deliberation shaped the final tapes, in the live collaboration, “I had to be equally willing to dive into the unknown and explore my curiosity — not just put my collaborators in the dark, tell them what to do and film them.”
The fourth session — Ecotones — challenges boundaries further. When invited to extend his planned three sound projects to a fourth, Cooper proposed work with artistresearcher Zayaan Khan “to see how far the centre was prepared to stretch the limits”.
Cooper’s interest is in “micro- and macro-universes of sound: focusing in and focusing out” and he found common ground with Khan’s exploration of bacteria, fermentation and their sounds — “gigantic universes in the microscopic realm.”
The Ecotones soundscape parallels the slowed clips of cricket and frog song he cut into Cara Stacey’s traditional instrumentation in Static.
Echoing the early pioneers of electronic music, like Cairo-born composer Halim el-dabh, Cooper believes any sound from life can be musical within “a sequence of tension and resolution”.
It’s going to be tough, he knows, for Kit Records to place Happenstance in any drop-down marketing menu.
And that’s rather the point. Technologies of music production and distribution — cut-up tape, digital mixing, online streaming — in contexts of diverse collaboration, hold the potential to render everything liminal. Industry roles and genre categories are up for question. A platform can also be an archive. The scrape of a bassist’s fingers, or a cricket’s wings, can both be music. Everything, as Cooper describes it, is “dancing between sound-spaces”.
The recent calls for the removal of Sports, Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa by members of the arts, culture and heritage community seem to miss the bigger problem, which political economy scholar and ANC member Oscar van Heerden posits is, “The ANC is confused (ideologically and strategically), therefore the government is confused, and therefore the state is confused.”
Although Van Heerden’s remark was made in light of the evidence relating to the State Security Agency at the Zondo inquiry into state capture, I am of the view that the confusion he identifies pervades all the departments of government, not least the department of sports, arts and culture.
It is no secret that South Africa is facing an acute leadership crisis. This is why the calls for Mthethwa’s resignation are not misplaced. He has presided over a department that has come to be known more for its professional mourning services rather than “providing leadership to the arts, culture and heritage sector to accelerate its transformation” (as per its official mandate set out in the various drafts of the revised white paper on arts, culture and heritage, which still hasn’t been finalised).
As important as fixing the problem of ineffective leadership is, we cannot lose sight of the ideological crisis — especially as it relates to the role of the arts and culture to postcolonial nation formation — the ANC has been in since at least the late 1960s. This crisis, according to literary scholar Ntongela Masilela, has to do with the ANC’S “enforced separation of politics and culture”. Although the contemporary ANC can be rightfully characterised as having “no intellectual ideas left” (as Van Heerden does), the dominance of orthodox Marxist-leninism in the ANC leadership circles for most of the second half of the 20th century led to the development of a bureaucratic view of the arts and culture.
In 1992, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile cautioned against this bureaucratisation when he criticised the ANC’S “criminal backwardness about culture, generally, and its role in society at any given time”. Even when it established its department of art and culture in 1982 (to house the activities of Medu Art Ensemble and Amandla Cultural Ensemble), Masilela accused it of having “created a performance space for the arts rather than a place for cultural production”.
Perhaps the most glaring example of how lowly the arts and culture have come to be regarded by the governing party is how this site of struggle is now lumped together with sports and recreation. This relegation suggests that, contrary to the revised white paper’s admission that “decolonisation of the sector leaves much to be desired”, the current administration views the arts as mere entertainment for “the masses” — meaning that the official conception of the arts and culture is a nonideological one, or so it seems.
The bureaucratisation of the arts and culture is largely to blame for the dramatic shift from “the emergence of community-based cultural organisations openly aligned to the struggle against apartheid” to the post-1994 function of the arts and culture as an instrument of rainbow nation social cohesion. As argued by the #Rhodesmustfall movement of the recent past, the rainbow nationbuilding project is a farcical maintenance of whiteness in blackface. This is despite its pretences as a pragmatic programme of action.
The daily occurrence of so-called service-delivery protests over the past 15 years represents the most sustained levels of much-needed contestation around the very idea of “post-apartheid South Africa”. So, the government’s propaganda of “social cohesion and nation-building” through the arts can only be read as an attempt at “manufacturing consent” (to twist the title of Edward
Herman and Noam Chomsky’s influential book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media).
What is to be done by artists and cultural practitioners in this state of confusion? One answer would be that artists must simply “go to work” and “reflect the times”. With much love and respect to Toni Morrison and Nina Simone, this is easier said than done. My view is that artists have to refuse the reduction of their work to “entertainment”. Where entertainment lulls and desensitises the audience, I am arguing that contemporary artists have to think seriously about aesthetic practices that would heighten our senses for the purposes of what sculptor and poet, Pitika Ntuli puts as “building our resistance” to injustice.
Contrary to those who say that we should not weaponise the arts and culture, the words of Guinea-bissau anti-colonial leader, Amilcar Cabral, that “you measure a people’s potential for liberation based on how different their culture is from their oppressors”, should haunt all of us. To what extent can we say that contemporary South African cultural life is different from that which prevailed in colonial-apartheid times?
Is there even such a thing as a “postapartheid national culture”?
These questions implicate the process of nation formation that has been led by the ANC. I emphasise this idea of process precisely because a nation is not a given: it is formed through social and political processes. Any claim to the contrary must be viewed as an attempt to bamboozle the people — what Cabral would describe as an “easy victory”. The ANC’S failure to fully decolonise this country necessitates a continuation of the struggle in and for representation; a struggle that should be waged on the ground and in our minds.
The role of artists in such a struggle would be to help us to imagine a new country, not to hustle whoever is in charge of the ministry of arts. Yes, artists (particularly those who are black) have been reduced to mere beggars for the next grant or residency. But which poor black person hasn’t been reduced to either a hustler or a beggar? The precarious situation facing artists won’t improve if the general structural conditions don’t change. It seems to me that many more artists would have to start seeing their position in relation to the people at large. Work awaits all of us.