Life & Work

African Heritage treats art lovers to its rich

art

Photo/Courtesy African Heritage models Catherine Karl and Lois Mutua and dancers on a 1995 European tour. At centre is former Mr Kenya Mickey Ragos in Cameroon ceremonial feathered head dress with two Jabali Afrika band members Asikoye (far left), and Josek (Far right).

Alan Donovan handed over most of his magnificent continental costumes, jewellery, workshop materials and designs to Makena Mwiraria when she took over management of the African Heritage almost a decade ago.

But that won’t deter him from celebrating the coming of age of Kenya’s premier culture and art gallery he co-founded with Joe and Sheila Murumbi in 1972.

Beginning April 11 through most of the month, Nairobians will have a chance to stroll down memory lane with the American-born Donovan and many of his creative partners at Alliance Francaise.

Organisers of the event have assembled a team of world class artists who started their careers at that gallery often with the support of Donovan and his co-director Kenya’s second vice president, the late Joseph Murumbi.

The list includes UK-based ceramicist Magdalene Odundo, the Academy award nominee, musician Ayub Ogada a.k.a. Job Seda, award-winning photographers Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith.

Four professional East African sculptors, Expedito Mwebe, Francis Nnaggenda, John Odoch Ameny and Elkana Ong’esa, whose sculptures stand majestically at the Nairobi City Park’s Murumbi Memorial are also set to showcase their work.  

The Master of Ceremony for the entire event will be the Mashawiki Mix TV host, Fareed Khimani, who will, on April 20, co-host the first African Heritage Annual Awards event with TV anchor Beatrice Marshall.

Murumbi Trust

The awards, established courtesy of the Murumbi Trust, will recognise overall artistic achievement as well as outstanding performance in specific segments such as music, dancing, modelling, photography and even for Mr. Kenya who, for 16 years, was Mickey Ragos – the muscle-man model who featured on international African Heritage tours for 22 years.

One of the special appearances at the opening event will be the Crown Prince of the Congolese Kingdom of Kuba, Prince Kwete Kwete who will be on hand to witness the premier screening in Kenya of Kire Godal’s documentary film, Kingdom of Kuba.

Prince Kwete Kwete will also join Donovan’s campaign to petition UNESCO to recognize the tremendous impact that Kuba cloth has made on 20th Century contemporary art and culture.

“I’d love to see UNESCO give Kuba culture World Heritage status, to ensure the Kuba cloth designs are never destroyed,” said Donovan.

Kuba culture will also feature significantly in Beckwith’s and Fisher’s forthcoming volumes of their book series on African Ceremonies. 

The American and Australian photographers who first met at African Heritage shortly after its inception in 1972 will also launch their latest book on the Dinka on the opening night of the Fortieth Anniversary celebrations.

There will be a bit of déjà vu during the opening since both Beckwith and Fisher exhibited once before with Magdalene Odundo.

Deja vu moments

It was in 1985 during the United Nation’s Decade on Women Conference celebrated at African Heritage with Odundo exhibiting her prize-winning pots, Fisher launching her first book, Africa Adorned and Beckwith launching hers, entitled Maasai.

The best déjà vu moments of the month-long celebrations are however expected to be most visible in the films that will feature at Alliance Francaise on April 16th and 23rd.

African Heritage Road Show will offer the most vivid reminder of what Donovan’s Pan African extravaganzas used to look like.

These were the colourful cabaret-styled fashion shows that were held almost every year in the 1980s and 1990s.

Featuring costuming that combined both traditional ceremonial garb with contemporary fashion designs by professionals such as Jane Owinga, Mary Onyango, Erica Boswell and Alan Donovan, the first AH shows to go global didn’t take off until the 1980s when the African Heritage Band was first formed by Job Seda.

African Heritage Road Show won’t cover all the incredible trips that Kenyan musicians, models and dancers made with African Heritage and Donovan.

For instance, it doesn’t cover the AH tours of Madagascar, Switzerland or the United States. Nor does it cover the very first world tour of an AH ‘road show’, which took 30 Kenyan models and musicians to Belgium. 

But the film does cover their 11-city tour of Austria and Germany.

It also includes the biggest AH extravaganza of all, which was part of the African Renaissance showcase that was funded by Coca Cola East and Southern African states.

Donovan’s abode

The other film that will conjure up memories of the distant past and of more the recent times is the documentary entitled African Heritage House.

Focused on Donovan’s current abode, which he modelled like the Dogon mud mosques of Mali, the film is about the aesthetic distillation of more than 40 years of his collections of Pan African art, artifacts and textiles, starting from the late 1960s when he worked in Nigeria, distributing food to starving children in Biafra for USAID.

Retiring from that job in 1969, Donovan’s rugged sojourn across the continent in his Volkswagon mini-van is well covered in his autobiographical account, My Journey through African Heritage which Kenway published in 2006.

One of the most memorable moments of that trip was his ‘discovery’ of the Turkana people whose pristine culture was relatively unscathed by British colonialism and globalisation.

Having studied African Art and International Relations for a Master’s degree at UCLA in the 1960s, his appreciation of the serendipitous encounter with the Turkana was immense.

The American decided to sell his mini-van on the spot in order to hang out for several months in Turkana (then known as the Northern Frontier District) and use that money to buy at least one of every artifact the people produced by hand.

That included everything from their cooking pots and milk containers (akatum) to wooden walking sticks (ubiro), headrests that doubled as stools (ekecolong) and ostrich egg necklaces.

Donovan’s time in Turkana was well spent. His collection formed the basis of his first art exhibition held in Nairobi in 1970 at Studio Arts 68, an early City Centre gallery run by another American named Sherri Hunt.

“The only African that came to that exhibition was Joseph Murumbi,” recalls Donovan. “He asked me to return to Turkana and duplicate my collection for him, which I did.”

That close encounter launched a relationship that would span the rest of Murumbi’s life and still goes strong as is evident by Donovan’s determination to keep the Murumbi legacy alive.

The grandfather of Kenyan art has had the Kenya National Archives house the Murumbi Collection of Pan African art and ensured that a chunk of Nairobi City Park is dedicated to the Murumbis’ memory and to Joe’s love of African art.

“Sculptures by four of Joe’s favourite East African artists are standing just near his grave,” Donovan said, alluding to the four monumental sculptures in the Park by Expedito, Nnaggenda, Odoch Ameny and Ong’esa, each meant to commemorate Murumbi.

That initial meeting in 1970 also became the basis for Murumbi suggesting that he and Donovan start their own Pan African Gallery, the first in Kenya and possibly in Africa.

“He said it had always been his dream to establish such a gallery in Kenya, which is why we opened African Heritage in 1972, just before Christmas,” he added.

Murumbi, who was Kenya’s first Foreign Minister and second VP, was a complex individual whose life and times will be featured in the film, A Road not taken.

It will be screened on April 23rd and followed by a talk on Murumbi by Kenya’s former anti-corruption ‘czar’ John Githongo.

What could well be the high point of the 40th anniversary celebrations of African Heritage is the musical concert on Friday night of April 20th.

The concert will feature well-known Kenyan singers Idi Achieng and Ayub Ogada, who served as the backbone of the African Heritage Band for many years, up until other band members (including Gido Kibukosya, Wally Amalemba, Sam Esikhaty and Jack Odongo) decided to take the band in a different direction than Ogada wanted to go.

“They wanted to get into more Afro-fusion (read Westernised) sounds while I wanted to stick with strengthening the indigenous African sound of my music, so we had to go our separate ways,” Ogada said.

Ogada will also be performing with the Bomas of Kenya and the divine dancers Fernando Anuang’a, whose professional dance company is based in Paris, and Dorothy Achieng.

So while some have suggested that the celebration of 40 years of African Heritage is less like an anniversary and more like a resurrection of a company that practically died in 2002, the reality is that either way one looks at it, African Heritage pioneered the contemporary African arts in Kenya and the revival of its spirit and its history is long overdue.