In Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night (1956; fig. 1), Tanzanian-born artist Sam Ntiro (1923–1993) depicts a scene typical of the Chagga peoples, a group living on the southern slopes of Mount Kilmanjaro to which he belonged. Rendered in loose, swirling brushstrokes, the men carry mbege, a kind of banana beer traditional to the Chagga, as an offering to the bride. Transported in gourd containers on top of their heads, mbege is produced through a labor-intensive process involving the cultivation, harvest, and ripening of bananas, which are then mashed and cooked and subsequently left to ferment for several days before being strained and left to sit overnight. Surrounded by a canopy of trees against the evening sky, the men advance with their banana beer across the rolling slopes characteristic of Chagga country. Their onward movement is echoed in Ntiro’s wavelike brushstrokes, which define the verdant green ground below.

After graduating from London’s Slade School of Fine Art in 1955, Ntiro moved to Kampala, Uganda, where he taught at Makerere College and, in 1956, executed Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night. In 1960, the work was included in a solo exhibition in New York City at the Merton Simpson Gallery, from which it was purchased by The Museum of Modern Art, making Ntiro the first African artist to enter the museum’s collection (fig. 2).

As exemplified by Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night, Ntiro was committed to depicting scenes of Chagga country. Due to this preoccupation in his oeuvre, the transnational interstices of Ntiro’s work have often been overlooked. In response, I wish to explore the role of memory in his practice. Although he would travel back to Kilimanjaro, Ntiro had not lived in Tanzania for twelve years when he completed Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night.¹ “He lives far away from his own people and country,” wrote a Ugandan colonial official who supported Ntiro’s application to the Slade in 1951.² I contend that Ntiro’s memories of Chagga country are a product of distance and thus, his practice complicates the frameworks of art history that limit understandings of his work to national and continental narratives.³

Ntiro Abroad

In his application to the Slade (fig. 3), Ntiro states that he “did Art for the first time [sic]” while studying at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, between 1944 and 1947. Born in 1923, Ntiro completed primary and secondary school in Moshi, a municipality on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro, before leaving Tanzania to pursue his tertiary education in Uganda. At Makerere, Ntiro was taught by Margaret Trowell, a Slade alumna who brought formal art education to Uganda in 1937.⁴ Wary of imposing Western techniques, Trowell often left students alone “to develop an art of their own,” prompting them only with verbal description.⁵ Trowell has been criticized for this approach,⁶ which was premised on an essential difference between Africans and Europeans, and Ntiro has often been dismissed as a faithful disciple of his former teacher, denying him subjectivity.⁷

Upon graduation, Ntiro stayed in Kampala, joining the college’s teaching faculty. With Trowell’s encouragement, Ntiro applied to the Slade in 1951, enrolling in 1952. His classmates included Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudanese, born 1930), Paula Rego (Portuguese, born 1935), and Menhat Helmy (Egyptian, 1925–2004). On April 24, 1954, Trowell commented on Ntiro in a letter to the Slade’s secretary I. E. Tregarthen Jenkin, “I’m glad our Sam Ntiro is doing so happily at Slade but I wish you’d make a combined effort to make him stop painting nostalgic memories of Chagga country and really take a look at England instead.”⁸ Recalling his former classmate, El-Salahi remarked that while students were responding to Cezanne and “painting apples,” Ntiro was painting images of cattle.⁹ This refusal described by El-Salahi in 2012 is compelling in that perhaps Ntiro believed that Cezanne and his apples lacked any direct relevance to him. As Ntiro would later state, “My painting is a memory of what I know best of the life of my people.”¹⁰

After graduating from the Slade in 1955, Ntiro was met with commercial success in London, debuting with Piccadilly Gallery in October of that year. He also returned to his teaching post at Makerere. Echoing Trowell’s comment, the British press celebrated Ntiro for having been “untouched” by his exposure to Western art education despite his adoption of many of the formal qualities of European modernism.¹¹ Working against these stereotypical responses, I contend that Ntiro’s practice was one enabled and forged through his distance from Chagga country, beginning in Uganda and continuing in Europe. His paintings act as a repository for memories of his home, a gesture only made possible by his departure.

Ntiro indirectly returned to the subject of banana beer in the one of three paintings he was commissioned to create for the 1962 opening of the new Commonwealth Institute building on Kensington High Street in London. In Banana Harvest (fig. 4), he cites an earlier stage in the process of making banana beer: a group of men displace the wooden pole that had propped up one of the banana trees to allow for the collection of fruit, while others gather fruit that has fallen to the ground. Another of these paintings, Cattle Drinking (fig. 5), shows the cattle keenly remembered by El-Salahi. In both works, Ntiro depicts the same rolling hills of Chagga country seen in his 1956 work, but here they have taken over the horizon line, dominating the canvas. There is also specific care given to botany as Ntiro preserves the landscape of his home on the canvas.¹²

Ntiro’s third painting for the Commonwealth Institute building, Village Gathering (fig. 6), depicts a group of people huddled together on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. If there is an orientation toward the past in Ntiro’s work, his paintings simultaneously propose a future.¹³ Returning to Men Taking Banana Beer to the Bride by Night, I contend that Ntiro chose to preserve the traditions of the Chagga at a time when they were threatened by colonial imposition. Ntiro was an ardent supporter of independence. Writing to Tregarthen Jenkin on October 16, 1958, he responded to an inquiry about the Capricorn Africa Society: “It is regarded by Africans in East Africa as a means of pacifying Africans and keeping them from attaining self-government” (fig. 7).¹⁴ Tanzania gained independence in 1961, and Ntiro served as the first East African High Commissioner to the Court of Saint James in London from 1961 until 1964. For his paintings propose a future for Tanzania premised on a past of shared traditions and self-government, one in which the Chagga people are in control of their land—from the means of production it enabled to the communal decisions surrounding it.

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In comparison to the historical recentness of mediums like video and installation, painting comes freighted with heavy histories, traditions, and pedagogies. It has constituted a site where debates of modernism and “primitivism” have played out and where, as cultures clashed, localized forms and imported styles were joined. While video, installation, and photography are often considered the globalized media of contemporary art, oil painting carries a culturally loaded set of connotations as a long-standing “Western” medium. This complicated heritage is taken up by the British-Kenyan artist Michael Armitage, whose paintings respond to contemporary issues and events in Kenya through the ghosts of past picturing. 

In his work, Armitage draws upon both Western and East African art history. His reference systems brings together his immersion in both of these worlds. Born in Kenya to an English father and Kikuyu mother, Armitage spent his childhood in East Africa before attending boarding school in the United Kingdom and training at London’s Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy Schools. Writings on Armitage’s work have often paid close attention to the way he invokes European artists, but little has been said about their East African counterparts, presumably due to the historically Eurocentric nature of art history¹ But it is this coupling of parallel cultural histories that interests me. 

Reverse appropriation

In Nyali Beach Boys (2016), Armitage revisits Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), transforming its central subject of five nude female prostitutes to five nude male prostitutes, known colloquially as “beach boys” who comb the beaches of Mombasa looking for wealthy female European tourists. The group of young men, rendered in shades of black, blue, purple, and yellow, stand against a tropical background of the same color palette. Their faces are reduced to a series of thin lines and concave eye sockets. They appear impenetrable and masklike, evocative of the African sculptures that Picasso used in the service of modernism. In his depiction, Armitage replaces Picasso’s basket of fruit, a symbol of female sexuality, with a black cat, an overt art historical reference to prostitution, most famously seen in Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863).

Armitage’s reworking of Picasso can be described in terms of what artist and art historian Olu Oguibe has termed “reverse appropriation,” as in a strategy of formal appropriation of the language and idioms of Western visual expression by the colonized.² Oguibe coined the term with regards to the Nigerian artist Aina Onabolu (1882–1963), who mastered the forms and techniques of western artistic expression. As he notes, Onabolu proved that the arts of drawing and painting were not culture-specific and could not manifest the superiority of one culture or people over another.³ The example of Onabolu disrupts the heart of colonial discourse, namely the perpetuation of fictional differences upon which the colonial project was constructed.⁴ Art and aesthetic sensibility were used to signify the unbridgeable distance between “savagery” and culture.⁵ Within this paradigm, European modernists alone could appropriate artistic forms without compromising their creativity; they controlled the axis of appropriation. Alternatively, non-Western artists who appropriated from Western sources were deemed derivative. 

Oguibe’s discussion on the appropriation of imperial culture is reminiscent of the relationship between mid-century African art movements and Western primitivism. Art historian Elizabeth Harney has written on the reclamation of African motifs from within the primitivist aesthetic by Senegal’s École de Dakar.⁶ Under the new post-independence government led by President Léopold Sédar Senghor, the École de Dakar promoted an aesthetic that corresponded to the philosophy of Negritude.⁷ Many of these artists chose to represent a pan-African heritage through objects preferred by the European primitive art market and modern artists.⁸ Harney argues that those involved with Negritude intentionally played with Western notions of primitivism to give a new accent to signs of “traditional” Africa and, in the process, expose the imperialist genealogy of modernist primitivism.⁹ Armitage’s recourse to Western art history issues a similar “reverse appropriation” in that it offers a critique of the appropriative colonizing lens of modernist painters like Picasso.

Armitage locates his recourse to western art history in east Africa. Instead of canvas, a traditionally Western surface, Armitage works with oil paint on lubugo bark cloth.¹⁰ The cloth itself is created by removing a thin layer of bark from the Mutaba tree that is subsequently beaten by hand into a thin, flexible material. Protected by UNESCO, the production of bark cloth is an ancient craft of the Baganda people in southern Uganda where it is worn by kings and chiefs during ceremonial events and used as a burial shroud. Armitage sources lengths of the cloth and stitches them together before they are stretched and primed. He incorporates these stitches and the material’s occasional holes and irregularities into his compositions. While often noted as a defining feature of Armitage’s work, the medium of bark cloth has been a staple for many contemporary artists in Uganda, such as Fred Mutebi and Ronex Ahimbisibwe.¹¹ In the past, modernists such as Ethiopian-Armenian artist Skunder Boghossian used bark cloth in their work to reflect the advent of decolonization. For Armitage, it seems that bark cloth represents both a search for a medium that is East African and a tool for decolonizing the overladen histories of oil painting. 

In Nyali Beach Boys, the social experience of Kenyan beach boys is highlighted by way of Armitage’s appropriation of Picasso. This art historical reworking challenges an isolated understanding of the beach boys, compelling audiences to consider their longue durée. Anthropologist George Paul Meiu has written about the history of Kenyan beach boys. According to Meiu, in the 1980s, the growing markets of “tribal” and “ethnic” culture drew Western consumers to Africa in search of transformative, authentic Otherness – the same impetus shared by modernist painters.¹² In response to this opportunity, Kenyan men migrated to coastal tourist destinations in order to sell souvenirs and perform traditional dances for European tourists. Many engaged in transactional sex or marriage with European women who were attracted to the thrall of the exotic, namely the virile Maasai warrior.¹³ Through these relationships, Kenyan beach boys expected to acquire wealth, which they would then use to marry local women and speed up their ritual initiation into elderhood.¹⁴ The lubugo cloth is also connected to the tourism discussed by Meiu; Armitage first encountered it in a tourist shop where it was sold as coasters and placemats, despite its sacred status amongst the Baganda. Picasso’s Demoiselles, the beach boys, and the lubugo souvenirs are thus entangled in the same Western stereotypes around an Africa available for consumption. The complicated histories of painting deployed by Armitage enable viewers to see these connections across time and the ways in which the beach boys comprise a longer trajectory premised on Africa’s exoticization. 

Rally paintings

In 2017, a year after Nyali Beach Boys was completed, Armitage began to work on a series of paintings based around events associated with Kenya’s general election and the violence that ensued as a result of ethnic rivalries and claims of fraud. The resultant history-style paintings were informed by the artist’s experience of an opposition rally in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park and images taken from broadcast media. In The promise of change (2018), a toddler, dressed in orange red robes and a plumed hat, addresses an indistinguishable crowd from a stage. Three adults bend over behind him; one of the men pokes out a long, bright red tongue. The third figure on the left, a woman, appears attached from the bottom of her hemline to a stand of decapitated heads. There are several frogs of enlarged proportions depicted: one shares the stage with the toddler and two more are suspended above the crowd. The strangeness of the scene is enhanced by the pink sky against which several acacia trees stand in the background. In another painting from the series, The Fourth Estate (2017), Armitage renders a purple tree that emerges from a sea of people attending a rally. The tree’s expansive branches are occupied by a dozen or so supporters, one of whom displays a banner depicting a large frog, while two additional frog banners are waved by the crowd below.  

Armitage’s paintings on the rallies recuperate a series of Kenyan and Ugandan artists to the attention of global audiences. Though several of these artists were featured in the landmark exhibition, Seven Stories About Modern Art (1995), at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the writing on the art history of East Africa remains thin, making Armitage’s work even more significant. In the catalogue for Seven Stories About Modern Art, curator Wanjiku Nyachae suggested that modernist painters skewed the reception and exposure of art from East Africa: there was an absence of the sculptures and masks made famous by Picasso in the region, which led to its dismissal by scholars and collectors.¹⁵ She wrote that this alleged absence endures in perceptions around contemporary art from East Africa.¹⁶

Armitage’s treatment of electoral violence and the political landscape of Kenya evokes the work of students at Uganda’s Makerere School of Fine Art in the early 1980s whose paintings addressed the failures of the postcolonial state in the wake of Idi Admin’s regime.¹⁷ In Misfortune (1985), Mathias Muwonge Kyazze visualizes Uganda’s entrapment in a cycle of violence and destruction through a spider web packed with prey.¹⁸ There is a sense of several generations besieged by violence: a bird and its chicks struggle to escape from the claws of mythical creatures, while a skeleton attacks a chained pregnant woman whose womb has been torn open. An owl, the Ugandan symbol of death, watches over the carnage. The art created at this moment in time seems to provide Armitage with a case study on the confluence of painting and political unrest in East Africa.

Armitage also calls upon the Kenyan-based artists Jak Katarikawe and Meek Gichugu whose careers were forged through Nairobi’s notable Gallery Watatu and Paa Ya Paa Gallery. Their paintings were even included in Armitage’s first major institutional exhibition, Paradise Edict (2020) at Munich’s Haus der Kunst. In The promise of change and The Fourth Estate, Armitage’s dream-like portrayal of the rallies, where reality gives way to the imagination, is reminiscent of Katarikawe.¹⁹ The paintings’ color palette adopts the artist’s trademark pastel hues of yellow, blue, pink, and purple. More than just dreamlike, the sinister and surreal atmosphere portrayed by Armitage seems to draw from the world of Gichugu where bodies are distorted and tongues unfurl against a landscape of acacia trees. 

Long-ago dubbed by Western critics as “Africa’s Chagall” due to his depiction of dreams, animals, and his home village,²⁰ a popular story goes that when Katarikawe heard of his European predecessor, he suggested that Chagall had copied him.²¹ This anecdote gets at the lingering centrality of a European canon of painting, in which artists who fall outside are made sense of through the canon, but they themselves are secondary to it, or optional to the art history syllabus. Alternatively, Armitage’s paintings place European and East African artists on equal footing, refuting these derivative accounts. As the discipline of art history attempts to become more global and attuned to the legacies of colonialism, Armitage’s paintings weave together, like the stitches of his lubugo cloth, these interconnected histories.

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