The Sisi Kwa Sisi Collective was founded in 1983 amid turbulent political conditions following Kenya’s failed military coup in 1982. Etale Sukuro is a cofounder of the group, which was made up of 12 artists, including Kangara wa Njambi (b. 1957), Kabacia Gatu (b. 1951), Gakunju Kaigwa (b. 1958), Mwaniki wa Gachia, Zarina Patel (1935–2024), Kahare Miano, Gikonyo Maina, Mwaura Ndekere, and John Diang’a (b. 1945).¹ In this conversation, scholar and curator Donald Maingi traces Sukuro’s artistic journey—from his early collaboration with Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) through the failed campaigns to establish Kenya’s first national art gallery, to the open-air traveling exhibitions organized by Sisi Kwa Sisi.

Donald Maingi: Sukuro, can you tell us a little about your journey as an artist? What first inspired you to pursue art? Tell us about your upbringing, your personal experiences, and the influences that helped shape your art and your role in cofounding the Sisi Kwa Sisi Collective.

Etale Sukuro: I was born in 1954 and educated in Tanzania. I studied fine art up to A-level and went on to do literature at the University of Dar es Salaam. In 1976, I came to Kenya, and I started teaching at St. Saviour High School in Nairobi and then moved on to Naromoru Girls High School in Murang’a, teaching literature and Swahili language. But in 1977, I moved back to Nairobi to join the late professor Wangari Maathai in her department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Nairobi and, also, to work with her at the National Council of Women of Kenya. She was the chairperson then.²

In the Veterinary department, I was a demonstrator and illustrator. And at the National Council of Women of Kenya, I was a contributor to their magazine Kenyan Women Today. I was also the illustrator for that magazine. In that same year, 1977, Professor Wangari Maathai (1940 – 2011) came up with the idea of the Green Belt Movement. I did the logo for the Green Belt Movement, which is still in use now. And I also did all the illustrations for social marketing for the Green Belt Movement. This inspired me to do my first solo exhibition in 1978 at the French Cultural Center. 

It was during this period that Professor Wangari Maathai was being hounded out of office and the Kenya National Council of Women was being dismantled by the government. The regime launched Maendeleo ya Wanawake to take over from the National Council of Women, which had been an umbrella for all women’s associations in Kenya. It was during those struggles that my resistance to the political regime grew more and more.

At the same time, the University of Nairobi was doing, for the first time, a traveling theater around Kenya, and it was also banned by that regime. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025) had done some plays, and they were also facing problems with the government.³ In 1979, there was a suggestion to establish the first national art gallery. We had not, up to then, had a national art gallery. We have had several galleries that have come up and tried to help where there was a gap. During that time, I was the chairman of the Central Art Clubs of Kenya, and I was part of the committee to establish the Kenya National Art Gallery. 

DM: Could you walk us through the founding of Sisi Kwa Sisi? How did you first meet as a group of artists—among them Kangara wa Njambi, Kabacia Gatu, Gakunju Kaigwa, Mwaniki wa Gachia, Zarina Patel, Kahare Miano, Gikonyo Maina, Mwaura Ndekere, and John Diang’a? What united you? What was your initial vision for the collective in contributing to the formation of a national art gallery? And how did the name Sisi Kwa Sisi emerge within that context?

ES: Let me just start with Sisi Kwa Sisi. It is a Swahili phrase that can mean “us by us” or “us for us.” “Us by us” means artist by artist, [that is,] Kenyan artist by Kenyan artists. “Us for us” means Kenyan art is for Kenyan people.

Back in 1979, the Kenyan government allocated money for the first time to renovate a former commercial bank building into an international art gallery. We—as artists’ associations, including Kenya Arts Designers and the Arts Club of Kenya, of which I was chairman—were contacted and asked to curate the exhibition that would inaugurate that building as a national art gallery. We went around the country as a committee and collected over 3,000 pieces from Kenyan artists, [so that we would be] ready to put them up once the renovation was finished.

We had a lot of problems with some people in the government in selecting the kind of work that could be shown. As we went on, we realized that most of the important works were going to be left out. But the worst thing that happened is that one government official came to tell the committee: “This exhibition is not going to be for Kenyan artists only. It is going to be with the Murumbi collection.”⁴ Murumbi was one of Kenya’s first vice presidents after independence—a staunch collector of artifacts from all over Africa. His artifacts were supposed to share the inaugural exhibition with our work. We discussed [this] as a committee and realized if we refused, we would be thrown out altogether and the national art gallery would not even start. So we agreed.

That was just the beginning of more problems, because the same officials came back and told us the inaugural exhibition would be the Murumbi collection alone. This was not acceptable. When I saw this misfortune happen, I went to the Department of Culture—which had been formed that same year, in 1979—and saw the minister, who directed me to the director of culture James Kangwana. Kangwana was one of the founders of Paa ya Paa, the famous gallery in Kenya. He agreed with me that there was a need for a national art gallery and told me that since this would now require political will from the highest office in the land, we needed to produce artworks that the president himself would officially unveil. These works would then be taken to the provinces—at that time we had eight provinces, not counties—and through that, we could ask the government for space to house the collection.

So Kangwana asked me to go and do research in all eight provinces and depict the traditional architecture of one nationality from each province. I did eight large paintings (fig.1)—48 inches by 16 feet each—which were to be taken to the provinces after the president saw them. The exhibition, called Utamaduni wa Sanaa (The Traditions of Art), went up in 1981 at City Hall in Nairobi. It was a major exhibition. Unfortunately, the traveling component never happened. And those eight paintings were never sent to the provinces. As I speak, I know a number of them were given away to Chinese officials who came to build the national stadium in Kenya. The others . . . I don’t know where they are.

Our second chance to create a center for Kenyan art died in 1981. The artists on that committee—some of whom had also been part of the first attempt at the National Archives building—sat together. One of the key members was Kangara wa Njambi. Some members of the Utamaduni wa Sanaa (The Traditions of Art) committee—Kabacia Gatu, myself, and others—decided to take some of the works that had been exhibited and add more, and then to take them on a traveling exhibition.⁵ This traveling exhibition was informed by what had happened with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want)—and the events surrounding the University of Nairobi’s traveling theater. There were many other factors that had inspired us to sit down and decide that we had to take our art to our people. And our content had to address Kenyan people. We were no longer going to do what had been done in previous years—when, basically, most Kenyan artists produced souvenirs for tourists. That’s what happened for many years. So we started Sisi Kwa Sisi.

DM: The art world in the 1980s was really a very busy environment. We had ex-Mau Mau artists coming up—like Samwel Wanjau (1936–2020), a rural ex-Mau Mau freedom fighter, and Edward Njenga (1922–2022), an urban ex-Mau Mau freedom fighter.⁶ What was your relationship with these artists? At the time, ex-Mau Mau freedom fighters were really vilified politically, and yet here they were, making art, just as Sisi Kwa Sisi was also springing up.

ES: Samwel Wanjau and Edward Njenga are my seniors. What was very interesting—what intrigues us—is the fact that they could express the politics before and after independence in Kenya, mainly the oppressive politics, through sculpture, which is very difficult. More interesting is the fact that expressing this through sculpture was interpreted as less threatening by the regime than paintings, which are more illustrative.

When you look at Edward Njenga’s work (fig. 3) and Samwel Wanjau’s work (figs. 2, 4), it is very clear and obvious that they were not doing these works in order to sell them. A number of [their subjects] look very sad, very violent. They were clearly producing this work to express the political, social, and economic situation in the country. And they inspired us—all the more so for the fact that by using that medium, sculpture, they could express so much. We realized what they had done—and that we should pick it up from there and put it in our own work. And this is the work that would then resonate with Kenyan people and be understood by them in terms of its context.

DM: What would you say really shaped Sisi Kwa Sisi at its early stages? Artists like Kangara wa Njambi, Zarina Patel—how did their practices fit into the collective’s early vision?

ES: Right from the outset, when we decided we were going to do work as Sisi Kwa Sisi, it actually meant doing different work from what had always been done—pieces geared toward pleasing expatriates, tourists, and some rich Kenyans. We decided that our work—us, Sisi—was going to be addressed to Kenyan people, squarely addressing the issues going on in Kenya in the past, present, and probably the future.

The oppression that was going on was not anything new—it had been going on [for a long time], and it was getting worse by the day. So we decided to tackle the disappearance of Kenyan culture. We decided to tackle neocolonialism and imperialism. If you look at a number of works, you’ll see two of the major issues depicted are food security and safety. And another is oppression. There was complete suppression of freedom of speech during the regime at that time. In fact, one had to be very careful when about to say anything—even just mentioning the name of the president. You had to look left, right, front, and back. Who is around? Just in case you might be picked up like anybody else. So in doing this kind of work, we knew the dangers.

But one fact was on our side: the level of education—or exposure—of politicians in relation to art was very low. They took it that art is just for pleasure. They couldn’t conceive that art could be a tool for education or a tool for the communication of ideology. So to that extent, we had freedom. We were able to express ourselves.

At that very same time, cartoonists—including Terry Hirst (1932–2015) and Paul Kelemba otherwise known as Maddo (b. 1962)—were coming up with artworks that questioned the regime. Our friend the late Wahome Mutahi (1954–2003) was a writer, playwright, and columnist for the Daily Nation newspaper. He, together with my friend Paul Kelemba—going by the name Maddo, one of the most famous cartoonists in Kenya—worked to depict the same oppressive behavior of the regime in a humorous way, and they went as far as setting up a traveling theater for one of Wahome Mutahi’s plays. It was also banned. Having both visual and performing artists continuously agitating for freedom of speech, questioning the bad behavior of the regime, the oppression, the killings . . . We decided that since our work was not for sale in the first place, we might as well make it serve an educational purpose.

DM: What was the relationship between Nairobi street sign painting and the early stages of Sisi Kwa Sisi? You’ve written about the history of sign painting as a practice within Kenya since the 1930s. What was the impact of that visual culture on these young artists who established their practices in the early 1980s?

ES: Unfortunately, a lot of murals done by these artists in bars, hotels, churches, and marketplaces have been whitewashed (fig. 5).⁷ But if you look at some of our work—when I say our, I mean Sisi Kwa Sisi’s work—you’ll see that it is illustrative. It could be more graphic at times, but it is illustrative (figs. 6–11). Sign painting is one of the art forms that truly reached Kenyan people more than any other throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.⁸ [That was] because these artists did more or less social-marketing work: signage, illustrative paintings, murals in bars and public places, comical at times to make their work more interesting to their patrons.

They inspired us in a way that made us realize that if they have done this for all this long, then we could take our art to Kenyan people—starting with portable works and eventually doing prints. We could take our work to places where a lot of people come—not because they are coming to see an exhibition, not like in galleries, but because they are coming to do something else. And while there, they are able to view these art pieces. That is exactly where our traveling art exhibitions picked up their inspiration.

DM: What was the public perception of the open-air exhibitions? What impact did they have on people who had never visited an art gallery? And how did that help shape the Sisi Kwa Sisi workshops and art promotions?

ES: When the second attempt to establish the Kenya National Art Gallery through the Department of Culture failed, and the traveling exhibition from the Utamaduni Asani exhibition was shelved, we had already built exhibition panels. I had initiated that at the Department of Culture. I borrowed them from the department, and with our friends, we decided to take them to the biggest marketplaces in Nairobi (fig. 12), to the slums of Nairobi, to the streets of Nairobi.

We decided we had to document the sentiment—the feeling and the feedback from those who came to see our works. A young man was stationed to write down responses. They wrote a lot. I have volumes upon volumes of comments (fig. 13). One of the most remarkable—which really moved me—came from a young child from a school in one of the biggest slums. They wrote: “I did not know we had such people who can draw such pictures in our country.” I just couldn’t believe it. And some of them were saying, “We only thought this would be in our textbooks, not being displayed for us.”

We had some sessions from around nine in the morning until six in the evening, and we would have 20,000 people or more—we couldn’t count. Why? Because they were passing by or they were in the market. Women would go on with their business as usual, but whoever was coming by was going to see what we were displaying (fig. 14). The initial work we displayed had mild political content—because, number one, the panels would have been taken away from us immediately, and number two, that would have meant the end of our traveling exhibition. So we were introducing the content of our political dissent slowly.

What we learned from this exhibition is that it was really high time—counting from independence, it had been, God knows, forty or fifty years—that Kenyans had no place, no way, to go and see Kenyan artwork produced by Kenyan artists. We realized we could go on with this, but it was quite daunting for us financially. We had to hire vehicles to carry these panels. Some broke in strong winds, and we had to pay the Department of Culture for replacements.

Amazingly, some of the comments we got were, “How can I get one of these pictures to hang in my place?” We realized that if we were selling our original work at the price equivalent to somebody’s half salary, we had to do something different to be able to sell copies at 100 shillings—less than a dollar. We realized the only way to do this was to make prints. So we set up a printing workshop in my studio (fig. 15). We trained more artists in screen printing, etching, and so forth. When we went to the open-air traveling exhibitions, we would have works that were affordable to the people coming—and we would have variety. Because it is very important that in any of those day-to-day exhibitions [in which] you found us—four or five of us, or sometimes I was alone—if we had many other artists and different styles, there were better chances that we could sell these works and finance our traveling exhibitions.

DM: What could you say was the legacy of open-air art exhibitions in shaping and redefining Kenyan contemporary art in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s? What was the impact as Sisi Kwa Sisi evolved and as the struggle for multiparty democracy was intensified?

ES: The two failed attempts to establish the Kenya National Art Gallery—one at the former KCB [Kenya Commercial Bank] building and one through the Department of Culture—made it obvious we could not go on with the traveling art exhibition indefinitely; it was expensive and the Department of Culture, after seeing some of the content of our work, took away the panels. So we could no longer exhibit in the same way.

It was at that moment that another idea came to me. What if—since everything has a price in this country—what if I turned the whole thing of taking art to the people, the same way as the bar muralists were doing, and still be able to pass on messages and influence Kenyan people through art? So I started Sanaa Art Promotions specifically to do social marketing.⁹ I got NGOs to fund some of our work. We were doing traveling theater. We were doing murals all over the country (figs. 16–17). At one time, we had 120 muralists employed by Sanaa Art Promotion. In total, by 2006, we had 288 artists working with us.

What did we do? If you look at the murals—some saying, “Your vote is your right”—these are the kinds of works we were doing in marketplaces and schools. We were holding meetings and small reenactments of what we were going to put on the mural in public places. So we had theater and visual arts going together to address different issues in society.

These artists went on to be teachers and influencers in this country as far as art is concerned. We have thousands of murals in this country inspired by Sanaa Art Promotion. Many artists have formed other groups using the same model. I believe the Kenya National Art Gallery is evolving through this kind of work. And as more Kenyan people are exposed to Kenyan artists’ work, they will demand the spaces and forums needed to have these works developed, conserved, and still displayed to the majority of Kenyans.

This conversation took place at a meeting of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Africa group at MoMA in March 2025. The 2025 C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and leader of the C-MAP Africa Group). Read more about C-MAP here

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