Missing and Lost People’s Day also points toward the complex and empathetic politics of an artist who has reflected on his homeland for four decades. The painting shows seven protestors—three men, three women, and a child—each dressed in monochrome Sudanese attire. They appear emblematic, though Elmur’s subjects always look half realistic and half like characters in a story. Six of them hold white pieces of paper, each of which contains the image of a missing person. Several cover their own faces with the depicted face, as if it were their own. The effect is evidentiary and stirring, as if each protestor were two people at once—the living and the dead.

It is also a remarkably self-reflexive painting, because photography is at the very heart of Elmur’s practice and, specifically, the inspiration for the works he has been making since his mid-30s, of which Missing and Lost People’s Day is exemplary. Its profound political commitment also reflects the inextricability of art and politics, for better and for worse, in the Sudanese context. Sudan’s modern art history typically begins with the Khartoum School¹, which in the postcolonial excitement of the 1960s sought to find and represent a specifically Sudanese identity. When Elmur, who was born in 1966, studied at the College of Fine Art and Applied Art in Khartoum, the lead tutor was Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, cofounder of the Crystalist movement that challenged the foundations of the Khartoum School.(Elmur, under pressure from his family to earn a living, studied graphic design, but he painted in his free time and sought advice from Ishaq and other lecturers.) The Crystalists aimed to break free from art’s ties to nationalism and class and move toward Conceptualist underpinnings, particularly as elaborated through a study of the intrinsic properties of materials. However, as the country’s political situation worsened in the 1980s, many artists fled to Europe or neighboring countries. When Omar al-Bashir seized power in 1989, his repressive regime began instrumentalizing art, pushing artists to produce pastiches of Islamic designs or Sudanese identity. Elmur was targeted by the conservative government. Soon after the coup, the authorities deemed one of his cartoons inflammatory—an image he had drawn for the newspaper and magazine where he worked after university—and he was fired from his job and then arrested. Afterward, he fled to Nairobi, where many Sudanese artists were already living.

When he returned to Khartoum, he painted furiously, developing the style that he is now best known for, with photography at its center. As he often tells the story, after Sudan achieved independence in 1956, the state mandated that each citizen carry an identity card.² Suddenly, all of Sudan needed to have their picture taken, and so Elmur’s enterprising father opened a photography studio—the Studio Kamal, which was adjacent to his own father’s barbershop—to meet this demand. As a child, Elmur was fascinated by the rejected photos that were kept in a tin box: double exposures or photographs in which a subject turned a head or arm, leaving a scar of a blur across the picture. These images, as well as others from his archival collection, became the basis for his new paintings. The technological misfires account for some of the glimpses of oddness in his portraiture: the wonky cheeks of one subject’s face, or the second chin that unexpectedly protrudes from another’s. Sometimes the double exposures are easier to spot because a subject appears to have two or three faces, with the extras hiding behind the original like discarded personalities—or, as in Missing and Lost People’s Day, take the form of an image of a face that is held in front of an actual face. These glitches are commensurate with the overall strangeness of Elmur’s work. His figures’ blocklike bodies seem at once too bulbous in their shape and too linear. Subjects are often shown in head-on formality—like they are posing for a studio photographer—or holding animals or plants as if to record their own role as caretakers, occupying the frame with impenetrable or perhaps simply worried facial expressions.

Elmur’s decision to put photography at the core of his work is a loaded one. The photograph played an important role in colonialism, where it reinforced the racist views of the European administrators. Popular images of the time showed “newly discovered” people in tribal dress, submitting them to the taxonomies and hierarchies laid out by colonial authorities. Others showed crowds arrayed as passive subjects around a central European administrator, clearly visible by his white skin and, more often than not, his obstinately white linen attire. (Elmur has also collected examples of these colonial images.) This legacy persists in Elmur’s work, though he also brings out other, less theoretical and arguably more powerful uses of photography: its dual role as a mechanism of state and economic state control (as, for example, in ID cards) and, on the flip side, as a means of accountability or way to contest state control by evidentiary testimony.

His Innocent Prisoners series (2019) refers to those who were disappeared under Omar al-Bashir’s regime. His subjects mostly appear in white, each holding or identified by a number, recalling another genre of photography: the mug shot, examples of which also appear in Elmur’s collection. He has acquired numerous archival photographs of apparent criminals from the United States, with their name, age, alleged crime, and other particulars handwritten underneath profile and frontal views. He also collects mug shots from 19th-century Egypt as well as Egyptian and Sudanese identity cards—much like those produced by the Studio Kamal.³ Other elements of his collection are less typical, such as water and electricity invoices and notices informing recipients that their service will be cut off after 24 hours if the bill is not paid immediately. These latter administrative papers were the inspiration for the Central Electricity and Water Administration series (2022), which shows the artist’s trademark characters standing next to water tanks and towers whose contents they have been denied. Water supply in Sudan is a serious issue, with most in the arid country hugging the contours of the three major rivers. For Elmur, who was raised on the banks of the Blue Nile, the idea of legislating access to water through extortive corporations is no mere infraction but a major example of the injustices of Sudanese corruption.

These notices, much like the images held by the figures in Missing and Lost People’s Day, point to the outsized importance of paperwork (passports, contracts, leases, birth certificates, images) among the migratory and dispossessed. If a house or a life is destroyed, these documents can be key to establishing lines of credit, gaining permission to travel or remain, or securing government benefits, new legal standing, and other fundamental rights. (Or to alerting you that you will have no water or that you must leave the country.) Elmur’s artwork not only acknowledges the power of these papers—the proof of life that the relatives of the June 3 massacre brandish in front of them—but also recognizes the absurdity of this power, couching this proof within a world of surreal and made-up figuration. These documents are both more and less than mere pieces of paper, depending on the authority behind them. But such testimony is sometimes all that people have: fragile leaves of paper that Elmur elevates on his stretched and confrontational canvases.

All personal accounts from Salah Elmur, unless indicated otherwise, were gathered by the author during discussions with the artist in the spring and summer of 2024.

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In the mid-1980s, over the course of three years and across three continents, feminist artist Everlyn Nicodemus (born 1954, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania) gathered together women to discuss their everyday experiences. From these conversations, which took place in Skive, Denmark; Kilimanjaro, Tanzania; and Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, she produced a series of seventy-five paintings and related poems that she called “Woman in the World.”¹Organizing such dialogues as a prelude to the act of painting was a way for the artist to reject her early training in social anthropology at Stockholm University, where she chafed at the idea that researchers could be neutral observers of communities to which they do not belong. With the permission of participants, Nicodemus taped the events. But she did not use these recordings as tools to empirically document what was shared, as one might do in academic research. Rather, through careful, solitary listening, she began to translate the joy, pain, and mundanity of women’s lives into abstracted figurations. Together these works foregrounded something latent in her earlier compositions: a desire to make the relationship between self and non-self (or “other”) a pictorial and poetic strategy based on affinity instead of an anthropological problem rooted in difference.

By her own account, Nicodemus decided to study social anthropology after being “confronted with everyday racialist attitudes for the first time when migrating to Europe.”²She had moved to Sweden in 1973 after spending her formative years in the Kilimanjaro region. Already fluent in Kichagga, Kiswahili, and English, she picked up Swedish quickly and enrolled in Stockholm University in 1978. Anthropology, she thought at the time, “seemed to offer the intellectual means to better understand human behavior,” especially the baser forms she encountered while living abroad as a Black and African woman.³

Once she began her coursework, however, she discovered that the discipline lacked the possibilities she imagined. Social anthropology was a relatively new offering in Swedish academia, but like all anthropological fields, it had deep roots in ethnography, which had itself emerged from the systems and structures of colonialism. About a decade before Nicodemus arrived, the university attempted to loosen these ideological ties by changing the department’s name from “General and Comparative Ethnography” to “Social Anthropology” and by moving away from curricula designed around the Museum of Ethnography collections.⁴Despite these changes, which might suggest a shift from a collection-based approach to studying culture and society to a people-oriented one, Nicodemus grew increasingly uncomfortable with the role of anthropologist—even as she continued her studies.

Her frustrations prompted her turn to art-making. Nicodemus returned to Tanzania in 1979 to do fieldwork while also providing Kiswahili instruction to, in her words, “Scandinavian aid workers.”⁵While living in an international community of expatriates, she met some women who invited her to attend amateur drawing sessions.⁶Nicodemus abandoned the sessions after a few meetings to make time for more serious artistic pursuits, resolving to have her own solo exhibition as quickly as possible.⁷Nicodemus achieved her goal in 1980, when she debuted her paintings and poems in a one-woman show at the National Museum in Dar es Salaam, and preeminent Tanzanian modernist Sam Ntiro gave the opening remarks.⁸

Reflecting on this period of her life in an interview with Belgian curator Catherine de Zegher in 1992, Nicodemus spoke about why anthropology troubled her so deeply and how her emerging artistic practice resolved some of the issues she identified in the discipline’s methodologies: “Anthropology demanded that I look at human beings in a way that was foreign to me. I had to disassociate myself from the humans I was to study, to deal with them as objects.”⁹By contrast, the work she exhibited at the National Museum “was exactly the opposite of the objectifying approach. I exhibited myself as a subject, showing every part of myself, my problems, my hopes, my conflicts, my whole life.”¹⁰These themes included her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, and romantic love.

The artist’s comments capture aspects of critiques that had emerged among anthropologists and other scholars in the 1980s about the discipline’s operating assumptions and its origins in the enterprise of colonialism.¹¹In brief, these assessments concern anthropology’s historical framework, in which cultures, and by extension peoples, are looked upon as hermetically contained entities that can be studied by supposedly outside, neutral observers and then interpreted for external audiences—often still located in the centers of Western empire. When Nicodemus says she turned herself into a “subject,” she does not mean the position of the anthropologist in relation to the ethnographic “other” as the field’s older conventions might have it; rather, she makes herself the center of the work, exploring her own vulnerabilities. An early example, After the Birth (1980) depicts a female figure curled on her side, a hand resting on—or covering—her face. A sleeping baby, the artist’s infant daughter, lies in front of her. A short poem accompanying the picture reveals the anxieties of a first-time mother both enthralled and overcome by her new responsibility.¹²

While Nicodemus has returned to her own biography throughout her career, she has increasingly framed her experiences vis-à-vis those of other women. Crucially, her paintings can be understood as situating those encounters as a series of mutual exchanges. For instance, she often describes one of her early works Two Black Candles (1983) in terms of a promise she made to acquire the bark cloth on which it is painted. Several years earlier, while pursuing her degree in anthropology, Nicodemus met an elderly woman living alone in one of the Bukoba districts near Lake Victoria.¹³They spoke Kiswahili, and eventually, the woman agreed to trade Nicodemus the bark cloth for some cotton cloth—on the condition that the artist burn two black candles.¹⁴

Why two black candles? Nicodemus does not know exactly, except perhaps for the fact that bark cloth is used in tradition-based burials.¹⁵In the region, the cloth is commonly associated with the Baganda people, whose kingdom in Uganda stretches to the southern border with Tanzania—an area near where this exchange took place.¹⁶Historically, the fabric was produced for various purposes, including for clothing and funeral wrappings. The latter usage, Nicodemus suspects, was the reason the woman had saved it.¹⁷(Incidentally, bark cloth is also the kind of cultural material that earlier generations of Western researchers would have collected for ethnographic museums, such as that in Stockholm.¹⁸)

More than anecdotal backstory, the exchange between the younger and elder women is integral to Two Black Candles. Its two female figures allegorize Nicodemus’s memory of the event—their tapered fingers dripping like wax, their bright white fingernails alight. The geometric and linear patterns of their robes flow into one another the closer they are to the ground, making the figures appear entwined. The soft texture of the bark cloth only heightens the effect. In that respect, the fabric has a dual function: It is the painting’s support, made plain by the untouched background. But it also peeks through the patterning, becoming an integral part of the represented clothes. 

A fluidity of line, in which bodies and body parts appear to meld into one another, marks Nicodemus’s work from this point forward. The resulting interpenetration of forms can be understood as a compositional device as much as a conceptual framework exploring the contours between self and other. Her painting technique is a prime example in this regard. Typically, the artist starts by drawing lines with charcoal, which she then goes over with a brush dipped into a tube of paint.¹⁹She lets the brush empty as she drags it across the surface so that the resulting line skips. Afterward, she paints flat fields of color just up to the edge of these boundaries. Nicodemus’s process leaves caesuras, letting the bark cloth—or, later, the canvas—break through her lines. These lines are not separations or hard boundaries but rather a means of entwining her figures so that one emerges from another. Indeed, Nicodemus’s caesuras might be seen less as negative spaces than as pauses that make room for other kinds of encounters between her subjects, herself among them.

The artist’s initial works for Woman in the World, a set of six paintings titled Tystnaden (The Silence, 1984), suggest that she continued to find conceptual utility in the idea of absence after developing it stylistically in Two Black Candles. The Tystnaden paintings emerged from a lull in the conversation among the participants in Skive, the first of the three gathering locations.²⁰Listening later to the tapes of the group discussion, Nicodemus began to paint on antique linen she had received as a gift from her mother-in-law.²¹Her pictures are not direct translations of the women’s stories, however. As her title suggests, the moments of quiet were just as important to her. The artist saw them as pregnant pauses, conveying what could not or did not need to be said.

Featuring monochromatic silhouettes of female forms, the six compositions that make up Tystnaden evoke but never fully disclose the tenor of the wordless exchanges. The artist describes the silence as having “passed through the conversation like a white thread,” a metaphor that explains the choice of paint color as much as it points to the fine weave of the textile that she left bare in the background.²²The outlines of the figures suggest an array of feelings, with some bodies folding in on themselves and others springing open in balletic leaps and arabesques penchées. Two women are solitary, but the remainder appear in pairs and groups. The swaths of white paint fuse them together so that, in several cases, it is difficult to make out the relationships among the parts. How many dancers, for example, are in the cluster with only seven limbs? Are the pairs of figures merging into one or splitting into two? What intimacies unite them? These questions are perhaps never meant to be answered, but they point to the gender-based affinities that the artist wanted to establish in her work at the time.²³Nicodemus further stresses this sense of commonality—in which one figure appears inextricable from another—in the corresponding poem “Women Silence.”²⁴According to her verse, having to hold secrets and, by extension, one’s tongue are universal undercurrents that unite women, connecting the womb, blood, and milk to the flow of rivers and oceans.

Although the formal resemblance of the figures underscores the shared moment of silence in the gathering, Nicodemus was also keenly aware that not all the women who contributed shared the same life experiences. After all, at every Woman in the World event, the participants came from different generations, class backgrounds, and professions. Several years later, the artist put a sharper point on the project she embarked on in Skive by acknowledging the limits of a feminism that does not account for the circumstances of race and geography:

Here, Nicodemus trenchantly borrows the language of colonial ethnography (“expedition,” “natives,” “study,” “collect”) and of anthropological analysis (“statistics,” “tables”) to reframe her own position and those of her participants. I want to draw a distinction, however, between the way in which she rhetorically presents herself in this passage and the model of the artist as ethnographer, to borrow a helpful formulation from Hal Foster, who used it to describe a slightly later set of practices from the 1990s.²⁶Although her statement can be read as a self-aware critique, anticipating the kind of “othering” that can happen when communities become the subject of an artist’s work, Nicodemus ultimately speaks of an equal interchange in which she too gives and not just collects.

If Nicodemus introduces the idea of reciprocity first through an ironic reversal of roles, in which the African researcher goes to the European indigenes, her framing was in part informed by something that transpired between 1984, when she painted Tystnaden, and 1986, when this statement was published for Woman in the World’s final iteration in Calcutta. “Who owns the knowledge of the Third World women?” Nicodemus inquires above. She also had posed this question as the title of an article she published earlier that year in Economic and Political Weekly, a social sciences journal based in Bombay (today Mumbai).²⁷Her account details the paternalistic attitudes and heavy-handed revisions she witnessed as a jury member and then editor for a planned volume of writings by African women sponsored by a Swedish government aid organization. What she describes, essentially, is the silencing of the contributing authors, whose texts were significantly shortened, reworked, and even retitled without their involvement. For Nicodemus, these interventions were particularly galling because the organization privileged its own agenda over the voices and stylistic choices of the writers—as well as undercut her purview as editor.

Literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” another text from the period, underscores the broader sense of urgency in Nicodemus’s question. Spivak first presented her ideas in 1983 at the conference “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries,” before publishing them in 1988 and again, in revised form, in 1999.²⁸Beyond a general time frame and the complementary formulation of their titles, Nicodemus’s and Spivak’s bodies of work are both concerned with the ways in which the West constructs a notion of the non-Western female “other” through intertwined forms of discursive and economic control that happened first through colonialism and then through global capital. (The latter of the two was a channel for the aid workers and organizations with whom and which Nicodemus crossed paths.) To boil down Spivak’s argument for the purposes of my short essay, the question is less whether the subaltern woman has agency to speak than how institutional, political, and archival structures mute or misinterpret what is said.

Who choses silence, and who is subject to it? Nicodemus’s work proposes different answers over the course of Woman in the World. Notably, while the artist was back in Tanzania for the second iteration of the series in 1985, the problems with the anthology of African women’s writings were coming to a head.²⁹One of the ways that Nicodemus responded was to paint Silenced, a knot of black and brown forms punctuated with features like eyes and extremities. Emerging from this jumble of rounded shapes—heads, shoulders, elbows, knees—is a white hand covering the spot where a mouth should be. By the time she made Silenced, Nicodemus had fully developed the painting process I previously described, in which caesuras are left within and around the lines that form her compositions. In fact, barring Tystnaden, nearly all the works in Woman in the World feature some variation of this technique. That Tystnaden was the exception seems less an aberration than an acknowledgment that the pause, the absence, the silence demand critical acts of interpretation.

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In the etching Youth (1965; fig. 1), a contemplative figure sits atop a globe, head resting on a knee, legs twisted together, arms tucked protectively into the body. The figure’s head, which is turned inward, counterposes the frontal, downcast face in the lower left foreground. It is this face that the etching’s maker, Ugandan artist and professor Catherine Nankya Katonoko Gombe, states was the origin point for the work itself, its tender melancholy invoking the difficulties of her childhood following “the death of [her] father at a tender age and the struggle to continue with education.”¹Youth is one of three prints pulled from plates etched by Gombe in her final year in the printmaking course offered by the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts (MTSIFA) at Makerere University, then part of the University of East Africa.² The 1965 class was a historic one. Alongside Gombe was a small cohort of students proficient in etching, woodcut, linocut, aquatint, and lithography. This class was the first to complete the full four years of Makerere’s new graphic art undergraduate program, founded in 1961 by Royal College of Art–trained artist Michael Adams. With its multiple textures, sinewy lines, shifts from abstraction to figuration, and plays with vertiginous perspective, Youth reflects Gombe’s notable skill. The central figure represents the apotheosis of her unlikely journey from childhood trauma to expert printmaker. However, any sense of triumph inferred by the body’s planetary perch is tempered by the anxieties inherent in the figure’s hunched pose. The sense of a precipice, or “dark hollow” beyond, speaks directly to what Gombe has recalled was “the mental uncertainty of the next path.”³

Youth, part of a trio on the theme of “Journey,” is an explicitly personal work, in which Gombe deployed her newfound printmaking skills to convey the complexities of her personal trajectory. Nonetheless, its conflicting themes and formal experimentations resonate more broadly with the school’s creative energies and tensions, providing initial insights into lesser-explored aspects of art-making at Makerere in the 1960s. Alongside prints by her classmates, such as Modest Wealth (1964; fig. 2) by Augustine Alirwana Mugalula-Mukiibi (1943–2019), Gombe’s work is a reminder that beyond the school’s better-known programs in painting and sculpture—which had, over the previous decade and a half, produced and then been led by renowned artists Sam J. Ntiro (1923–1993), Gregory Maloba (1922–2004), Elimo Njau (born 1932), Theresa Musoke (born 1944), and Francis Nnaggenda (born 1936), among others—printmaking was a burgeoning field at the heart of public creative expression in the early years of independence.

Kampala, a thriving creative city, was the locus of several young, innovative, graphic-rich publications including Roho and Transition, which were printed by Uganda Argus Ltd.⁴The printmaking equipment that Adams installed at the university—a physically demanding process that he has described as “acids and fingers, hot plates and turpentine, a dangerous beginning”—enabled his students to produce imagery that fed directly into their pages.⁵ Adams, himself a painter and a printmaker, designed several iconic covers for Transition, including the 1966 cover featuring a green, red, and yellow playing card design to accompany an essay by Ali Mazrui (1933–2014) on Kwame Nkrumah, the “Leninist tzar”; the 1967 cover featuring a sardonic cartoon that accompanies an essay by Paul Theroux on Tarzan, the “first expatriate”; and an ominous design from 1968 (fig. 3) dominated by a vulture for the issue focused on the Biafran civil war.⁶

At Makerere, Adams was, as Sunanda Sanyal has discussed, a provocateur unafraid of confronting a growing art world elitism.⁷This is most evident in an editorial he published in Transition in 1962 (when Gombe, Mugalula-Mukiibi, and others were in their second year), in which he denounces critics as failed artists who “stopped understanding when they stopped being creative.”⁸ In this text, he argues that the gap between high and low is relative, that both Michelangelo and Mickey Mouse constitute a “worldy experience,” and that the postcards people buy of each are, ultimately, “the same size.” Below his text, there is a small, abstract, graphic work titled Clouds, which appears like a crystalline, stratigraphic slice underscoring the idea that encounters with creative expression need not be confined to the hallowed gallery space. Adams was an inspiring teacher, one whom Gombe remembered fondly nearly sixty years later. The sentiment, it seems, was mutual. In 2021, thinking back on the class of 1965, Adams wrote “When my 4th year students left, I knew I had to follow. They had graduated me.”⁹

As Serubiri Moses has recently discussed in reference to Gombe’s contemporary Theresa Musoke­ (born 1944), who won the prize for painting in 1965, the art school in the mid-1960s was both energized by Uganda’s independence in 1962 and challenged by an increasing emphasis on formalism.¹⁰The latter had been introduced by Scottish artist Cecil Todd (1912–1986), who took over leadership of the school in 1959 and worked to shift the curriculum away from Margaret Trowell’s essentialist pedagogy promoting the belief that African artistic education should prioritize a “native” intuition free of Western influence.¹¹In its place, Todd instituted a rigorous, academic program in which students studied artworks from the Western canon, took life drawing classes, and were encouraged to gain mastery in a variety of mediums. His school sought to offer an internationalist art education, and yet it did so within a climate that the new nation state could not help but inspire.

Moses argues that Musoke rejected Todd’s formalism and turned instead to surrealist representations of nature inspired by East Africa’s rich flora and fauna.¹²Musoke herself took printmaking classes, and her woodcut of guinea fowl, as Moses discusses, appeared in Transition in 1963. Musoke’s evident interest in wildlife was shared by many of her contemporaries, reflecting the concern for conservation that proliferated in the wake of independence. The second issue of Roho: Journal of the Visual Arts of East Africa (1962), for example, features an excerpt from the Arusha Manifesto (1961), a foundational document in East African conservation, as well as an essay by Kenyan zoologist and Makerere professor David Wasawo that calls upon readers to recognize the urgent need for preservation, especially in an age of ever-growing tourism.¹³Wasawo’s text is accompanied by twelve graphic depictions of animals, all of them the work of Makerere printmaking students—including Fatma Abdullah (1939-1994) , whose abstracted, writhing mass Python occupies a full half-page.

Contemporaneous artworks evidence that beyond Roho’s diminuitive illustrations, Adams’s students developed more complex works on the theme of Uganda’s wildlife, employing a range of printmaking techniques to evoke particular qualities. In figure 4, which is by a currently unknown artist, what Adams describes as a “free-wheeling line and perfect mastery of black-and-white form” conspire to convey a sinuous scene of busy, mischievous primates. The wide-eyed backward glance of the figure in the center left, in particular, has a cartoonish quality that seems to speak to a playfulness inspired by Adams’s own irreverent disregard for “sterile” and “imitative perfection.”¹⁴ At the same, Mugalula-Mukiibi’s work (see fig. 2) demonstrates material mastery through precision cracking of the wax on the etching plate to create a vignette that conflates the hardy bodies of Uganda’s iconic Ankole longhorn cattle with the parched earth of the harsh, desert climate in which they thrive. These works superceded Todd’s formalist insistences, pushing the material qualities of printmaking processes to elevate conservationist agendas and affront elitism—while also satisfying the appetite for new national icons.

Unlike her classmates, Gombe did not depict Ugandan fauna. She did, however, feature a large, indigenous banana leaf in the foreground of her etching, depicting it in a torn state to accentuate an atmosphere of “abundance . . . and uncertainty.”¹⁵Like Mugalula-Mukiibi’s mobilization of etching’s formal qualities to infer Ankole hardiness, Gombe’s work retains a clear index of its process of production in the rendering of the map of the African continent in reverse. For the final project display, Gombe was asked to mount the actual plate she had produced, and so she chose to etch the map the correct way around for those viewing it. The resulting print, Youth, therefore represents the continent as a mirror image of itself, serving as a reminder that it was the plate itself that was the primary subject of examination. Importantly, however, the star that marks Uganda centrally on the equator remains unchanged, as the central anchor in both the etched plate and its subsequent printed manifestation. These details in Gombe’s and Mugalula-Mukiibi’s work emphasize that Makerere’s first printmaking students did not simply prioritize form over content, but rather consciously experimented with the material specificities of the former to create new representations of the latter.

In a work so deeply entrenched in Ugandan imagery, it is hard not to sense in Gombe’s anxieties about the future a broader trepidation regarding the fate of the young nation state. In 1965, tensions between Uganda’s first president, King Edward Muteesa II of Buganda, and its prime minister, Milton Obote, were rife, with the latter overthrowing the former within a year, and Idi Amin seizing power only five years later. Despite the immense difficulties and trauma of the ensuing years, both Mugalula-Mukiibi and Gombe went on to forge successful careers as artists and academics. Their printmaking training at Makerere stood them in good stead, instilling in both a lifelong attentiveness to material qualities and to Ugandan cultural iconography and heritage. Prior to his passing in 2019, Mugulalu-Mukiibi had enjoyed a long career as a master printmaker, developing, in particular, new techniques for printing on Ugandan bark cloth, which he exhibited internationally. Catherine Nankya Katonoko Gombe has similarly pursued a career steeped in the protection and celebration of historic heritages, obtaining a PhD from Kenyatta University in arts education, and publishing and teaching on ceramics, basket weaving, and bark cloth to this day. ¹⁶

As with many of the works produced at Makerere in the 1960s, Youth was sold shortly after it was made. It was bought by Scottish writer and campaigner Naomi Mitchison on a visit to Kampala, and was sent for inclusion in the Argyll Collection, a public art initiative she had set up to provide rural, Highland communities an access to art.¹⁷Seeing the work again in 2021 after a long hiatus, Gombe was struck by the complexities of emotions that it evoked: “Happy and sad moments, achievements and struggles, self-assurance and uncertainty.”¹⁸More than anything, however, Youth reminded her of critical childhood guidance. As she recalled, “My mother repeatedly told me, ‘Bwoba toyagala emirimu ginno, soma ennyo,’which translates as ‘If you do not like these chores, study hard.’” Academic success, she understood, would be liberating, a mantra that has guided her six-decade career as an artist and educator.

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Magdalene A. N. Odundo is a ceramic artist born in Kenya in 1950 but residing in Britain since 1971. Much has been made of her biography and the complexities of her education, training, and rigorous practice of creating beautiful vessels that speak to multiple associations and inspirations across the history of art and their resonances with the human form, especially the bodies of women. Odundo, who has been contextualized as a British studio potter and an artist of African descent, belonging to a millennia-old heritage of women’s pottery-making, transcends the restrictions of this duality, working in clay as well as in other mediums, including graphite, bronze, photo transfer, and glass.

Magdalene Odundo has received critical acclaim from writers on the three continents where her remarkable vessels have been exhibited and collected. The praise often begins with the unforgettable impact of first experiencing them: their sensuous and commanding presence as sculpture and their mystique in terms of how Odundo created them.

There has been equally probing curiosity about the ideas and sources that inspired their iconic forms, which seem familiar and new at the same time. Their evocative power resides in Odundo’s deliberate references to pottery made in Africa and, simultaneously, her comprehensive knowledge of the world’s ceramic history. There is an impressive eloquence in the responses to Odundo’s work, among them, those of curator Yvonne G. J. M. Joris, art historian Gert Staal, art critic Louisa Buck, curator Ulysses Grant Dietz, and fashion designer Jonathan Anderson.¹ When asked by Nigerian writer Ben Okri in a 2019 interview what she wants people to take away with them when they look at her ceramic pots, she replied, “I just want them to be amazed and astonished that this very simple material, which is so cheap, so easily found, which we all walk on, can be transformed”.²

Since the earliest exhibitions of her vessels in the 1980s, there has been a focus on documenting the specifics of Odundo’s biography and her complex journey to becoming one of Britain’s most celebrated ceramic artists and one of the first Africa-born contemporary artists to represent Global Africa in museum installations.³ This preoccupation with her biography has generated a standardized narrative that has been repeated in brief or long form in nearly every exhibition text or published essay, starting in 1994 and continuing to the present.⁴ Indeed, it has tended to inhibit how people write about her work, limiting fresh conceptual or critical insights, and increasing a reliance on Odundo’s own words. The consistency of her vessel types and the very knowledge that, with them, Odundo is releasing clay’s captive voices has writers seeking to describe and expose what the work is saying and why. Curators, artists, and scholars have conducted interviews with her, and her responses are extensively quoted.⁵

For Odundo, the human body is a vessel, and her creations share its language: bodies, necks, mouths, lips, and other defining essentials like nipples, umbilici, and vertebrae. These anthropomorphic alignments are universal in global ceramics, and yet the way Odundo abstracts and synthesizes them has been a hallmark of her achievement—and is especially visible in Untitled #15 (1994; fig. 4).

Odundo draws from a storehouse of images and memories, often looking for the essential bits in both to create her vessel types. The striking form of Untitled #10 (1995; fig. 5), for example, captures in clay the extraordinary backward sweep of headdresses worn by early twentieth-century Mangbetu women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

She incorporated into her formal college studies what she had learned from her African teachers, especially while in residence at the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, Nigeria, which was established in the early 1950s by British ceramist Michael Cardew (1901–1983), who was himself a student of British studio potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979). By the time she earned her MA in 1982 at the Royal College of Art, Odundo had distilled her own style and technique of working as a 1983 example in the British Museum collection illustrates (fig. 6).

Indeed, based on her experience with local Gbari potters in Abuja, Odundo developed a method of hand-building and coiling and a process of finishing her leather-hard vessels with a labor-intensive sequence of burnishing, applying slip, and lightly re-burnishing to achieve a high-luster surface when fired. She especially admires the celebrated Gbari artist Ladi Kwali (1925–1984), who became her mentor.⁶ Kwali had joined Cardew in 1954 and integrated the wheel throwing, gas-kiln firing, and shiny glazing that he had introduced, none indigenous to the region or, for that matter, to most of sub-Saharan Africa. Kwali was an influential teacher, as were others at the Pottery Training Centre, and key to what Odundo learned from them was the importance of tenacity, patience, and humility.⁷

Odundo spends weeks or even months meticulously building her sculptures. She repeats the shapes she favors (and yet they are never identical), such as that of Newark’s Untitled #10 (fig. 5), as part of an inexhaustible quest to achieve “perfect symmetry and perfect harmony.”⁸ The control intrinsic to her hand-building process is then tested by the firing, first in a purely oxidizing atmosphere that turns them a bright red-orange that intensifies the elegance and fluidity of their shapes, as is expressed in Untitled #4 (1995; fig. 7).

Then, if she chooses, she fires her creations again (and again) in an oxygen-poor environment that changes “the static orange to the one you cannot predict with its various shades of black.” The Munich Design Museum’s Kigango cha Baba and Kigango cha Mama (2009; fig. 8) show how the firing conditions yield variations in patterns of flashing and areas of smoky iridescence that can be dazzling and are the outcome of the inevitable surprises teased by chance in the kiln.

Their humanity is a part of the tension Odundo negotiates between stasis and movement as the vessels undergo the alchemy of transformation. She uses the expressiveness of her vessels’ necks and flaring mouths and the treasured “spots” from the firing to impart a sense of vitality, which is dramatically evident in Untitled #11 (1995; fig. 9) and Untitled (1994; fig. 10). Success for Odundo is having the vessels “dance” even though they are standing still.⁹

Indeed, part of the innovation of her 2019 retrospective exhibition, Magdalene Odundo: The Journey of Things, organized by former chief curator Andrew Bonacina for the Hepworth Wakefield museum, was inviting Odundo to help curate the selection, rendering the specificity of “things” she has identified as her “contemporary and ancient heroes” visible. The project took as its subject the links between what Odundo has studied and revered and the formation of her own ceramic vocabulary. While these links have been detailed in publications and exhibition catalogues, the idea of bringing them together physically in the exhibition space was introduced in the 2006 exhibition Resonance and Inspiration at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida. Transcending geographical, temporal, and categorial boundaries, the more than seventy-five disparate objects in The Journey of Things were juxtaposed by the artist with about fifty of her own ceramic vessels dating from 1974/76 to 2016, making for incomparably evocative and astonishing experiences, which she has long sought in the reception of her work.

The range of suggested affinities between her work and the global sources she has mined is impressive. It brings Odundo’s comparative approach into sharp focus, and is exemplified in the installation view provided here (fig. 11).¹⁰ Odundo has chosen her sensuous oxidized vessel from the British Museum (Untitled, 1994; see fig. 9), because for her, it animates the static aspects of fired clay: it conjures the image of Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919–1991), with her long neck and graceful arms, dancing in Swan Lake.

Surrounding it are three works by artists Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) as well as a Greek amphora with black-painted decoration by an “unknown maker.” The subjects of all five works are engaged in activity, whether dancing, wrestling, or frolicking. There is an implied parity among them. Yet, does an arrangement like this complicate viewers’ expectations of Odundo’s influences, pushing the reception of her work beyond the as yet intractable dichotomy between fine arts and craft, suggesting they are all in fact “art”? Or does the journey of things imply something else? The exhibition organizers seem to erode the conceptual ambition of Odundo’s approach with labels and catalogue captions that name “known” artists and call others “unknown makers,” as if their anonymity in the historical record denies them status as artists.¹¹

The Journey of Things, which toured to the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, along with the artist’s participation in several recent international group and monographic shows—including the 2022 Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani—have further sealed her reputation and the recognition she so clearly deserves as an accomplished international artist. Through them, Odundo has eclipsed the restrictions of her identity bifurcation and is celebrated on her own terms: for her lifelong dedication to the vessel form and to fired clay as her preeminent mode of expression.¹² The five vessels, made between 2009 and 2017 and elegantly displayed in the Corderie dell’Arsenale in Venice (fig. 12), represent several of her iconic styles and her tendency to work in series in which each constituent creation is unique. With the exception of the central vessel from the Asymmetrical series, the vessels show the variety within the Symmetrical series. Together, the grouping underscores Odundo’s technical and artistic virtuosity and the impact of her subtle humanizing details.  

These recent curatorial projects, along with a long list of residencies, including collaborations with Sloss Metal Arts in Alabama in 1993, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum for the 2002 project Acknowledged Sources,¹³ and with glass artists at Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, and the National Glass Centre at the University of Sunderland (2012­­­–14) encapsulate the persistent spirit of discovery and experimentation that drives her ambitions. At the National Glass Centre, for instance, she produced a collaborative three-part project called Tri-part-it-us. Its culmination was the 2014 installation with one thousand suspended blown-glass elements called Transition II (fig. 13).¹⁴ Its spectacle contrasts with the single 3500-year-old tiny glass ear stud from ancient Egypt that Odundo used as the catalyst for the residency.¹⁵ The closeness of the ear stud to the body, in that the two become one when the stud is worn, continued Odundo’s exploration of art’s humanity and her fascination with glass as an artistic medium.  

Throughout her career, Magdalene Odundo has resisted a singular classification. Because she was educated in Britain, which has been her home base since 1971, she is seen there as a British studio potter and considered one of its best postwar ceramists. In the United States, she was included in the groundbreaking and controversial 1991 exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art, in which she was one of only two Africa-born women artists and the only ceramist selected by its curator, Susan Vogel. Odundo’s work was a revelation to many of us who had studied the arts of Africa in the 1970s and 1980s and done research on living artists working in “traditional styles” (including the women who still made pottery in their home communities). What distinguishes Odundo from other African artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is her “unapologetic attitude to the idea of beauty.”¹⁶ This has helped her overcome the emphasis on the “Africanness” of her work and instead drawn attention to its formal innovation and distinction from African village–based domestic and ritual pottery.

As a woman who works primarily with clay, Odundo has been marginalized and described as a “maker” or “potter” outside the mainstream definition of fine art per the western canon. This distancing also seems to have minimized her participation in the political discourses around race, gender, and blackness. Monique Kerman has argued that Odundo came of age as a professional before the debates concerning black British art and artists gained momentum, and thus did not engage overtly with issues of racial and ethnic difference.¹⁷ She was excluded from many survey exhibitions that made stars of other contemporary British artists of African descent, like Chris Ofili (born 1968), Steve McQueen (born 1969), and Yinka Shonibare (born 1962).¹⁸ Yet, by the late 1990s, Odundo’s vessels had become better recognized in the United States and in the United Kingdom, and work like hers—long typecast as craft or design—had begun to appear in the permanent collection galleries of art museums. Her sleek modernist sculptural forms offered curators of African art a comfortable bridge between historical traditions and the global contemporary. Odundo’s vessels appeared as the first and sometimes only ambassadors of the new. In the newly reopened de Young Museum in San Francisco, for example, their Odundo vase (2007; fig. 14) was mounted in a case with six historical African wares. Her vessels were also paired with shimmering hangings by El Anatsui (born 1944)—which had received international notoriety at the 2007 Venice Biennale—and installed in museums and galleries, further emphasizing the excitement of original work by contemporary Africa-born artists.¹⁹

Over the same arc of her career, she has been dedicated to education as a university teacher, researcher, supervisor, and visiting lecturer; as a mentor encouraging students and young aspiring artists, especially those from Africa, to take up ceramics as a profession; and as an external examiner for various national and international universities. In recognition of her commitment to education and the field of ceramics, Odundo was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for Services to the Arts in 2008, honored in 2018 with the ceremonial leadership appointment as Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey (where she taught for seventeen years), and elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List in 2020 for Services to Arts and Arts Education. Even if her shifting identity remains a conundrum and the art-versus-craft debate has yet to be dismantled, the rigor of Odundo’s process, her restless search for perfection, and her receptivity to new sources and mediums of inspiration and collaboration have won her significant acclaim as a contemporary international artist with an abiding love of clay.

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Born in Kampala, Theresa Musoke began her artistic practice in the early 1960s, and to this day, continues to make art with the tenor, range, and mastery of many African modernists of the postwar era. Her work can appear synonymous with postwar African art and has been described by scholars such as Margaret Nagawa³ and George William Kyeyune⁴ as engaging fauna, wildlife, and abstraction. Musoke’s reputation as an artist has rested on the academic training she received in various institutions in Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Arguably, the dominant theme running through literature on Ugandan and East African art more broadly is the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts and its aesthetic pedagogy.⁵ It is easy to see Musoke’s excellent draftsmanship, which has been described as her art’s “sweeping brush stroke,”⁶ but when we step away from the academicism of her art, it is clear that her investment in and concept of the wild are more broadly inspired than merely an academic exercise would suggest. Her visual treatment of wildlife, in its illuminating and vociferous activity, recalls the interiority of postwar artists in Uganda, particularly through what I refer to as her imaginative and surreal imagery. While I do not subscribe to a singular definition of surrealism, I claim the imaginative, meditative, poetic, animist, and psychological as descriptive of Musoke’s surrealist art.

In this short paper, I challenge the claim that Musoke began working with nature and the concept of the wild during the mid-1970s in Nairobi, Kenya,⁷ clarifying their presence in her aesthetic trajectory and artistic practice as early as 1963. To give a concise biography, Musoke entered the Makerere Art School in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962.⁸ Makerere University was widely known at the time (and in subsequent years) as the “Harvard of Africa.” Between 1962 and 1965, Musoke made waves at the art school and larger university campus by winning a painting prize, and working on a public mural commission for the old girl’s dormitory at Mary Stuart Hall, which was completed in 1953, and extensions made in 1958 that include a common room.⁹ She went on to earn a diploma from the Royal College of Art in London in 1967. By 1970, Musoke was in the United States pursuing an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. She returned to Uganda in 1972. Upon her return, she taught at the Makerere Art School for two years before leaving for Kenya, where she taught at Kenyatta University. Musoke permanently returned to Uganda in 1997. Since then, she has maintained a studio-gallery in her home, where she continues to practice painting, drawing, and printmaking.

During World War II (1939–45)

The prevailing dark mood in East African art emerged in the 1940s within the context of World War II. For example, several works made in 1941 by Gregory Maloba (1922–2007), a pioneer modernist in East Africa, clearly reflect the mood of the time.¹⁰ This mood lent itself to folklore. Maloba used the myth of walumbe (death) in his 1941 wood sculpture Death, and similar references to mythology can be traced in the work of many Makerere artists. The emergent Makerere style is evidenced in the work of Maloba and his contemporaries—including Sam James Ntiro (1923–1993), whose 1956 oil painting Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride at Night is in MoMA’s collection—who are considered the first group of Makerere Art School artists. The emergence of the Makerere style was no doubt inspired by the teachings of Margaret Trowell and her pedagogical focus on folkloric myth. However, during and after World War II, artists working in the Makerere style generally chose somber, mournful, or terror-filled myths as sources for their imagery.

Early Years at the Makerere Art School

Theresa Musoke is no exception to the prevailing dark mood expressed in the postwar by artists in East Africa. Her earliest works, such as Anguish (1964; fig. 1) and Cat Ghosts (1962; fig. 2) reflect this somber state of mind. Although Musoke’s work in the 1960s was created in a moment of optimism, and indeed of transition, her much-discussed turn to animal imagery is consistent with the deeply meditative. For instance, her visions of birds and the wild are not “realistic” but rather taken from the imagination. In this sense, her concept of the wild is complex. Such is the case with Guinea Fowls (1963; fig. 3), which was featured in 1963 in Transition magazine. The three birds in this image all face different directions and move across the entire plane of the woodcut. Musoke’s use of space creates the impression that there is no horizon line. Her tendency to break the horizon and create compositions in which much activity takes place but isn’t fixed by a foreground and background, or sight lines, has persisted throughout her career.

In contrast to the dominant discourse on twentieth-century art in Africa, in which artists are measured by their proximity to “modern life,” artists like Musoke have produced a different picture of their experiences. If the urban is absent in Musoke’s art, and further, if her concept of the “wild” tends to be misplaced by Ugandan historians in a lineage of British or American Romanticism and its view of the sublime,¹¹ then her early 1960s Cat Ghosts (fig. 2) suggests that her concept of the wild has an affinity with a certain temperament. “Cat Ghosts” translates as emiyaayu in Luganda, and is used in this context to mean roaming or hostile spirits. Effectively, Musoke’s works confront the postwar anxieties of East Africa as it was coming out from under the clutches of British colonial rule.

The atmosphere at the art school had changed by the time Musoke was admitted as a student, when Maloba and other former students were already teaching there. She encountered a changing department, one that reflected the optimism of Ugandan independence from Britain in 1962. One may ask how the zeitgeist of transition influenced her art, and yet by her second year at the Makerere Art School, she was working with nature. In addition to Guinea Fowls, she produced Cat Ghosts in the style promoted by the art school at that time, that is, the style of artists such as Gregory Maloba, whose innovative aesthetic centered highly emotive subjects such as death and horror. The Makerere Art School, which had been in existence for almost two decades in the early 1960s, emphasized the use of myth, and these artists pushed the aesthetic further by creating aesthetic innovations that foreground the dark atmosphere of the postwar era in East Africa. While Musoke’s Guinea Fowls may not give an accurate depiction of these emotive aesthetics or the somber state of mind of the era, her later surrealist sculpture Anguish (1964; fig. 1), which was featured in 1964 in Transition magazine, does.¹² The sculpture depicts a figure whose body is visibly contorted, its face looking up into the sky and its hands loosely folded together. Its two legs are either rested or kneeling, and the work bears several hollow spaces or voids that cast shadows in sharp light, evoking the traumatic dimensions of the era. Musoke’s turn to nature in 1963 shows her resolution in establishing her own path.

After Makerere

When Musoke was at the Royal College of Art in 1967, she continued her engagement with nature and natural imagery. In The Crested Cranes, a startling beautiful print from 1967 (fig. 4), she depicted the national bird of Uganda. In this lithographic print on paper, her use of color is extravagant. The composition includes a trio of crested cranes, all of which are dancing or flapping their wings. The background is serene, depicting what could be either a clear sky or a calm sea marked by horizontal lines that extend across the plane in a way that appears more forceful. The marshland on which the cranes dance has a more rugged terrain. This work can be contextualized in the history of Ugandan art, which includes oil paintings of crested cranes by Harry Johnson, founder of the Uganda Museum (a Greek temple on Mengo hill), and more recently, works such as a large watercolor drawing of crested cranes by Taga Nuwagaba (born 1968). These works signal to the viewer that Musoke cannot be separated from the social and political history of Uganda, and that as an artist, she understands the visual iconography that has produced Uganda’s history and narrative. If, as art historian Angelo Kakande argues, Musoke did not depict politics in her art,¹³ and as art historian Margaret Nagawa states, she isn’t interested in “social issues,”¹⁴ perhaps this artwork shows us that Musoke embraces the “national” as a paradigm for art-making. Some of the other prints she produced in 1967 also incorporate birds—for example, Feed (1967; fig. 5), which depicts what I view as a reed bunting with thick brown plumage whose mouth is wide open as it reaches out for a circular piece of food. Reed buntings occur year-round in the United Kingdom and would have been a common sight when Musoke studied there.

Indeed, Musoke does not easily fit into neat boxes of social realism that depict feminist art or the incumbent postcolonial regimes. And thus, anyone turning to her art in hopes of finding a clear illustration of either postcolonial or anti-colonial political struggle, or of women’s experience and feminism will be disappointed. I believe that Musoke began to challenge realism fairly early on as a student at the Makerere Art School when, in 1962–63, she enrolled in anatomy classes. In this setting, she favored the peculiar “beautiful ugly”¹⁵ aesthetic of Gregory Maloba and Ignatius Serulyo (1937–2018), and evolved from this position to inject her own personality into her art. This includes her turn to nature as a source. It also includes her opposition to a particular brand of formalist aesthetics under the baton of Scottish artist Cecil Todd (1912–1986), who was dean of the Makerere Art School in the 1960s when Musoke was a student there.

1980s to the Present

Musoke’s art has been included in a range of important exhibitions from the 1980s onward,¹⁶ and questionably positioned within a modernist and primitivist trajectory.¹⁷ Her work of the 1980s incorporates dense imagery suspended in space. In this period, Musoke’s visual language matured to what has become her recognizable style. Her paintings from 1982 to 1986 reveal an almost complete revolt against the notion of a stable horizon line, and in Zebras (1983; fig. 6), she pushed her concept of space even further by depicting the animal figures suspended in midair. Her output from the 2000s onward has been similarly prolific.

In closing, Musoke is an artist who has carried out active intellectual opposition to dominant aesthetic ideologies, such as to the particular human anatomical pedagogies of the Makerere Art School during Todd’s tenure (although she would occasionally return to portraiture in the early 1980s and after).¹⁸ This view might be contested by art historian Kyeyune, who wrote that her rigorous formal training in subjects such as anatomy is a dominant force in her art.¹⁹ Art historian Nagawa has argued that this kind of intellectual opposition could be contextualized within the “artistic, social, and intellectual issues” that have preoccupied Ugandan women artists, who have forged largely independent careers within a patriarchal field.²⁰ Lastly, Musoke’s surreal imagery continues to be sweeping and densely psychological. Her work may parallel twentieth-century post–Independence Uganda in its breadth, and it shows an artist who has innovated her own style and aesthetic sensibility. With this innovation in mind, Musoke’s influence on East African artists, particularly with respect to the surreal landscape, is towering.

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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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“Technologies of Everyday Innovation”

In Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga compels us to consider different forms of technological innovation and intervention.¹ He invites us to acknowledge the multiple forms that technology can take, and proposes that we not only think of them in relation to their western-centric forms. What is central to Mavhunga is thinking about forms of mobility, ones that are specific to hunting, as means of inventing, implementing, and benefiting from technology. Similarly, Edward Shizha expands ideas about indigenous African technologies to incorporate “techniques used in the production of arts and crafts, blacksmithing, iron smelting, carding and weaving.”²

As an extension to broadening the criteria for what we consider technological innovation, we might think about the kiondo, a well-known kind of basket made by the Kikuyu people of Kenya,³ as a form of technology. At the nexus of the kiondo is the mukonyo, the preliminary circular component that acts as a foundation for the rest of the basket. The strength or feebleness of the mukonyo—which also refers to the navel, or that which connects a child to its mother through the umbilical cord, while cultivating and sustaining life during the period of gestation—will determine the success of the kiondo, attesting to the necessity of grounded origins.⁴ Further, as Joseph Waweru Kamenju posits, the kiondo is a kind of language full of codes, significance, and philosophies.⁵ He argues that it is “one of the most powerful symbols among the Kikuyu,” and initiates the possibility of theorizing the basket as a doctrine that governs most of Kikuyu culture, from its architecture to its myth-making and children’s play activities.⁶

Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu (born 1972) refers to the symbolism of the mukonyo and the importance it has in Kenyan culture.⁷ She recalls and notes its generative capacity, making a link between its artistry, social and political significance, and relationship to notions of origins and grounded-ness. Mutu’s meditation on the mukonyo can be seen as the consolidation of her thinking around the series Untitled from Eve (2006), which is a deliberation on the representation of women, technology, and the potential for reimagination and re-inscription. Untitled from Eve, a series of five etchings and three aquatints printed at master printer Jacob Samuel’s workshop in Santa Monica, California, employs etching, monograph, collage, aquatint, and drawing, and is inspired by the figure of Eve. It considers the excessive and obsessive representations of ‘the first woman on Earth’, which, while varied, are often harmful and emblematic of hetero-patriarchal anxieties and injustice. Throughout history, Eve has been portrayed as the originator of sin, a wicked transgressor, and a seductress, among other representations. By reflecting on her, Mutu continues her own fascination with female anatomy, inscription and legibility, seemingly femininized symbolism, and the role of women in history.

Mechanizations and Delicate Mark-Making

Mutu’s recourse to the intersections between gender and technology—often discussed in relation to cyborgism and Afrofuturism—has been notable throughout her practice. In collages such as In Killing Fields Sweet Butterfly Ascend (2003), the recognizable hybrid of women’s bodies and machinery, often in the form of motorbikes, is used to contemplate physical trauma inscribed on women’s bodies. Mutu’s chimeric figures often “adopt mechanical prostheses” and are meditations on the mechanization of the body that is perceived and inscribed as other (fig. 2).⁸ She continues to merge parts of the human form (or its metaphors) with technological components. The relationship between women and technology, often employed in the field of advertising, where women’s bodies are used to sell technological objects, is one that requires scrutiny and change. There is a need to rethink the role of women’s bodies as extensions of machines, or inspiration for technological intervention.

Untitled from Eve is punctuated by a variety of exercises in artistic sensibilities. Mutu invites us to think about the sensitivity and care it might take to offer more positive imagery of womanhood, from the manner in which Eve’s name is inscribed on paper (fig. 1), to the sensitivity of visual form and its relationship to negative space (fig. 3). She motions toward what it would mean to delicately approach an image of a woman’s pubic area (fig. 4), and in so doing, to refuse any damaging connotations. The recognizability of the drawing (fig. 4) as a depiction of a woman’s short and curly pubic hair sits appositionally to the abundance of phallic representations and aesthetics permeating the visual arts. Mutu seeks to present this part of a woman’s anatomy as delicate and unapologetically present. Despite its obviousness, or maybe because of it, she makes sure to depict an image that might be read as confrontational and antagonistic in a sensitive, beautiful, serene, and mesmerizing manner. The issue of delicacy is intentional. The artist pauses on the act of drawing, thinking of it as a central activity, and one that occurs as a series of “subtle, calming, contemplative movements.”⁹ This slowing down and contemplation—punctuated by the “unfilled” negative space within the picture plane—are presented as an abundant “monotonous delicacy.”¹⁰

This sensitivity and delicateness are sometimes dislodged and disrupted by Mutu (fig. 2).  The artist abandons the grace and fragility of the rest of the works by presenting an image that is “almost vulgar in its obviousness.”¹¹ Here, the issue of origins is provided as a tension, with the distorted and collaged images extricating their original and intended purpose. The jarring imagery of the legs, which sit uncomfortably against the technology of a regulating anthropometric grid, questions the manipulation of selling bodies—women’s bodies, in particular. The viewer cannot help but investigate the image, wilfully seeking to make sense of it. The content of the work—a woman in a pose suggestive of exotic dancing, in high heels with her legs contorted in an evocative fashion—presents like an endless question mark. The grid, as a scientific apparatus and equalizer of race, gender, sexuality, and womanhood, accentuates the problematic control of women’s bodies throughout history. The body that is controlled here refuses total domination—and by virtue of its distortion, which has been potentiated through the technology of printmaking and collage, demands to be seen differently, and insists on evading capture and entrapment within the grid.

What consolidates Untitled from Eve is Mutu’s love for drawing, and the admirable care she pays to her medium. She summons the power of mark-making and inscription to articulate the historically labored treatment of the representation of women. In producing these images, she intended to arrive at what she calls “a feminine print.”¹² While thinking about the female body and the connotations that have befallen it throughout history, the artist manifests the female touch in print. She recalls, with affection, how the act of printmaking, and the supplementary acts of drawing and collage, were for her a rewarding process. The act of pondering each mark with care and precision, ensuring that each one reflects its deliberate and considered execution, is apparent in the measured treatment of each individual works in the series. Mutu uses these specific mark-making techniques to help us think about fragility, grace, origin, control, (mis)representation, and transgression—all through the ubiquitous figure of Eve.

Proposition for Generative Technologies

Mutu centers the image of Eve as a repository for women’s history. She ruminates on this image as one that was invented and coded in hetero-patriarchal laboratories, in spaces that Ruha Benjamin might call “tech fixes [that] hide, speed up, and even deepen discrimination.”¹³ She pays attention to the loaded-ness of such coding, and offers forms of generative decoding and re-presentation. Acknowledging that “[t]here is a tendency to look at Africa as if it never possessed any science and technology before Europeans set foot on the continent,” Edward Shizha shows us that “Africa created its own indigenous technology using its own scientific knowledge.”¹⁴ Echoing the sentiment, Mavhunga states that “African history is replete with examples of people adjusting their traditions to craft self-help solutions to everyday challenges and to selectively tap into resources from outside.”¹⁵

With this in mind, it is possible to consider Mutu’s recourse to the technology of the mukonyo as an amalgamation of African traditional and indigenous forms of technology, alongside more contemporary and western-orientated accounts. In addition to the more mechanical, “Western(-originated) high-tech exemplars”¹⁶ that epitomize Mutu’s practice (figs. 5, 6), there is the opportunity to read Untitled from Eve as a form of leaning into what Mavhunga calls “technologies of everyday inventions.”¹⁷ We might see a signaling to the technology of the mukonyo as an extended attribute of Mutu’s interest in technological intervention—and its detriment to women, their representation, and their bodies. However, the technology of the mukonyo offers a different reading and use of technology and women’s bodies and work, and considers the kiondo and its nexus as spaces for women to gather and form communities. Through this community work potentiated by collective indigenous technological practices, such as those expressed by Shizha and Mavhunga, the solitary figure of Eve is no longer in isolation, but rather communes with more generative and positive images of woman able to hold and support her. Drawing a parallel between technology and mobility, Mavhunga argues that “technology is a way of doing.”¹⁸ This potentiates acts of undoing as forms of radical action, and by extension, we can consider Mutu’s undoing of problematic representations of Eve as an engagement with technology. As Ruha Benjamin states, “It is time to reimagine what is possible. So let’s get to work.”¹⁹ Mutu’s representation of Eve and the undoing of the damaging imagery associated with her become forms of uncoding and decolonial praxes through technological intervention rooted in epistemic disobedience.

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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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The proliferation of diverse photographic practices across the world soon after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 is by now well-known. For example, Deborah Poole’s pioneering work on the early history of photography has shown that the movement of photography between Europe, North America, and Latin America constituted the making of a transcultural visual economy, one that was very much about deploying the “truthful” optics of the camera to justify discrimination and imperialism.¹ Photographed people became visual data in the making of modern scopic regimes of difference. For example, photography made race a visible “fact,” and slaving societies, such as the United States, used photographic representation to legitimize slavery and later segregation. But photography also engendered unforeseen horizons of visibility and agency. Portrait photography as an expressive force of modernity was embraced by many. By the 1850s, commercial photography studios could be found all across the globe, including in Buenos Aires, New York, Shanghai, Cairo, Bombay, and Accra. It is striking that in all of these cities, many separated by two oceans people posed for similar portraits, often holding identical standing poses in front of standardized backdrops. Yet rather than being peripheral simulations of the European experience, these pictures are representative of a complex web of connected, yet different image worlds.

However, what is much less known is that eastern Africa, especially the Swahili Coast, was also a fulcrum of the consumption and production of photography. Here photographs did not connect to local practices of picture-making, as in Asia, West Africa, and the Middle East. In fact, Swahili Coast culture was generally aniconic before the nineteenth century (although sculptors did create low-relief semiabstract zoomorphic carvings in architectural settings). This suggests that not all histories of photography are about pictorial illusionism and the mimetic capacities of photography. Rather, photography’s role as a thing in the world, as matter and materiality, played a significant role.²

The Swahili Coast of eastern Africa is one of the most fluid nodes of the Global South, where people, ideas, and materials from all over the world converge and intermingle. A Muslim cultural complex, its ports have acted as intersections of vastly different social and economic systems for more than a millennium. The region has long connected the African heartland to places across the Indian Ocean, especially to the coastal regions of South Asia and the Middle East. As a result, local people are masters of the in-between, easily negotiating between different worldviews and cultural traditions. The second half of the nineteenth century marks a watershed moment in a long history of transcontinental connectivity. The North Atlantic world, including would-be colonizers and capitalists, increasingly focused on controlling the trade and resources of Africa and the Indian Ocean world. When Zanzibar became the seat of the British-backed Busaidi Sultanate of Oman in 1837, the entire region became the center of competing imperial projects. While its main port towns, such as Zanzibar and Mombasa, have always been vanguard places, during this time, new technologies and infrastructures of movement, communication, and mass media rapidly accelerated transcontinental exchange, contracting space and time with unprecedented intensity.

By the 1870s, photography, one of industrial modernity’s most revolutionary mediums, was essential to local aesthetic practice. The first photographs likely arrived in markets of the region’s port towns from Bombay and other South Asian and Middle Eastern trading centers, although Zanzibaris had already been photographed in 1846, when a visiting French naval officer created a series of anthropological daguerreotype plates. Initially, locals did not have access to original photographs but rather to mass-produced picture postcards, or cartes de visite, and chromolithographs. Photographs were printed onto card stocks and paper using various photomechanical processes. By the 1900s, such small-format cards were circulating in the millions across the Indian Ocean and along the caravan routes of eastern Africa. As elsewhere in the world, photography was about both oppression and liberation in myriad ways.

While some locals had the ability to commission their own portrait photographs, many more could buy photographs of strangers, along with other cheap commodities, which were flooding the local markets at this time. Small, mobile, and easily amassed and collected, these pictures connected to older traditions of displaying transoceanic commodities in one’s home. For local consumers, photographs were tantalizingly exotic, endowed with a foreign materiality that made them perfect artifacts for display and pleasure.

By the 1870s, commercial photography studios also proliferated, serving a diverse clientele. At first, local photographers primarily catered to European immigrants, colonial officials, and Omani Arabs, but by the turn of the twentieth century, mainland Africans, Swahilis, and South Asians all frequented them to have portraits made or to buy images of others. Goans, who were Christians and Portuguese subjects, opened the first commercial photography houses in Zanzibar and Mombasa. Although it is often assumed that they came directly from present-day India to the Swahili Coast, many had been living in other ports of the western Indian Ocean. For example, A. C. Gomes first opened a studio in Aden (in present-day Yemen) in 1869, where he also served as a photographer to the British government. He and his family migrated to Zanzibar sometime in the 1870s, when British interests in the Indian Ocean region shifted from the coastal towns of the Arabian Peninsula to the Swahili Coast. In fact, Goan photographers also sold affordable imports, including textiles, household wares, and fashionable items of adornment, such as jewelry and perfumes. They were key agents and purveyors of the commodity culture of the Indian Ocean.

During their early history, studio photographs functioned as portraits and also as objects of good taste. In fact, the ruling elite and wealthy merchants often displayed framed studio portraits of their family members in carefully curated domestic spaces. The photograph in figure 1, for example, shows an interior view of a multiuse room in a large mansion in Stone Town. The room is filled with European glass chandeliers, Middle Eastern carpets, Goan furniture, export-ware porcelain, and German factory-made chairs. Studio portraits are also central to the room’s decorative program. Three large, mounted, and framed portraits of men in Omani dress are set on the ornate Indo-Portuguese cabinet in the right foreground of the image, and another occupies the small nightstand next to the bed. Versions of this photograph exist in many archives across the world, and it was published in a British book in the 1890s, where the byline noted, “The conflict between Oriental and Western civilization is clearly discernable in the decorations of the chamber.”³ Yet this layering of diverse cultural strands in Zanzibari homes did not represent a conflict to locals. The young man sitting in the center of the room, his name no longer known, exudes confidence and authority. His body language is relaxed as he leans against the curve of the chair’s back, extending his legs slightly before him. The carefully arranged collection of prized furnishings and objects d’art reflects his globally inflected aesthetic sensibility. Here photographs, although certainly portraits of family members, also worked in tandem with the collected items that filled this room, to create a layered space of exotica.

For more than one hundred years, until around the 1990s, locals avidly posed for (fig. 2), collected, and created elaborately staged studio portraits of themselves and others for an array of reasons. The great majority of studio photographs from Africa still in circulation today, especially those in European and North American private and public collections, are the historical picture postcards that fall in the “native studies” category (figs. 3-10).⁴ The postcards themselves are very much part of the leisure and collecting culture of Europeans and North American audiences; although, most feature photographs taken by the most successful commercial photographers of the Swahili Coast, including A. C. Gomes, Pereira de Lord, and J. P. Fernandes. They simply sent their photographs to Europe, where they were reprinted as picture postcards, which were then shipped back to eastern Africa to be sold to visitors, who in turn sent them back to Europe and other places overseas. As postcards, local photographs circulated across oceans with unprecedented ease. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a regular schedule of steamships connected the main ports of the Indian Ocean with those of Europe, including Hamburg, London, and Marseilles. Interestingly, before the 1890s, the majority of Swahili Coast commercial studios worked with German postcard printing houses, especially those located in Hamburg.⁵

Studio prints and postcards depicting local people wearing elaborate costumes and holding contrived poses were especially popular during the colonial period, when the coast was part of the British protectorate (1890–1963). Many show local young women, because they evoke a much-loved phantasm of exotic feminine sensuality. The women’s bodies and clothes are sometimes hand colored in luscious hues (figs. 4, 5, 7-9), endowing them with a compelling realism. Clearly, many compositions met the desires of North Atlantic audiences, although scholars and oral histories suggest that postcards also featured photographs that locals had commissioned of themselves; it seems that commercial studios had portraits reprinted as postcards, likely without the permission or knowledge of the sitters. We cannot be sure which photographs were once personal mementos because locals also sometimes posed and dressed in ways that played with North Atlantic photographic tropes. In fact, through photography, diverse clients mixed Swahili aesthetics of self-display, local rules of public propriety, colonial categories of race and identity, and modern notions of the individual.

Although today we have access to thousands of picture postcards in both private and public archives, the lives of those photographed remain largely opaque. We also can only guess about the kinds of negotiations that took place between photographer and photographed.⁶ The majority of postcards, especially the nameless “native type” postcards, show poor people and young women, who were likely hired or forced to perform in front of the camera. Especially the most Orientalizing and seductive compositions (fig. 6) are part of a long history of transforming people into pretty pictures and delectable objects. Today we like to imagine that the sitters in these photographs had some agency in their self-presentation. We see something confident and powerful in these women (especially figs. 4 and 5), believing that they are somehow subverting the oppressive force of the colonial and male gaze defining them. Because of the mimetic realism of photography, we interpret gazes, postures, and gestures as intimating a trace of a sitter’s inner and intimate life. In fact, in many cases, the people who could choose to remain invisible had a great deal more autonomy than those pictured in such postcards. This does not mean the pictured women do not require our serious consideration. They lived complex lives and struggled for self-determination in ways that these photographs can never reveal. Yet, paradoxically, they are also often all that remains of their historical selves, and as such, archival traces of their lived experience. Reading such postcards against the grain of objectification is an important project.

Tourists who bought and sent picture postcards likely did not consider the sitters’ subjectivities or life worlds, but rather saw them as souvenirs, or nameless bodies. As postcards, they are comfortably distant and purely ornamental. The desire for pleasing ornament was why many postcards featured theatrical arrangements of women’s bodies, which were transformed into striking arrangements (figs. 9 and 10). The captions never provide the names of the subjects, but instead a more generic description, such as “Swahili Beauties” (fig. 10), for example. Some reference to “beauty” is printed on many postcards (fig. 8). The subject’s individuality is subsumed by their perceived visual attractiveness; each person is transformed into a pleasurable component of a composition. These postcards are in many ways exemplary of the violence of photography, pandering to the voyeuristic desire of viewers for possession of and power over others.

Many of these women, and also young men, were vulnerable to other forms of violence, including economic, bodily, and sexual violence. These photographs perhaps do not overtly suggest extreme subjugation, but without a doubt, many of the sitters were touched by the violence of slavery. It was a local tradition for retinues of bonded or enslaved women, wearing elaborate costumes, to perform pleasing dances in public. Their dress and jewelry spoke of the wealth and good taste of their enslavers. They often wore matching turbans, body skimming caftans, and tight pants, as seen in figure 10. There existed even a specific category of enslaved women, wapambe, which means “the ornamented ones,” whose primary role was to beautify parades and festivals. Also, as historical recent research has shown, enslavement and its many legacies shaped daily life in myriad ways for decades after the Abolition Decree of 1897.⁷ Abolition was especially ambiguous for women. For instance, the decree officially offered freedom to all, except women categorized as concubines. In fact, many powerful locals declared all enslaved women in their house to be concubines to forestall their manumission.

These postcards therefore hint at the continuation of extreme injustices and hardships, even as the sitters’ smiles and delightful poses suggest play and fun. They very much reveal something about local histories and legacies of violence and are not just about the predations of colonialist photography. They certainly continue to reverberate in Zanzibar today because painful questions about who enslaved whom still shape local interpretations of the nineteenth century.⁸

Clearly these postcards are complicated objects. They are not simply about the North Atlantic taste for exotic bodies, although that is their most obvious role. They are also composites—“local,” “Western,” and “colonial” —all at once. The camera turned living people into mediated effigies, objects that adopted the shape of human beings, that in turn could be shipped across oceans in mobile postcard form. But they also hold onto real lives and specific histories, histories that suggest individual experiences of dehumanization—not just photographic violence.

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