Jua Kali & the Transformation of Contemporary Kenyan
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2011 Globalizing Kenyan Culture: Jua Kali & the Transformation of Contemporary Kenyan Art: 1960-2010 Margaretta H. Swigert Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Swigert, Margaretta H., "Globalizing Kenyan Culture: Jua Kali & the Transformation of Contemporary Kenyan Art: 1960-2010" (2011). Dissertations. 265. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/265 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2011 Margaretta H. Swigert LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO GLOBALIZING KENYAN CULTURE: JUA KALI AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CONTEMPORARY KENYAN ART: 1960-2010 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN SOCIOLOGY BY MARGARETTA SWIGERT CHICAGO, IL MAY 2011 Copyright by Margaretta Swigert, 2011 All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest appreciation to all the Kenyan artists and supporters of contemporary Kenyan art with whom I met and worked throughout my multiple trips to Kenya. I especially wish to acknowledge friends at African Colours, the online art gallery in Nairobi for enabling me to ‗perch‘ at their offices while conducting my field research in Kenya. I am also indebted to my Kenyan family who, by allowing me to stay in their Nairobi home for many months, facilitated my trekking all around the countryside both within and on the outskirts of Nairobi. I would also like to express my deep appreciation of my dissertation committee at Loyola University Chicago whose support, encouragement and guidance ensured the completion of this study. Dr. Judith Wittner, Dr. Marilyn Krogh, Dr. Lauren Langman and Dr. Fred Kniss were all extremely helpful throughout the process of writing. I especially wish to thank David Treering, the GIS Specialist at Loyola‘s Center for Urban Environment Research and Policy, without whose technical assistance I could not have constructed the maps and included the illustrations in my text. Google maps also played an essential role in the map construction process. In the final phase of production of this dissertation, I gratefully received support from a number of wonderful people, including Elizabeth Nnakubulwa, Christine Wolff, Rosa Negussie, Elissa Fineman, Sarah von Fremd, Traci Zamp, Jenni Rinne, Maria Freeman and Joan Smutny. iii Finally, I would like to thank the Graduate School of Loyola University Chicago for awarding me the fellowship that facilitated my traveling to Kenya to conduct my research. A note of appreciation for Rotary International is also in order since it was RI‘s Ambassadorial Fellowship that first enabled me to venture forth to East Africa and fueled my love and appreciation for Kenyan art and artists. iv For Migwi, Lisa, Faith Wairimu and Maya Imani Gacheru . PREFACE Jua kali City: The Nairobi Art World as a Site of Cultural Production We live in the age of the city. The city is everything to us— It consumes us, and for that reason we glorify it. Onookome Okome: ―Writing the Anxious City…‖ This dissertation began with the intention of focusing on three separate art worlds in Kenya and examining the impact of globalization on the Banana Hill Art Studio, Kisii Soapstone Cooperative Society and Rahimtulla Museum of Modern Art. But that plan quickly changed Figure 1. Nairobi City Life, an oil painting by the Banana Hill artist Alex Mbugua once I hit the ground in Nairobi after being away from the country for a decade. I had been an arts reporter for leading Kenyan newspapers for many years, and although my focus had been on both performance and visual arts, I had steered clear of the visual for several years just because the contemporary visual art scene had become too political for my taste. Like some of the artists you will read about, I felt local artists were beingused as ‗stepping stones‘ for other people‘s advancement in the international donor world, so I stepped back from covering art exhibitions and spent most of my nights reviewing plays in Nairobi. I had to leave the country for family reasons just before the new millennium arrived, but once I returned to vi Kenya a decade later, I found so much vibrant cultural activity, so much dynamism, innovation, creative energy and global flows, that I knew I couldn‘t confine myself to only three art worlds; I had to see the city holistically as a site of cultural production and an ‗art world‘ in its own right.Certainly the number of formal art institutions has increased exponentially in the last ten years: There are also more training sites for aspiring artists. Otherwise, the first two post-independent commercial art galleries still exist, one indigenous (Paa ya Paa, meaning ―the antelope is rising‖), the other expatriate (Gallery Watatu); thriving foreign cultural centers-French, German, British and Italian are also still active and accommodating, and the National Archives and National Museums are on-going, although the latter has been transformed with millions of European Union euros brought in to renovate and provide some funds for the arts from 2006. Donor money has played a central role in transforming and even globalizing Nairobi‘s art world over the last decade not only at the National Museums of Kenya, but in the start-ups of new institutions. The RaMoMA Museum of Modern Art and The GoDown Art Center might never have gotten off the ground without substantial funding from the Ford Foundation and other development aid agencies. The same is true for another art center, Kuona Trust, which had started up with donor funds in the mid-90s ostensibly to help develop contemporary Kenyan art and artists. But as the artists themselves will explain, donor funding can be problematic, particularly when the funds dry up as many of them have since the 2008 Global Recession. And as Rasna Warah, a Kenyan journalist and former United Nations staffer explains, donor aid often leads to donor dependency among its recipients. At the same time, ―Dependency on aid (donor vii funding) also allows development workers and other do-gooders to continue justifying to themselves why their work is so important‖ (Warah 2008: 13). The point is that while one dimension of globalization in Kenya is donor money coming into the arts community, having both positive and negative effects, foreign funding is not the only factor contributing to the tremendous growth in jua kali arts activity in the past few decades. On the contrary, part of the dynamism has been due to artists‘ Figure 2. Kenyan Art, a poster by Patricia resistance to donor controls. In this regard, Njeri went global when jua kali art went on exhibition in the United Kingdom Rasna Warah again made the valid point when she wrote: ―Aid-dependency also ensures that rich countries retain some control over their former colonies‖ (2008: 12). One group especially resistant to this kind of neocolonial control was the Hawa Women‘s group. They had actually applied for funding to build a fully-equipped women‘s art studio, and received approval for $800,000 grant from an American donor. But when one of the donor managers refused to disperse the funds except on terms that he specified, the Hawa Women went elsewhere to raise funds from both global and local sources to conduct rural women‘s art workshops that took them all over the countryside. They also managed to expose the donor‘s controlling practices in the media. Other jua kali artists reacted to donors trying to determine where they could work. Rather than be controlled by the donor‘s dictates, these artists simply moved out from under the donor‘s gaze. In the spirit of jua kali self-reliance, they fanned out and found new spaces from which to work. Having been lulled into complacency while the donor‘s promise of ‗free things,‘ once the viii artists realized that nothing—not even foreign aid -- came for free, they were aroused and energized by that awakening. Quite a number of creative initiatives have resulted from that awakening. Based on my research findings, spending many months working with, listening to and writing about Kenya‘s jua kali artists, I argue that much more than donor money has brought about the tremendous cultural productivity among Kenyan artists, a productivity that‘s been aptly named an African Renaissance. More than money has scattered artists all across the city where they are at work in slums and industrial areas as well as in posh suburbs and peri-urban sites. I argue that it is what Raymond Williams calls an ―emergent cultural practice‖ and what I call a jua kali survival strategy which has unleashed infinite possibilities for creative expression among jua kali artists. Given that the term jua kali has historically referred to informal sector employment, which is where millions of Kenyans migrating to the city in search of work go to earn some kind of livelihood, however meager it may be, it is hardly a surprise that a fair percentage of them resort to jua kali artistry. What‘s important to note however is that a major factor contributing to the growth of the informal sector was the World Bank- IMF-led structural adjustment programs of the late 1980s and 1990s, which reduced or eliminated subsidies on basic services in urban areas. Not surprisingly, it was around this same time that the Kenya government began to take note of the immense entrepreneurial potential of the informal sector.