07 Mar 12 | Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa
“Slum is a tricky word. It conjures up images out of control. The threatening. The miserable. The lawless,” thus wrote Richard Swift in his article “Welcome to Squatter Town” for The New Internationalist. This publicity raised awareness of the difficulties of slum living in Kenya, but it also highlighted the negative aspects of life in these settlements. 60 per cent of people in Nairobi live in slums or informal settlements. You can’t romanticise it. There is hunger, poverty, dire sanitation and overcrowding, with around 200,000 people living in an area approximately 630 acres (similar to 630 football pitches).
But, if you look for them, there are also high expectations, enterprise and thriving creative expression.
In a small room crammed with paintings and metal sculptures partially illuminated by sunlight concentrated through two small windows, eight artists form a collective know as Maasai Mbili in one of Africa’s largest informal settlements, Kibera. The group started in 2001 when friends Otieno Gomba and Otieno Kota decided to combine forces to create a studio space. In 2003 they purchased their current building, turning what had previously been a dodgy bar into a centre of artistic expression and tolerance.
Most of the artists now affiliated with the studio started as sign writers, and in a style directly influenced from this past they create works of visual texts. It makes for hilarious and perceptive art. Otieno Gomba’s piece Save Our Souls features the tread of a running shoe and alludes to both the culture of recycling in Kibera and the depravity found there, while Ashif Malamba’s Somali Pirate series pokes fun at the media’s recent fixation with banditry on East Africa’s coastline.
Using the street as their primary inspiration, Gomba says, “It couldn’t be art if it was just eight artists locked in a room.” Their studio doors bear the word “karibu”, welcome, an open invitation to the community. The work here is not a reflection of life in Kibera, but a representation of it. From the canvases that are primed with a mixture of paint and rubble to mimic the walls of houses, to snippets of conversation overheard in bars that feature in Kevo’s paintings, this is art that is intrinsically bound up with the community in a relationship approaching symbiosis.
As well as creating a neutral space where people can come to them, Maasai Mbili also undertake outreach programmes. Mbuthia Maina holds informal art classes for children where they can “paint what they want” and “pour out their minds”. In a country where art has been sidelined in the national curriculum, this opportunity to explore creativity in an unmediated environment carries even more importance. Not only to does it contribute to building imaginative capacity, but crucially it also provides children with a vehicle to express the issues they see around them but are powerless to control.
Maasai Mbili have created a network of influence within their community, and in the process are building consensus around the idea that there are other possibilities and futures to explore. “Mental attitudes are changing,” said Gomba, speaking of the youth who once saw their options as limited. Rather than turning to a life of petty crime, they now see art as a viable means of making a living. It is a message which is no doubt made all the more powerful because it comes from those who have grown through the same circumstances they have.
The initiative that Maasai Mbili are best known for arose out of the post-election violence of December 2007. Almost overnight, neighbours turned on each other for being from the “wrong tribe”. The death toll rose almost daily for weeks. Amidst the chaos, members of Maasai Mbili decided to use the paintbrush as their main tool in an effort to restore social cohesion. Using street art as a form of visual resistance to unfolding events, they painted Kibera’s ruins, adding colour to blackened buildings and daubing walls with the words “PEACE WANTED ALIVE”. At the time Gomba asked himself, “What is the impact of art in the community? What is the role of art in the time?” In short, how does art influence interaction with our environment, and by extension, our behaviour in it? Art For Peace was born.
Identifying children as having suffered the brunt of the trauma, Art For Peace then embarked on a series of programmes that encouraged youth to address the violence that had engulfed them through creative means. It was “a form of therapy” Gomba said, and an initiative that drew considerable media attention. In the months that followed camera crews and dignitaries flocked to see how a group of dreadlocked artists had begun to address the horrors that those most vulnerable in their community had born witness to.
Now that the violence is over the world’s gaze has moved elsewhere, but for Maasai Mbili the work goes on as they continue to engineer positive social change through art. As Gomba aptly put it, “Art For Peace is eternal. It has no limit. It doesn’t just apply to Kenya. It has no boundaries.”
Maasai Mbili utilise art to effect lasting social change, and they have another pressing goal: to see street art recognised as a legitimate art form. “Street art is sidelined,” said Ashif, “although now there is some recognition. We want to integrate street art with gallery art.” With limited gallery space across Nairobi, compounded by high costs associated with exhibiting, this is ongoing struggle. However when they do get the chance to exhibit, their work consistently sells out. “Our perspective is unique,” Says Ashif, “it is a commentary that is social, personal, economic and political. And it is also full of humour.” Maasai Mbili opens up alternative paths of understanding and gives fleeting access into the visual culture and identity of their community in Kibera.
African Street Art deserves a place in global contemporary discourse. It has meaning beyond commoditisation and market whims. Street Art directly engages with communities through its own language. It changes behaviour and opens up new possibilities; it holds the potential to shape our society. Art — from the street to the gallery — forms an integral part of our national identity.
Musimbi King is a freelance journalist in Nairobi focusing on creative industry in Africa and the role this sector can play in promoting socio-economic growth across the continent.
16 Feb 12 | Sub-Saharan Africa
“It all comes down to reading! If you read properly, you evaluate, you notice, you critique properly. It’s depressing, flying across Africa there’s all these Wazungu (white people) on the plane reading, but our people are reading self-help books or newspapers or not reading at all!” Pili Dumea laughs.
It’s counter-intuitive: ask most politicians what Africa needs, they’ll say water, an end to wars, better food distribution and health provision, roads and a functioning tax system…
But ask Pilli, and you get a different answer. Mama Dumea is the Executive Director of the Children’s Book Project, one of the few NGOs in East Africa that promotes fiction writing and reading. A Tanzanian lady in a vibrant green kanga (local dress), she is chewing thoughtfully on her mango over breakfast. “Julius Nyerere, our ‘Mwalimu’ was a teacher. Intellectual and creative skills were valued twenty years ago. After his Arusha Declaration in 1967, the international publishers — MacMillan, Longman, Heinemann — all left Tanzania. It was terrible for us. What we need now is creativity, thinking, reading!”
She believes people lack creativity and innovation in East Africa. “We are taught to answer, not ask questions in schools. To cram, to copy, to rote learn. Our intellectual development and creativity is completely stifled. If a man sees his neighbour opening a shop, he doesn’t think, ah, how can I compete, no, he thinks how do I COPY!”
This is ironic since East Africa is a highly oral, wordy culture. Mamatiles, or jokes, are central to the lifestyle. Even the kanga Mama is wearing has a little provocative Swahili “poem” on it “Even if you hate me, God has chosen me!” A Muslim, Mama Dumea is aware of the problems facing people in the community “sticking out” by writing. She wants to get them young: “We have a saying, ‘bend a fish whilst it is still fresh’; in other words, work with young, lean fresh minds, not stale ones!”
The Children’s Book Project is backed by a Canadian NGO. They work across East Africa and Liberia in a three pronged attack: supporting writers and encouraging them to write and think creatively for children. Teaching teachers how to read to children, and lastly developing the publishing and distribution sector. They actively support women writers by training and mentoring them. A female Muslim writer, Ameena Minna, still unpubished, agrees: “In my community I am not encouraged to have a public voice, but I feel a calling to write children’s stories, to help my children appreciate and negotiate life. I ask my children directly for inspiration.”
Though there is approximately 60 per cent literacy to a basic level across East Africa, there’s not a reading culture here. Ameir H Ameir has tackled this problem by setting up reading clubs in Tanzania and Zanzibar. “For us the problem is still books: we desperately need books, they’re incredibly expensive. We have hundreds of young people and children who are desperate to read now, because we show them how wonderful it is, how liberating. The issue is sourcing the books — if you know someone who can send us books from Europe, we would love that!”
The scarcity of books has several causes. Publishers can’t make the profit margins; distribution suffers from poor infrastructure; poverty means there is no spare income for “luxuries” like books. Writers often print their own works or have to limit what they write about to appeal to their audiences. Making a living from writing in Africa is virtually unheard of. Space to be creative, the time and money to write, and the confidence to express what you really feel, evocatively and descriptively, are all hard to come by. And role models are now scarce: where once the curriculum bulged with writers like Chinua Achebe, Nyongi Wa Th’iongo, Shaaban Robert and Professor Kazalabi, few school children know now of their intellectual heritage.
In a hot ground floor room an old shabby gentlemen in a stained white kufia and kanzu and worn flip-flops mops his brow with an orange flannel. He is attending the Zanzibar Bookwriters Conference. The questions range from “can I submit a handwritten manuscript” to “should I write in Swahili or English?”. Only four of the 32 of the participants (who are undoubtedly members of the elite) have an email address.
Rumoured to be in his 70s, Mzee Haji Gora Haji is one of Zanzibar’s most prolific and popular writers. He takes 10 minutes to laboriously write his name for me. With no education at all, his numerous books have not earned him much money, but the themes of devils, ghosts, mgangas (witchdoctors) touch a chord with his audiences. “I write about the everyday, the local, I see stories in the daily. The gossip, the jealousy, the humour of the people around me.” Like his colleague Nassor Soud (who finances his own work by producing government textbooks) Haji has touched the popular psyche: the fear of “pollution” of tradition, the importance of leading an ethical life, the ever-present danger of “shetani” (devils) who corrupt with their lustful, material ways.
So what then, is the secret of creativity? “It’s important to educate, to nurture, to encourage, to make mistakes, it’s nothing to do with money,” says Nassor. “Creativity, writing and reading changes behaviour, changes society, asks people to think about the fundamentals: joy, respect, cultural issues.” Haji Gora Haji adds: “You must strive to keep your mind free, to concentrate, and to make time.”
07 Feb 12 | Africa, Index Index, minipost
A radio journalist was abducted and tortured by police last week in Djibouti, Africa. Farah Abadid Hildid of radio station La Voix de Djibouti, was forced into a car by one uniformed police officer and one plain clothed officer on Thursday morning. The journalist was blindfolded and taken to a cell, where he was forced to remove his clothes, and was beaten with pieces of rubber. Hildid’s abductors told him: “We’ve had enough of you. You must stop broadcasting information about us. You must stop bothering the police and the Department for Investigation and Documentation. It will be the worse for you if you continue.”
29 Nov 11 | Africa, Index Index, minipost
Three journalists in the Ivory Coast were taken into police custody on Thursday. César Etou, Boga Sivori and Didier Dépry from daily newspaper Notre Voie were taken in for police questioning on suspicion of insulting the head of state and harming the national economy. Publisher Etou and Chief Political correspondent Sivori were questioned about an article that appeared in the newspaper about 40 new Mercedes official cars made available to members of the government, while the assistant editor Dépry was questioned about an article from the newspapers front page regarding the value of the CFA franc.
“Slum is a tricky word. It conjures up images out of control. The threatening. The miserable. The lawless,” thus wrote Richard Swift in his article “Welcome to Squatter Town” for The New Internationalist. This publicity raised awareness of the difficulties of slum living in Kenya, but it also highlighted the negative aspects of life in these settlements. 60 per cent of people in Nairobi live in slums or informal settlements. You can’t romanticise it. There is hunger, poverty, dire sanitation and overcrowding, with around 200,000 people living in an area approximately 630 acres (similar to 630 football pitches).
As well as creating a neutral space where people can come to them, Maasai Mbili also undertake outreach programmes. Mbuthia Maina holds informal art classes for children where they can “paint what they want” and “pour out their minds”. In a country where art has been sidelined in the national curriculum, this opportunity to explore creativity in an unmediated environment carries even more importance. Not only to does it contribute to building imaginative capacity, but crucially it also provides children with a vehicle to express the issues they see around them but are powerless to control.
Now that the violence is over the world’s gaze has moved elsewhere, but for Maasai Mbili the work goes on as they continue to engineer positive social change through art. As Gomba aptly put it, “Art For Peace is eternal. It has no limit. It doesn’t just apply to Kenya. It has no boundaries.”