Rupi Mangat
24 August 2008
column
Nairobi — THE ESSENCE OF SCULPTURE IS ABOUT defining space. The "Universal Couple," a five-foot tall metal sculpture of a man and a woman in embrace, highlighted in iron and copper, is a stunning piece of work by Expedito Mwebe Kibbula.
The sculpture makes one stop, look and think of what it is or can be. Being a life-size three dimension figure, it goes beyond a photographic image.
It is what Henry Moore, one of the 20th century's most famous sculptors, said of his work when asked to define, "All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the onlooker moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know."If one was to meet Kibbula for the first time, the first impression is that of a quiet, unassuming man. That is until you see his work and see the artist behind them. Some people have called him the African Picasso. African Heritage founder Alan Donovan said the description perfectly fitted Kibbula.
Donovan said, "A genius must be a visionary, which both were. Picasso was one of the so-called 'modern' artists in the early 20th century that borrowed heavily from past African masters. Few contemporary African artists have the talent and genius to awe their viewers like past African artists who created the masks, textiles and sculptures that reside in the world's museums. Expedito is an exception."
The five-foot-tall metal sculpture of the two figurines representing the Universal Couple was meant to grace the Murumbi Memorial Garden together with the "The Bird of Peace Emerging from the Stone of Despair" sculpted by Prof Elkana Ongesa, which echoes a line from a Martin Luther King speech. Instead, we meet in the lobby of the Inter Continental Hotel where the sculpture may be housed temporarily.
Prof Elkana Ongesa is another giant of African Heritage, and the artist who produced the first major exhibition at African Heritage on Kenyatta Avenue in 1973.
Prof Ongesa's sculptures adorn the entry of the United Nations Building in New York; the front of the Unesco headquarters in Paris; the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta and Caltex headquarters in Houston, Texas.
He also has sculptures in china and other countries but "The Bird of Peace Emerging from the Stone of Despair" is his first such work in Africa. Joseph Murumbi, Kenya's second vice-president, requested him to sculpt a work for his grave before he died.
Like other great sculptors, Prof Ongesa was one of the first -- from a long line of stone sculptors in his family -- to pursue a life of studying and teaching art, against formidable odds.
Among the many institutions he attended were Kenyatta University and Makerere University. US ambassador Michael Ranneberger introduced Prof Ongesa as Kenya's greatest living sculptor at his recent exhibition at the Village Market in Nairobi.
Born in Uganda in the 1950s, Kibbula belongs to the Nsenene clan of the Baganda.
This is the clan of the grasshoppers who are renowned for their artistic skills. For as long as he can remember, art has been his way of life. As a little boy, his mother took him to visit relatives at the lake shore town of Asembo Bay, in Tanzania.
"Walking on the beach, l found the pebbles quite stunning and I picked a few to bring home with me." Many years later, he found that Henry Moore (1898-1986) had also been awed by pebbles on the beach. Moore is best known for his abstract monumental bronzes, which can be seen in many places around the world as public works of art. The subjects are usually abstracts of the human figure, typically mother-and-child or reclining figures.
Kibbula is a graduate of what was one of the top universities in Africa, Makerere, in the early 1970s. He is one of the early artists of post-independence Africa that Murumbi admired. It was a vibrant time for East African universities, producing luminaries in many fields. "Jonathan Kingdon was one of my tutors. He was a professor in painting, drawing and anatomy," said Kibbula.
That surprised me, since I know Jonathon Kingdon to be a scientist working in research. A few years ago, l had listened to the white-haired man give a talk on the animal kingdom for the East African Wildlife Society in Nairobi. His books on African wildlife are a must- read for wildlife lovers.
"Jonathan Kingdon is an original, a genius. He stretches beyond the boundaries of an artist and a scientist. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Einstein, before him, under his tutelage, one can discover the many facets of an artist.
STUDYING ART IN MAKERERE back then was exciting. Many came and didn't know who they were and then discovered their latent talents. Some thought they were painters but turned out to be sculptors while some found their calling in paint.
It was like losing your way and finding it through intellectual stimulation. An artist's brain is complex and therefore it is a long and tricky exercise delving into it," said Kibbula of his student days. "Art school was important because it was training for exposure and making a lot of discoveries about the self. You were exposed to the wider school of society and the environment, space and functions, mingling with architects, lawyers, doctors and many other different people. Makerere was then fluid, not restrictive like today."
For Kibbula, studying art was exciting as it involved being exposed to different styles and experimenting with techniques. the experience was much more ingraining.
Today however, Kibbula laments that there is almost nothing to write home about the art department at his former school. "it is not enough to just study art and become a teacher; art is more than academia," he said.
Whereas art and artists in the west have been documented and studied, this is still missing in africa. "we were totally disoriented by slavery and the coming of the arabs and christianity on our continent. their systems clashed with ours, so we were robbed of the chance to be ourselves or for our civilisations to evolve. we surrendered our ways and became artificial practitioners of alien ideas. we need to do more in the documentation and exploration of our artists before all is lost."
Kibbula explains the phenomena of africans using skin lighteners and straightening their kinky hair, as a sign of a people still caught in the quagmire of colonialism. he describes this as the ultimate destruction of the african identity. the political system of the independent africa took on the cloak of colonialism instead of strengthening the african identity.
"We as africans have to develop ourselves or we will sink deeper into nothingness," says Kibbula. "look at mahatma Gandhi, he forced the white man to accept him as an Indian.
The great leader, who Winston Churchill had the audacity to call the "half naked kafir," began his call for non-violence in South Africa after he was thrown off the train because he refused to move from the compartment reserved for whites.
Back in India, he called for the great salt march in defiance of the British orders that their Indian subjects buy only manufactured salt imported from the west. his other political statement was to wear his simple homespun cotton wraps and strengthen Indian industry. his discarding of the western garb was what prompted Churchill's comment.
Kibbula talks animatedly about the human brain. "people become secure and comfortable with where they are. but once in the comfort zone, they become weak and this is when african politicians step in to exploit the people, and it becomes impossible for us to move ahead. then we lose our ability to discover ourselves."
"Look at Bill Gates, it is nothing other than an artistic brain working and using the scientific component of his brain."
Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer, the ultimate "renaissance man", with an infinite curiosity and powers of invention. he is considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and the most diversely talented person ever to have lived, only rival led by his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Da vinci is renowned for the mona lisa and the last supper, and the drawing of the vitruvian man.
As an engineer, his ideas were vastly ahead of his time. he conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics.
Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing.
As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.
Kibbula says Picasso is the most recognised figure in 20 century art. His celebrated painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon), was strongly influenced by African sculpture.
It depicts five prostitutes in a brothel from AvinyÃ' street (in Barcelona). He completed it in the summer of 1907. The painting now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which acquired it in 1939.
"Few Africans support African artists. Murumbi dwelt on this theme in his speeches, including the address he gave at the opening of the African Heritage in l973. He pleaded with Margaret Kenyatta, then mayor of Nairobi, and city councillors to support African artists and sculptors. But this message fell on deaf ears.
He later said that African politicians should not be upset when African art leaves Africa since they were not interested in buying it or supporting the artists.
Donovan says African artists such as Francis Nnaggenda, once the chairman of the Fine Arts department at Makerere University, got the best training they could find at that time and completed their studies against difficult odds.
Murumbi owned four of his sculptures, three of which are now at the National Museums of Kenya, the Kenya National Archives and the Murumbi Peace Memorial.
KIBBULA SAYS AFRICAN art from the past centuries, from rock art to traditional masks, is extraordinary. It is a "super" art form. "However, it has been labelled primitive and tribal -- whatever primitive means-- and therefore made to be of a lesser kind by the colonialists.
"We have more life in our works," says Kibbula, "which the European Renaissance was copying. African art is a mosaic of ideas and elements borrowed from nature. It is not simplistic. The European Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries almost became a science whereas in comparison, African art was an adoration of the human form.
But today, African art seems to be isolated and static much of it because of the political crisis on the continent. "Artists are becoming more isolated and that's the tragedy. Artists cannot inspire themselves.
They need interaction, and in a way, globalisation is good because artists can step out into the wider world. But there is a dire need for the renewal of the African art world. Much of it has been tampered with by politics. Artists need to discover themselves.
"In Africa as a whole, there are few contemporary artists whose works have the spirit that evokes a sense of awe in the viewer like those old masters who produced the sculptures that moved the early modern masters and thus forever changed the face of world art," says Donovan, who has travelled widely in Africa since the 1960s and qualifies to be an African art historian.
Some of Kibbula's signature series of etchings on wood panels can be seen at the Nairobi Serena and Kampala Serena hotels. Others are in private collections around the world.
"I don't have a style," says Kibbula, "But l can say that I have a stand point. I transform."
Kibbula is a philosopher artist. "My work is not just to entertain. It is about things I want to see and if you like what I do then we walk together, if not, then that is okay. The important point here is that an artist must be strong and independent in what he or she does. It is possible to make statements that can influence society. And an artist must move on to pick new ideas," he says.
Today, Kibbula works with his son Michael Angelo, who he sees as his prodigy and future. The two worked together on the Universal Couple.
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