Harold F. Miller
28 September 2008
opinion
Nairobi — Even the most casual visitor to the new All Africa Conference of Churches office block in Nairobi will be accorded a generous welcome. Nearly half the ground floor is an expansive entrance cum reception area.
A fore-bay extends over the half-circle drive-in, delivering the visitor to the base of the marble-covered entry stairs, leading in turn to the wall-to-wall foyer of this uniquely circular building. If the entrance is majestic, the concave carved mural, located immediately behind the reception desk, is stunning.
Comprising a series of upright planks sawn from Kenya's finest trees, the mural stands 12 feet in height, mounted on a semi-circular display wall.
Mythical images and symbols from across the African continent fill the 20-feet display. A stylised female image graces the left edge of the mural while the other end is bonded by an abstract male image.
Together they function as the custodians of human life. Between them "live" the myriad symbolic representations of life in all its complexity, including an allusion to the shadows of prehistory. Ancestors keep watch from the living past; wise men maintain multi-directional watch in the present; flora and fauna support the chain of life.
Ceremonial masks and ancestral images are ritually and artistically present throughout the mural; memories, voices, images and meanings begging for exploration. That conical weave pattern, is it the outline of a carefully thatched village hut or is it the omnipresent African basket?
Amid the many forms, the persistent observer detects the symmetry derived from the Islamic influence in Africa. Is the West African fertility doll (image) a proto-type of the Christian cross and more distantly, a derivative of the "ankh," the hieroglyphic for "life"?
The artist who crafted this mural is Uganda-born, Makerere-educated Expedito Mwebe Kibbula.
He admits to having been employed for a time as an art teacher at the then Kenyatta University College, but has long since preferred to be in touch with "the real world."
At any one time, his decentralised garden art studio on the edges of Kangemi (a western suburb of Nairobi) features a number of on-going projects.
Intern artists focus their attention on the production of stylised craft items. More senior artist assistants work with Kibbula on the design and execution of major projects.
The All Africa Conference of Churches's commission for the production of a mural, initiated and supervised by Eva Chipenda, was by any measure a major undertaking.
Over a period of nine months, these wooden planks were sculpted into mythical and symbolic shapes, representing metaphysical understandings of African life.
They have been rendered by the artist into a myriad stylised, but not totally individual forms. There is a relational dynamic and interaction across this wooden canvas of life. Together, the forms exude a sense of life.
What purpose does such a mural serve, ensconced as it is within the continental headquarters of the All Africa Conference of Churches? Kibbula anticipates that many people will recognise the mural merely as an art form, reflecting images from Africa's past.
That is one level of appreciation, perhaps the only one for those who have either consciously or subconsciously forgotten or rejected the African past. But just as the mural connects the images with each other, so are the viewer and the present generation of Africans challenged to make connections.
Even the most superficial reflection on the symbols may stimulate the remembering of some residual intuitive knowledge among present generation African viewers or "participants."
According to philosophers on the continent, the past is always beholden to the present; its meanings yield to interpretations by each successive generations.
Kibbula believes that the images of this mural should not be left inert within their textbook-appointed designations. The viewer, as "participant," is invited to interpret and to connect the images with each other and, of course, with the viewer's personal perceptions.
According to Kibbula, much of the African past has in fact been lost or abandoned. Forever.
Even now, some of the symbols in the mural seem to stand apart from any discernible meaning.
However, Kibbula resists the visitor-observer's impulse to identify specifically and explain precisely the meaning or origin of each symbol or the connections between them.
Instead, they should be appropriated -- by careful reflection -- into the present, thus becoming part of the living tradition which has conceived, birthed and sustained life on the African continent.
Across the continent, Africans believe the creator, God, to be the source of all life. That very God is acknowledged by Christians as the father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yet, African life in the Christian era has been characterised by a certain alienation between the past and the present, by varying degrees of discontinuity between indigenous religious beliefs and the God of the Bible.
Today, Christians are called to understand all affirmation of life as God-given. Just as icons functioned in the ancient Church to enhance religious devotion and just as African life was sustained by ritual and symbol, so perhaps, can Kibbula's artistic contribution serve as an invitation to all viewers/visitors to reflect on the grandeur of the "oikos," the African "household of life."
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