Kabiito Richard's paintings: a local reinvention in a global perspective

African Arts, Summer, 2004 by Sunanda K. Sanyal

The complexity of the history of modern art in Africa is no big news. Not only was institutional art training introduced in the African colonies under individual circumstances, but its destiny at each of those sites has been decisively shaped by the local events of the postcolonial decades. The consequence is multiple histories of individual and collective intellectual efforts to assert what Chika Okeke has identified as "the unmistakable mark of the artists' twentieth-centuryness" (Okeke 2001:30).

Facing such diversity, then, any study of an intellectual milieu in Africa has to pay close attention to a variety of issues peculiar to that scene. The case of an emerging artist, for example, is instructive in this context. Such an artist inevitably faces the challenging task of recognizing and adapting to several influential mediating factors--various social and cultural discourses, the institution's model(s) of instruction, and the inclinations of individual mentors--in order to build a personal idiom of visual expression at the conclusion of formal training. An attempt to historicize the legacy of an institution by examining how some of these agencies shape the individual's creative quest can be particularly effective in bringing to light a local history of representation as well as the global aspirations of those localized efforts. Focusing on a selection from an untitled series of paintings done between 1995 and 1997 by the Ugandan painter Kabiito Richard (b. 1969), this paper examines such a case.

A graduate of Margaret Trowell School of Fine and Industrial Arts at Kampala's Makerere University, Kabiito now teaches there. Here I examine the formal and iconographical properties of Kabiito's images, in which he incorporates fragments of indigenous objects, to discover how artifacts from known cultural contexts are transformed into pictorial signs. My thesis is twofold. I maintain that, on the one hand, the paintings resist classification as ethnically authentic images, instead testifying to a contemporary artist's vision using local references to move beyond the confines of that locale into a global space of artistic discourse; yet, on the other hand, I argue that the experiments aiming at that broader arena also demonstrate a local reinvention of the pictorial strategies of modernism. In addition to analyzing the individual works, I trace their institutional lineage through a discussion of the relevant aspects of the Art School's training and, finally, place the project in the larger context of a global politics of culture.

Man in Kanzu and My Heritage

As Kampala is located in the heart of the kingdom of Buganda, once the most powerful of the four monarchies of southern Uganda, the majority of the artists at the School, including Kabiito, are Baganda. "I felt I owed something to my culture," says Kabiito about his use of traditional Kiganda objects and materials in his work. "They [local artifacts] inspired me to represent them in visual forms. I wanted to show what else the artifacts could offer." (1)

With no apparent thematic unity, some of the paintings of the series show only images of artifacts, while others offer collages made with actual objects. Man in Kanzu (Fig. 1) and My Heritage (Fig. 2) belong to the first group. In the first picture, Kabiito alters the image of a "male" Kiganda drum (omugalabi) to represent a man clad in the full-length white robe (kanzu) and cap that Arab traders brought to Buganda in the nineteenth century, accompanied by the full-sleeve jacket that came later with the Europeans. One of the most common male attires in the region, especially in rural Buganda and its neighboring areas, this combination of acculturated garments is accepted today as traditional dress. Kabiito does not so much see the drum as a reference to music as he visualizes the familiar gender identity of the instrument by suggesting an analogy between the elongated shape of the object and that of a male body in the flowing robe. The figure, however, neither claims any credible presence in space, nor does it appear to be a caricature of either the drum or a human; instead, the complete absence of any suggestion of volume in the transformed object, the asymmetry of its shoulders, a curious combination of translucency on the left half and opacity on the right, and the organic flat shapes in the background confirm the primacy of the picture surface. The pensive character thus demonstrates a contemporary Ganda artist's passion for painting no less than his awareness of the history of his culture's openness to foreign influence.

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

Unlike the solitary object in Man in Kanzu, an abstract image of an entire environment--the royal tomb located at Kasubi near Kampala--is the subject of My Heritage. A quick look at this edifice, therefore, will help clarify the picture. The kabaka (king) is the supreme symbol of Buganda's identity, and the royal tomb contains the graves of the last four of the kabakas. (2) A surviving testimony to the scale and grandeur of Buganda's royal architecture and the most revered shrine in the kingdom, the tomb (Fig. 3) displays on multiple levels what in Luganda is called kutimba. A void, or a bare, unadorned space or body is philosophically unacceptable in Ganda thinking--a concept that Alois Lugira describes as the gaganda's "horror of vacuum" (Lugira 1965:39). Conversely, an effort to produce a sense of enigma by placing or hanging coverings, obstacles, or partitions is identified as kutimba, an expression capable of describing a range of activities, from decorously draping one's own body, to ambiguously speaking with proverbs, to embellishing spaces with objects or images. Kutimba is thus an aesthetic term as well, not often intended as such in contemporary contexts but evident in both the tomb's architecture and the arrangement of the relics it houses. The building's sloping roof, for instance, makes the walls almost invisible from a distance; even the partially exposed front wall is methodically interrupted by two rows of roof supports. Further, a number of thick rings, made of palm fronds and dyed in a combination of red and black, cover the entire slope of the high ceiling of the commodious but dimly lit shrine hall (Fig. 4). Finally, an array of shields, medals, photographs of the deceased monarchs, and a variety of spears crowd the four graves located against a backdrop of bark-cloth curtain, with the roof supports around the graves also wrapped in the same material (Fig. 5). Simply put, strategies of juxtaposition and concealment stemming from the idea of kutimba are key to the tranquil mood of the monument.