Fragments of our passing lives

Typical is Nairobi River shown as a wasteland, huts huddled together for their own protection.

The Prussian blue of Nyambari transmutes into the sharper cyan of a chemical blue stain that permeates the river and leaches into the surrounding land.

Those who live amid this desolation walk shoulders hunched beside the river. In the background trees stand starkly as survivors.

In addition to the easel paintings there are 11 oil studies, each around A4 size, pinned loosely to a board.

They have a vitality absent in a few of her larger landscapes; an energy that comes from a vision focused down as though through the lens of a magnifying glass.

This energy comes, I feel, from her stated mission which is to capture the Kenya she believes is fast disappearing.

The title of Rahab Shine’s exhibition is A Piece to Remember and her real subject is not so much village life but the fact that it is already beginning to vanish around her.

The ways she knew as a child are largely gone; even the slums are changing fast.

It all needs to be set down so future generations can see what life was like.

Shine writes: “Day by day slums are being upgraded, which is good, and one day it will be forgotten.

“I realised that for coming generations I should do something as an artist as one who has lived in this generation where there is a lot of oppression.”

She adds simply: “My art will tell the story.” And Shine has a point.

Who remembers, for example, what the land once looked like where the Village Market at Gigiri now stands?

It was a slum. Its inhabitants were kicked out in the 1990s.

And what of Kibera, reputedly Africa’s biggest slum, where the wood, tin and mud houses are rapidly being replaced by blocks of flats?