I am prone to making the occasional mistake.

For example, I declared in 1979 that Britain would never elect a woman as prime minister. Two days later, enter Margaret Thatcher stage right.

I was also fairly confident that Donald J. Trump would never enter the White House, except perhaps as a reluctantly invited guest.

So clearly politics is not my thing.

But I thought art was… until I visited a current exhibition called Vanguard 1, celebrating Kenya’s First Generation artists — those who from the late 1980s-90s helped to make East Africa a force in the art world, and whose work won international acclaim.

Among them was a painting by Tabitha Wa Thuku, an artist whose canvases I have perhaps been slow to appreciate. I remember comparing a recent exhibition of hers to a train crash.

I still hold that to be true, yet in Vanguard 1, at the Circle Art Gallery in Lavington, Nairobi (on until the end of June), is a landscape called Little Paradise — and it practically steals the show.

Quiet, reflective, pared to the bone, it brings a small corner of Kenya into the room, and is a little masterpiece.

It is a place the artist knows well, her farm at the village of Ndondori near Kinagop, known for its sudden mists. If Wa Thuku can paint this well, why does she not do so more often? As they say in Trumpland — go figure.

Looking around the exhibition unfortunately reinforced my belief that the abilities of the First Generation, with a few notable exceptions, were in inverse proportion to their huge reputations.

And those reputations even now lumber like dinosaurs across the sunlit meadow of the regional arts scene, casting long shadows. Were they, are they, at all deserved?

The answer has to be yes, but as time allows a clearer view of past triumphs, it has to be said that the artworks themselves are generally less important than the inspiration their creators gave to those who followed.

Easily among the best of the pioneers are Ancent Soi and Kivuthi Mbuno.

Their unique presentations of village life are as timeless and unchanging as their self-taught skills in colouring, composition and drawing.

Soi’s The Clinic, from 1996, surprises with the ingenious way his combination of episodes — arrival, waiting, seeing the nurse — compresses time in a composition anchored by the nurse’s startling white uniform.

"The Clinic" by Ancent Soi. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY | NMG

Untypically, Mbuno’s Struggle, however, is unusually muted as though the scene is already fading from memory.

Meek Gichugu, like Mbuno, specialised in fantasy; in his case a mixture of Dali-esque spindly beasts, commonplace objects given a bizarre twist (gourds with wings for instance) and a strong sexual undercurrent.

He is also among the best of the lot, sharing that distinction with the Tanzanian George Lilanga, well known for his convoluted paintings of shetani (humorous malevolent spirits). Lilanga first trained as a sculptor in the Makonde style and is represented by a perky little carving of a seated woman.

Any discussion of the First Generation brings us inevitably to those known optimistically as the Big Three — Jak Katarikawe, Sane Wadu and Wanyu Brush.

Katarikawe is notoriously uneven (witness his retrospective at the Kenya National Museum’s annex next to Nyayo House a few years ago) and at The Circle his woodcut I Can Make You Talk struck me as clumsy in design and execution.

His oil of a couple apparently quarrelling outside their home reminded me, by default, that when on form, painting iridescent narratives of his dreams, he earned his tag as a regional petit maître.

Both Wadu and Brush specialise in thrashing paint onto canvas, their subjects staggering bravely through the onslaught and onto the picture plane. It is a clever, diversionary technique, well suited to artists with somewhat shaky drawing skills, and it has served them well.

Refreshingly, the show’s curator Danda Jaroljmek, has offered a couple of their watercolour and gouache paintings instead of the more familiar oils, and they hold up well.

Wadu’s subdued painting of his artist wife Eunice (hung next to three of her bold prints) is shot through with tenderness, while Brush’s vivid Exodus is a luminous exercise in carefree chaos.

Other notable works include Theresa Musoke’s print of a buffalo, Rosemary Karuga’s two charming collages, Shine Tani’s painting The Landlord, a couple of vigorous mixed media drawings by Charles Sekano (of historical interest, at least) and the towering wood carving Two Dancers by Samwel Wanjau, made in 1980.

With 27 artists showing around 60 paintings, prints and sculptures, it is impossible to mention them all, which in some cases is probably just as well.

For what is clear from this show is that while these artists inspired others to paint, sculpt and print, many of them lacked consistency and even basic skills. It is as if to have been there was enough.

But do visit Vanguard 1. It is where the flourishing regional art scene began. It is also worth the trip just to see Wa Thuku’s moving little landscape of a much loved place — a wholly unexpected and very welcome glimpse of Paradise.