According to Wambui Mwangi’s illuminating introductory essay, we owe the status of Wanjiku to former president Moi who opined that she was not competent to participate in such weighty matters as the writing of the new constitution.

This exhibition is a defiant response to that, showing how she has become an icon up there with France’s Maraianne, Britain’s Britannia and the Statue of Liberty, though she is closer to America’s “mwananchi” than to Margaret Thatcher, for women in the public eye are still rare and extraordinary.

With the help of the inimitable cartoonist Gado, she has become a uniquely Kenyan humble, wry character — tiny in stature but not in importance, who has indeed contributed constructively to the making of the new constitution.

No pumbavu; she has found a way to straddle the public-private divide.

The women’s work at Nairobi’s Alliance Francaise ranges from the glossy high fashion photography of Barbara Minishi whose celebration of female artifice contrasts sharply with the stone carving of Irene Wanjiru or Lydia Galavu.

Minishi revels in womans’ ability to use paint to highlight her own beauty whereas Mwangi’s photographs show her fruitfulness, her shy presence in so much of African society.

Stone brings us closer to the Madonna and Child image of woman, her power to give birth and to nurture.

These two sculptors emphasize the near-holiness of the ordinary woman who hops skips and jumps through life (as in Sylvia Morumbwa’s watercolour on paper.)

Wanjiru sees the bond between mother and child as strongest of all: Her androgynous figure’s eyes are closed in quiet reverie and the hands that hold the fearful babe flow seamlessly into its helpless body.

She may be made of stone but her heart is visible in the fierce strength of the face which belongs to no particular race or tribe.

Morumbwa’s Wanjiku has to hop and skip to avoid the dirt and obstacles that are the stuff of her daily life.

Though she, like the others, embodies the aspirations of a country made up of 43 disparate tribes yoked together by violence, she is under no illusion that anything will change soon.

But her hurry shows that she doesn’t have time to waste thinking about it. There is important work to be done.

Susan Warwinu’s colourful paper collage brings out the vitality of womens’ discourse —the element which binds them in a common struggle and lessens their burden. Unlike some of her sisters abroad, Wanjiku is never alone or isolated, whatever age she may be.

Community and family give her strength. Warwinu says that Wanjiku always puts her family first and makes enormous sacrifices to keep it alive.

“She is hardworking and perseveres,” she adds. Central to it all is Gado’s mischievously mocking figure commenting from the sidelines. Like Disney’s Jerry, she proves that size counts less than wit.

Esther Mukuhi’s I’m a Real Woman stands out as the centre of a turbulent world.

The busy, outlandish colours of her garb, her gourds and her baskets contrast with the still sense of her person.

“She is overworked and the breadwinner,” writes Mukuhi. “She is everything to her family and should be respected.”

The bold use of colour reveals a joy and beauty in her which cannot always be expressed.

A different kind of stillness inhabits Tabitha wa Thuku’s A look onto the Foot. Her moon-faced female figure looks down at her feet as a sign of humility.

She smiles in quiet contentment, floating in her own world. Until now when prominent feminists like Mwangi and Mshai Mwangola began to take an interest in her, Wanjiru was silent and invisible.

Now she has come into the public arena as “an awakened citizen who took over the process,” writes Mwangola, to the extent that the constitution has even been named after her.

She turned around the contempt of Moi and the world of the Mheshimiwa he represents.

She has at last succeeded in defying the patriarchal voice of authority. But this is an art exhibition not a seminar, so the ideas articulated in words add meaning and context to the work.

They do not provide solutions but a unique way of posing questions.