It is said the former Ugandan president Idi Amin had his unfaithful wife Kay Adroa murdered and her arms and legs cut off then reattached, with her legs where her arms should be and her arms sewn onto her hips.

A ghastly effect and so destabilising that one doctor who saw Kay’s body promptly threw up. And that was a pathologist well used to dissections.

Interfere with what we perceive to be normal and the effects can be dramatic, as many artists have shown.

One of the latest to venture down that path is Elias Mung’ora, with a painting that marks the start of a series called African Identity. A head is framed by ranks of screenshots taken after Googling the word “Africa.” (It produces 1.48 billion entries in 0.57 seconds.)

But there is more. This head, with its purple woollen cap, has its huge, grinning mouth where the eyes should be, and the eyes and nose where you would expect to find the mouth and chin.

The reversal explores Mung’ora’s belief in the ambiguity he finds in urban Africans immersed a culture largely imported from Europe and the US.

The painting is acutely observed and disturbing — both in its iconography and implications — and it is the first of many works through which Mung’ora will explore the dichotomy of urban Africans abandoning their own rich heritage for the foreign cultures that bombard them.

The painting is one of 15 currently on show at the Circle in Lavington, Nairobi, in an gallery hang, sandwiched between the recent show of sculpture and next month’s preview of the Circle’s fourth art auction — this year to take place at the Intercontinental Hotel, Nairobi on February 27.

African Identity seems to set the tone for a subconscious undercurrent that in a less balanced exhibition would turn the gallery into a house of horror.

Next to it is Boniface Maina’s Phobia, a 152cm by 116cm illustration of the sort of overwhelming figure that children have nightmares about. Advancing towards us with hands like spiders, it is something bad coming to get us.

Paint your fears by all means; get them out of your system… but nevertheless, I am beginning to worry about Boniface Maina.

And then there are three paintings by Shabu Mwangi, all in a row. His amorphous figures with their sharp, glittering teeth have their own unsettling quality.

Culture v. Modernity, showing a man, a woman and just one child, alludes to the modern norm that reduces the number of children families traditionally raised, while Talk at the Shore relates to the migration crisis. Two men talk at the shore (not ‘show’ as the exhibition catalogue has it) while small boats bob in the background. Their talk is of hope; their future probably to drown.

Mwangi’s third painting, Bed Sitter 1, is from his latest series dealing with life in the slums. A parent lies beside a bed on which are two children. Love, overcrowding, the struggle to survive.

These three paintings prove once again that Shabu Mwangi deserves his growing reputation as one of region’s sharpest social commentators as well as, almost incidentally, a colourist and draughtsman who has developed a unique style to express his concerns.

Peter Walala shows a sheet of recycled clothing labels stitched together to comment on consumerism rampant in the capital (and a link is established here, surely, with Mung’ora’s concern about the urban cultural clash) while Justus Kyalo offers two large abstract paintings that spring from his interest in the pre-colonial trails from Ukambani to the Coast.

The first, Trails, is a magisterial magenta and blue colour field crossed horizontally by four strings; the trails. The second, more allusive, is called Outvited. It too bears traces of trails but that initial inspiration has become secondary to a celebration of the pleasures of painting and the creative process.

Predominantly cream and white, with touches of caramel and magenta, it is one of those rare paintings you could look at for hours, sinking ever deeper into it and always finding something new.

The remaining seven paintings are by the Sudanese artists Rashid Diab, Dawit Abebe, Salah Elmur, El Saadig Agina and Yassir Ali.

Ali, we know — he has been on the Nairobi scene for years — and Elmur is entertaining with his faux naïf style of seated figures contained within glass cubes.

Abebe and Agina are, er, colourful, but I care not for Diab’s paintings, in spite of his huge reputation and prices to match ($18,558 and $17,940 here). For me his paintings are slick, expert and well composed but they lack depth.

The dearer one is of a single, brightly clothed figure poised in a blur of paint on a big white canvas and is called Lonely Woman. And that’s your lot for yer cash.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, an arts consultancy based in Nairobi