Advertisement

Humanity through the eyes of history

Friday October 20 2017
Kari

Pokomo painting by Leonard Katete. PHOTO | KARI MUTU | NATION

By KARI MUTU

Ugandan artist Leonard Katete has long been a part of the Kenyan art scene, known for his Christian paintings. His parish in Uganda was the centre for distributing religious statues and, as a youngster, he used to admire the carvings in churches.

In 1995, he was commissioned by the Nation Media Group to paint the culture of East Africa. A selection of this work is now on show at the Nairobi National Museum in an exhibition called Humanity Through My Eyes.

Katete says that traditional portraiture was his way of recording history. Most of his works are images of married couples wearing traditional clothing, seated on the ground or on stools, with bare feet.

Before Katete, Joy Adamson was the only other artist who had compiled Kenya’s tribes through art in the 1950s.

While Adamson’s subjects dressed in authentic cultural attire and wore traditional accessories, Katete’s work 40 years later shows the decline of ethnic heritage with fewer artefacts and more generic clothing.

From Kenya, Katete has drawn people from the Kamba, Kuria, Giriama, Orma, Pokomo , Luhya and other communities. From Tanzania is a Wagogo couple from Dodoma and a Sukuma couple from Didiya Sinyanga where the women are known for dancing with snakes.

Advertisement

At the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya, Katete captured a Dinka man and his wife from South Sudan, decorative scars etched deeply on their foreheads.

Sheikh Abdi Shariff from Kenya’s south is the only Muslim person he painted because Islamic laws discourage the depiction of people.

Katete also painted a portrait of Nelson Mandela called Tears of Freedom. He presented it to Mandela during his visit to Kenya not long after his release from prison in 1990, and later it was hung at the Nelson Mandela Museum in South Africa.

A long-time resident of Kenya, Katete taught art to secondary school students for many years. For reasons still unclear, he only completed 25 of the 52 expected pieces before the project stalled. “My art is part of my contribution to humanity and to Kenya’s history as much as my own country, the rest of Africa and the world.”

Advertisement