East Africa’s Olympic athletes are not the only ones flying the flag abroad… our artists have been at it too, raising the region’s profile with a gold medal performance on the cultural scene.

Whether in the United States, or closer to home in South Africa, buyers have committed to the excellence of East African art.

Sculptor Irene Wanjiru of Nairobi delighted collectors in America following a two-month residency near Portland, Maine, while a booth dedicated to video art by the Kenyans Jackie Karuti and Ato Malinda plus the Tanzanian Rehema Chachage engaged visitors to the Johannesburg Art Fair.

The fair also featured a section given over to typically satirical paintings by the Ugandan Paul Ndema and matatu prints by Kenya’s Denis Muraguri, while a series of four mixed media drawings by Paul Onditi were also on display.

In Cape Town, the Nini Gallery is showing five canvases and 15 works on paper by Ehoodi Kichapi, many of animals including the powerful Fighting Bull shown on this page recently.

Fighting Bull, by Ehoodi Kichapi. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

The sculptor Wanjiru was invited to the US by the culture and arts charity The Spillway Fund, who set her up in a beach front cottage in the small town of Southport, Maine, where she made sculptures from ocean driftwood.

These included the totemic One Generation builds on the Next, a towering piece of interlocking figures.

Also carved from a long log that was washed onto the beach was Teeming Giraffes, in which the spreading roots were inverted to become the giraffes’ heads; the body of the log, their necks. It stands four metres tall.

Wanjiru’s carvings often have the rude energy of fetish and ancestor carvings by the Sukuma and Nyamwezi peoples of Tanzania, an influence on the German expressionist Georg Baslitz, who collects their sculpture and whose own work — including rough-hewn figurative carvings — commands many millions of dollars in salerooms throughout the world.

A series of Wanjiru’s collages of Kenyan fabrics and oil paint on canvas also excited curators from the prestigious Bowdoin College Museum of Art, who were said to have expressed “strong interest” in her work.

Typical was The Lion and the Jackal, which in its honest vigour and simplicity carries echoes of the Tanzanian Tingatinga school.

In South Africa, two booths were taken by the Circle Art Agency of Nairobi; one for the video art and another for the paintings and prints of Ndema and Muraguri.

Video and installation artists Karuti, Malinda and Chachage all to some extent dealt with the almost obligatory issues of gender, sexuality and identity.

Chachage, marked by the social isolation she felt when a student in South Africa, seeks an understanding of identity through exploring rituals, and with a split screen shows the same woman twice, side by side, her back being massaged; oiled and simultaneously cleaned.

Karuti showed a reprise of her installation at Circle’s Freedom, Flight, Refuge show some months ago that featured paper boats being pushed across water against a map of the world. It translates well from 3D to screen.
But it was Malinda’s take on the Mami Wata theme — Mother Water, the mermaid spirit who embodies desire, hopes and fears and straddles cross-cultural ideas of good and evil — that provided the single most memorable image.

Combining ideas of authenticity (identity again) and race, it was of Malinda herself, with white face make-up and dressed like an undertaker complete with top hat handing out leaflets to bemused passers-by.

She reminded me of Baron Samedi, the voodoo priest who created an army of zombies.

A still from her spool (which lasts for nearly 11 minutes) would make a fabulous, haunting photograph.

In Circle’s other booth, Muraguri showed the gaily insane world of Kenya’s matatus, while Paul Ndema, based in Kampala, showed four oils on canvas dealing, as ever, with the hypocrisies and contradictions of daily life; mainly of the Church.

Two self-portraits show him with halo holding an owl (The Devil was Black) and again with a halo grinning hugely, his skeleton poking through his flesh, while he clutches the Bible from which sprouts money (Den of Thieves).

In a third painting, a woman wears a mitre and holds the Papal staff, while in what is probably the most pointed of all, a tattooed cross-dresser (with that iconic halo) stands before us, his/her face slashed with a vivid lipstick, wearing a tee-shirt on which is written I Love Gals that Love Jesus.

Follow that.

Kenya’s Paul Onditi courageously tries in a nearby booth that was to have been taken by the Kuona Trust Arts Centre — now reportedly beset by serious financial problems; all staff sent on leave and a donor’s auditors combing the accounts.

Rather than miss the show, Onditi took over the booth at his own expense.

Happily he has already sold a couple of his mixed media drawings on synthetic sheets.

They feature his Everyman character Smokey on a background of industrial waste and environmental degradation… his symbol of man (himself?) cheerily holding off the collapse of all he holds dear — a timely, if unintended, metaphor for his artist friends at Kuona Trust.

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