Mkokoteni

The Essence of Nairobi: Effort, Entrepeneurship, Patience.

Samuel Fosso, Africa Remix 10 February – 17 April 2005

Untitled, 1998

Is there such a thing as African art? Africa Remix answers

Behind the mask

by Mark Irving (The Times Online, January 15, 2005)

Naive, primitive? African artists have outgrown these labels. Why haven’t we?

The centre of the contemporary art world is, as we all know, London. It’s also New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Shanghai and many other places because contemporary art doesn’t let geography get in the way of a marketable commodity. But it’s certainly not Africa. When did you last hear of an African artist — one working in Africa — making headlines? This is both weird and sad, when you consider that 100 years ago artists such as Picasso and Dérain “discovered” that African culture could offer something new and vital to the avant-garde.

Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907, one of the 20th century’s most important works of art, owed as much to Africa as it did to the artist’s revolutionary vision. The problem is that just as a major season of events showcasing contemporary African culture opens in the UK, with related exhibitions in Germany, France, Japan and the US, our view of African art remains, for the most part, shaped by the stereotypical cultural references — totemic masks, shields, ritual semaphores — that intrigued Picasso and his peers. For them, the value of this “primitive” art lay in its supposed authenticity, in the open window it gave to man’s inner world.

In the contemporary art world, however, sophistication and irony are what count. Authenticity is something that art gallery press releases might splash into the mix, but it is rarely the leading theme. In this context, an artist’s work being “authentic” is a synonym for untutored, possibly ugly, certainly naive, but you would never hear people admitting to this. Yet somehow, when it comes to contemporary African art, we find similar terms used by the curators and collectors who have organised and lent to these exhibitions.

“There is a certain innocence about art produced in Africa, although this is changing with the internet,” says Jean Pigozzi, a Swiss entrepreneur who owns one of the largest collections of African art. “I’m impressed by the directness — the brushworks, the narratives that are evident. But there are so many double meanings in the paintings and work. There’s a lot of subtle humour running through it,” says Peter Marzio, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the venue for a large show of Pigozzi’s collection this month. “Overall, there is a great sense of involvement in human issues, less formal, self-conscious detachment,” says Roger Malpert, senior curator at the Hayward Gallery, where Africa Remix, the largest exhibition of contemporary African art seen in Europe, opens next month. You would be hard pushed to find these glowing words being used to describe work shown by any of the leading dealers of contemporary art.

Does this mean that art being produced in Africa and in the West is judged according to different standards? And if it is, does this matter? “As an artist born in Africa, but with no urge to bear the burden of the African artist,” the artist Hassan Musa wrote in 2000, “I know that the only opportunities open to me to present my work outside Africa are of the ‘ethnic’ type, where people assign to me the role of ‘the other African ’ in places designed for the kind of seasonal ritual where a certain kind of African is ‘in favour’.

“It is a situation which is not lacking in ambivalence, and which gives me the impression of being a hostage to this strange machine that integrates African-born artists into the world of art, while at the same time shunting them off into a category apart. What, then, are these expectations of European aesthetics that encourage Europeans to invent their own version of African art? It is an African art that Africans never see, because it is often produced in Europe for those Europeans who collect it, exhibit it and make it an object of aesthetic reflection.”

Pigozzi, who since starting his collection in 1989 has made it a rule to collect only work by living artists working in the sub-Sahara, disagrees. He says that he has learnt a lot from Charles Saatchi about collecting art and sends his curator to find and nurture talent on the ground in Africa.

But Pigozzi collects only work by black artists, even though Africa is home to artists of many races. “South Africa is too European,” he says, insisting however that there is “no compassion, no social or political motivation” to his collecting. He refuses to lend his collection to ethnographic museums as he considers the distinction between fine art and ethnographic artefacts to be crucial, although I find it one that’s difficult to make when confronted by some of the works in his collection, since some employ materials, forms and symbols that seem familiar to the ritual objects you would find in any ethnographic museum.

While African artists now make the Turner Prize shortlist and photographs by Africans Malik Sidibe and Seydou Keita are hot property, art by other African artists working with clay, straw or supermarket rubbish is perhaps less widely appreciated. The irony is that in the hands of artists such as Antony Gormley, Joseph Beuys or Thomas Hirshhorn these materials are used to produce work that is readily accepted as artistically valid.

The art market sets the true test of what the art world thinks about contemporary African art. “It’s not significant now in sales percentage terms, but in the long term it will be,” says Ray Hughes, a leading dealer in the field based in Sydney since 1992. “I think so much of international art — produced by the Goldsmiths colleges of the world — is cannibalistic, about art eating art,” he says, referring to the Chapman brothers’ most recent exhibition, which lampooned McDonald’s with a series of painted wooden sculptures that mimicked traditional African artefacts. “In Africa, they find a way of embellishing their lives and customs. It has a real purpose,” Hughes says.

Prices for contemporary work from Africa are beginning to rise, and major museums are starting to buy. The British Museum’s £23,000 purchase in 2003 of two of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s massive cloths made from bottle tops is one example.

“The world has become a bit more open about African art. There was a time when African artists would say ‘thank you’ when included in a show. Now they can dictate what they want in an exhibition,” says Simon Njami, the co-curator of Africa Remix. “The show will force people to address the idea that ‘those people are so poor, they have other things to deal with than art’. As long as we are human beings, we have to deal with pain and poetry, and Africa should not be limited to just fighting against poverty.”

Africa Remix, Hayward Gallery, London SE1, Feb 10-April 17 (020-7960 5226; http://www.hayward.org.uk)

The War Against the African Who Refuses to Beg or Die

There is a continuing war against the poor in Kenya. Though the country purports to be capitalist, small businesses and entrepreneurs continue to be targeted by a relentlessly statist government. And since they are in business, the purveyors of mercy – the NGOs and their activists – will have nothing to do with assisting them. Yet entrepreneurs offer the country’s brightest hope.

Mary Kimani, writing in The East African Standard, takes on a draconian tax hike on mitumba (used clothes sellers).

The Ides of March are come for mitumba?
By Mary Mwangi

Today is March 15, the day dreaded by all mitumba (second hand clothes) traders and wearers. After today, smartness in empty bellies will be a thing of the past for those who survive on less than Sh80 a day. About 10 million people will lose an economic lifeline derived from imported used clothes and shoes popularly known respectively as mitumba, misumba or nguo kukuu in the East African region.

The East African Council of ministers gave importers of used clothes up to the middle of March to choose between abandoning the trade altogether or bringing in the stuff on the punitive tariffs imposed by the new East African Customs Union (EACU) ostensibly to protect local textile industry, promote cotton growing and raise revenue.

Kenyan ministers of Finance and Trade and their counterparts in Uganda and Tanzania in their “conventional” wisdom resolved to impose a tariff equivalent to 200 per cent on mitumba and shoes to stem cross border smuggling amongst other things. The increase of import tariff from Sh20 to Sh 60 per kg on imported clothes translates to Sh 1,485,000 up from Sh495,000 per 24,750 Kg container. This is punitive.

Informal sector complements government efforts to create jobs by providing employment to schoolleavers, drop-outs, retrenchees and retirees. It defeats reason and common sense to insinuate that what open-air traders do negates economic progress.

Kamukunji MP, Norman Nyagah, is a lone voice in the crusade to save millions consigned to poverty, early deaths and family breakups when their economic lifelines terminate. His colleagues in various House committees share in the complicity to promote poverty amongst the population in the informal sector. It is not in the interest of the people for leaders to preside over plans and deliberate on ways of stifling the business environment through restrictive laws, regulations and excessive taxation.

According to political leaders, mitumba remains the sole cause of the collapse of the local textile industry. Curiously the ministers failed to address the issue of cheap and low quality textile imports, which impact negatively on local production. The Asian imports are comparatively more expensive than mitumba clothes but cheaper than locally produced apparel.

Ministers agitating for the protection of local industries are avid consumers of foreign products. Most of designer clothes ministers wear, the poor can only find in mitumba at pocket-friendly prices.

Another reason advanced is that those in the informal sector have not been paying their share of taxes. That is neither here nor there. If mitumba peddlers were not paying taxes as alleged, why would the business people bother to petition authorities on the proposed tariffs? Statistics at the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) bear testimony to the fact that mitumba dealers are indeed taxpayers.

The cotton industry collapsed years ago and even before Kenya was given a quota in the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) to revamp the industry, rehabilitation was the most unlikely dream. This is not in dispute and Agriculture Minister, Kipruto arap Kirwa and his counterparts in Trade and Finance can bear testimony to this. They have been conspicuously silent on plans to kick-start the scheme. There is no guarantee that cotton from Kenya will find good prices in the world market. Subsidies to cotton farmers make American cotton in the world market cheaper by 25 percent but will the Government have the money to sustain many years of subsidies?

Textile factories closed down due to mismanagement, corruption, and lack of raw materials, hypocritical policies, questionable prices and low quality. These have nothing to do with importation of mitumba into the region at all.
Independent studies confirmed that there is no link between mitumba import and the collapse of textile industry. In the year 2004, studies undertaken by Swiss Academy for Development (SAD) and German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) showed that second hand clothes exports to developing countries do not ruin their domestic industry. In a global economy, local textile industry can thrive if the country achieves the right quality specifications and minimizes the cost of production. This is not the case here.

The same can be said of their key supporter, Francis Atwoli of the Central Organization of Trade Unions (Cotu). The Cotu Chief Executive, claims that the closure of textile factories resulted in job losses because of second hand clothes imports. This claim is debatable. When Cotu affiliate Kenya Textile Workers Union fails to recruit or sell their services to the informal sector, who is to blame?

Mr Atwoli, who also leads the Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union, cannot say how much acreage is under cotton crop in the country today and out of his general membership, how many are from cotton farms. Reviving the cotton industry, as those in the know would like to put it, is still an obscure project.

For the ordinary middle class Kenyan, mitumba means a lot more than the mere economic rhetoric of the cotton and textile industry. Second-hand clothes provide a break especially when spending on clothes for the majority of the low earning population who find it ironical to fancy used cars, radios, refrigerators and houses but shun used clothes. The same people who advocate or decide to slap extra duty on mitumba, most likely may not be even adorning locally made apparel.

The numbers of people who depend on the mitumba trade, both in the rural and urban areas, are massive. For the government to ignore such an obvious fact in its deliberations is to say the least a betrayal of trust and confidence. Ten million people is not a small constituency to brush aside. At least, Kenyans can afford second hand items, dress decently and still spare extra money for other needs in the face of biting poverty.

Killing mitumba business to save cotton or textile farmers is not a solution to the economic woes. It is the same as killing one sugar factory in Ramisi and starting one in Garsen as a cost saving measure yet both are entitled to equal protection from the same system.

Mitumba traders some of whom were cotton farmers are not in the business because they fancied killing the local textile trade. They could not survive in the market because ginneries never paid for their produce or there were no alternative outlets.

No one forces anybody to buy mitumba because the market presents a variety of goods for the consumer to choose from according to quality and price. Second hand products have enabled many Kenyans to live a considerable comfortable lives for sometimes as economy nosedived and purchasing capacity eroded beyond redemption.

* The writer is a businesswoman dealing in used clothesCopyright © MMV . The Standard Group

Darfur

The Two Towers in Khartoum and London

Millbank Tower, the London offices of the UNHCR and the British Labour Party, lies halfway between the headquarters of the British secret service and Parliament. Between truth and deception. Millbank Tower: glass and cement, sharp angles and silver lettering – modernity. Liberté, égalité…

One evening in Autumn 2004, a small group from Darfur held an all-night vigil outside the tower hoping that its occupants will act to stop an ongoing campaign of slaughter in west Sudan. It was a cold night, made chillier by the thought that it was meant to be warm summer. Cars sped by with their passengers wearing puzzled expressions – what are those black people doing?

It was a cheerful enough gathering, but also a lonely one for there was no TV camera present and no reporters in bulletproof vests. Morbid jokes were made about how much more attention would be focused on Darfur if only it had been invaded by Rumsfeld’s boys. For decades, the Khartoum government has destroyed Sudanese lives with numbing regularity. It is as if the sheer scale of suffering has rendered the Sudanese invisible – perhaps such a fate is the price they must pay for the world to ensure that its humanist ideals remain unsullied.

On that Saturday evening, the little band made to become visible; to deliver its message of great injustice borne to the occupants of Millbank Tower. Who knows what the result of that cold night was? But for those who were present it was a triumph of hopeful anger, a refusal to give in to the hopeless shrug. Run from the tower that kills, appeal to the tower that says it saves. Darfur: Burning, killing, torturing, raping, enslaving, chasing and terrorizing of black African Muslims by black Arab-African Muslim militias. It makes the head swim for it is no simple matter; there is great complexity in Darfur’s suffering. But consider the facts not in doubt: Tens of thousands are dead and over million have fled their homes with many huddled on the Chad-Sudan border enduring further attack. The main perpetrators of this campaign are the Janjaweed militia, which has been sponsored, supported and directed by the Sudanese government. The victims have been targeted because they are black Africans; the aim is to ‘cleanse’ Darfur of their presence.

Every tower in Khartoum and on the Thames knows Article Two of the 1948 Geneva Convention: genocide is an acted-upon intent to eliminate a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. One hundred and thirty seven states are signatories of that famous agreement. Where are they? Where are their citizens on whose behalf they signed on the dotted line? They must say no to death and destruction in Darfur; thumbs down to the Sudanese government’s denial of human choice and possibility.

African governments and their counterparts in the Arab League have been reluctant to break ranks with Khartoum’s killers by condemning the Darfur campaign. As usual they couch their deafening silence as Pan-Africanism or Pan-Arabism solidarity rather than the false unity of small men that it actually is.