Elimo Njau 1932 - Present
To write about Elimo Njau is to appreciate the vision of Pan Afrikanism (consider for a moment visual art’s role in driving political discourse). The 2006 unveiling of his five legendary murals at the St. James Anglican Cathedral in Kiharu, Murang’a was particularly revealing of the artwork’s Afrikanist concerns despite its predominant religious theme.
It also marked the first time Elimo would embed his name on the iconic art. Reason? Elimo created the murals in a politically hostile colonial environment of the 1960 and would not sign against them for fear of being silenced by censorship by the colonial government. Elimo himself “has a soft spot for art that tells the history of Kenya’s liberation struggle and the Bible in a traditional African manner.” This autobiographical anecdote by the Nation Africa newspaper underlines his passion at driving Afrikan consciousness, originality, and identity.
In 1932, thirteen years after the arrival of British colonialists in Tanganyika as Tanzania was known then, Elimo Njau was born in Marangu along the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. He is the only visual artist in Kenya whose artistic legacy and history traverses the first three countries of the East African Community. As a Tanzanian, he was brought up in a Lutheran Christian environment. His father? A Swahili teacher and Bible Scholar. Growing up, Elimo would watch his elder brother (5th from the firstborn) draw – a skill that, as Elimo confessed, his brother was very good at.
And in mimicking his brother’s brilliant drawings, Elimo became adept at illustrating his surroundings at a young age. His father, aware of his children’s talents, threw a challenge where he offered to give a prize to a child that would draw an exact portrait of him. And to everyone’s surprise, Elimo’s drawing was by far the best. Recognizing his magnificent drawing skills, his church leaders invited Elimo to illustrate Sunday School lessons. It’s these simple but effecting moments that charted his entry-point into formal art training.
Fittingly, the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art at Makerere University in Uganda was a primary destination for East Africans with a nascent artistic talent. And thanks to a recommendation from his church leaders, Elimo, like many other budding artists at the time, joined the institution. He would graduate with a degree in Fine Arts and History of Art in 1957 and later taught at an elementary school in Makerere between 1959 – 1962 but was never offered a teaching job in his alma mater.
His political conciousness was manifest in a speech delivered at the Internanational Congress of Africanists in Ghana in 1962, when he stated;
“When I finished my studies at. Makerere University, I was puzzled by the contemporary artistic chaos in East Africa… My quest, I decided, was to find a philosophy to guide me. I looked for this philosophy in modem Western art, in vain; I searched for it in traditional African art, and found a powerful symbolism and a portion of the sense of purpose I sought; I looked for it in contemporary Asian artists and critics of East Africa, and found them just as confused and lost as myself. At last, one day, I saw that the pumpkins in my mother’s garden were never exactly alike. (..) I examined myself in a mirror and found that I was not identical to my father or grandfather. If every baby was a new creation, then why should I copy anybody? I had discovered God’s creative secret…For my own guidance and as a warning to my students and fellow artists I formulated the following policy: DO NOT COPY. COPYING PUTS GOD TO SLEEP.”
Underlying Elimo’s philosophy of “Do not copy. Copying puts God to sleep,” however, was a sense dissatisfaction with new pedagogical approach to art training at Makerere after Margaret Trowell’s retirement in 1957. A set of changes in training art students were introduced when Sam Ntiru in 1958, and subsequently, Cecil Todd in 1959, took over as the head of the art school at Makerere.
In the new system, Margaret Trowell’s training approach in which she always trained her to strive to create art that epitomized an Afrikan cultural authenticity was abandoned in favour of European models of training (“academic dogma grounded in colour theory, drawing and Western art history”). The latter pedagogical approach not only sidelined Africans’ own right to construct their histories and identities through art but also dismissed Margaret Trowell’s achievements, thus prompting serious misgivings from Elimo.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his criticism of Cecil Todd, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London and a “…Scottish artist who left a teaching job in South Africa to come to come to Uganda” where he became the head of Makerere’s art school: “Todd was one of the few teachers who also practiced…” he writes,:
“what he taught. He initiated the idea that Africa is a blank slate on which to create something. So he started from ground zero. I differed from him when he wrote off that whole tradition, that nothing existed before. Todd was blanketing our history, which was not his duty.”
By the time Elimo set foot in Kenya, he had already founded Kibos Art Centre in 1964 near his home in Marangu, Moshi district, Tanzania on land donated by his father. Here too his Afrikan identity became manifest in the ideals and aims of the gallery which he expressed in a poem:
“It is like a mango tree
Too slow in growth to compete with ephemeral fashions of the art world; but with roots too deep in the soil to be uprooted by any shallow wind of “civilization”.
Its roots sink deep into the earth to reach out for the bones of our ancestry and sap that is our heritage from God.
Its trunk powerful and round like true communal life in unity and harmony.
Its branches open up into a generosity of leaves, flowers and colourful fruits to feed the world and inspire humanity with spiritual health, joy, love, peace and humility in eternal wonder”
In Kenya, Elimo shaped up as the soulful founding father who many of the contemporary artists and art lovers look up to today. This includes his co-founding, in 1965 of Paa ya Paa art centre –the first African-owned art centre in Kenya and perhaps East Africa.
Billed as a centre to help East African artists display their creativity, from visual arts to literature, Paa ya Paa had five other co-founders including James Kangwana, Jonathan Kiriara, Pheroze Nowrojee, Terry Hirst, and Charles Lewis. Their professional accolades at the time? Kenyan broadcaster, poet and novelist, human rights lawyer and poet, British artist and founder of Kenyatta University’s art department, and Oxford University Press publisher respectively.
By itself, ‘Paa’ is a Kiswahili homonym meaning, ‘antelope’ and also ‘to fly’. So Paa ya Paa roughly translates to “Antelope Flying.” or “The Flying Antelope.” The sheer indefatigability of the perspicacious Elimo is what kept the centre running long after the other co-founders withdrew or pivoted to other career disciplines.
But before co-founding Paa ya Paa, Elimo had established Njau Arts Studio, when he first came to Nairobi. Then located in Westlands, the centre quickly became a burgeoning spot for painters, sculptors, musicians, poets and writers – a growth that was undoubtedly organic. And to add to his founding exploits was his role as a contributor to the Nation Newspaper in the immediate post-independent Kenya.
For instance, in a July 31st, 1988 article of the National edition Elimo reasoned:
”Many of us move lock, stock and barrel to the Western style. We uproot ourselves and our creativity becomes just a few spices on the white man’s plate. But art should be a way of life, enriching us, nourishing us in body and spirit, and growing from the African soil of which we are a part.”
Unsurprisingly and in line with his spirit of fidelity to an Afrikan consciousness and identity – a philosophy very much in tune with his creative practice, his writings, in the eyes of his European landlord, were particularly unsettling. Not once, not twice but on several occasions. It did not take long before he was asked to vacate his rented apartment.
Being a rental space also owned by a muzungu landlord, The Njau Art Studio was no exception here. So, Elimo as well as other artists who made the studio their home were kicked out. It’s at the height of a relentless search that a five-acre piece of land on Ridgesways off Kiambu Road was discovered and sponsorship became available in 1971 to purchase it. Here Elimo would re-establish Paa ya Paa Arts Centre. Do not copy. Copying puts God to sleep’ was written in bold letters as a visible message on the gable of a building at Paa ya Paa.
Were you to erase all memories of Elimo Njau’s involvement in the East African art discourse, you would bet your bottom Shiling that like “a phoenix he would rise from the ashes.” Indeed, following the mysterious and unfortunate burning of the historical art centre in 1997, Elimo picked himself up, dusted himself, and began rebuilding the centre with the help of other visual artists who had made the centre their home.
In post-inferno Paa ya Paa, several tasteful artworks were remastered, while a significant like wooden sculptures, the library and other archival material went up in smoke thus rendering them unsalvageable. Yet other works, amidst various decorative additions, would be artistically displayed in their charred outlook. What is an artist if not ironical, poetic and surprising?
Then there is the artist-poet Phillda Ragland Njau, Elimo’s Afrikan-American partner and wife who supported him throughout the notable renovation. Long engaged to the poet and writer Rebecca Njau, Elimo met Phillda in 1970 when she was visiting East Africa alongside other nationals from the United States on a religious mission. Originally from New Jersey, Phillda herself was into photography and it’s from her visit to Paa ya Paa where she would meet Elimo and the rest as they say ‘is history’.
Married as the second wife, Philda’s relationship with Elimo would flourish while Rebecca gradually became estranged to him – their affection fading as years passed. It would be what Elimo termed as “irreconcilable differences,” with his first wife, that he and Rebecca parted ways in 1983.
But all one can discover is that the success of Elimo’s strive for representation of African artistic productions and intellectual discourses have been bootstrapped in part by both Rebecca and Phillda. And the dedication of those artists inspired by Elimo’s determination coupled with external patronage is yet another, thus suggesting a wonderful overlap of synthesised desire, family and a pan-afrikanist narrative.
The human rights lawyer and former Paa ya Paa co-founder Pheroze Nowrojee gave a fitting summary at Elimo’s 84th birthday celebration when she said:
“a transforming figure not only in art; one cannot write a political history of East Africa of the ‘60s without the record of the extensive part that art and literature, theatre and poetry, debate and disputation, played in those years of change. In the middle, there’s Elimo in many capacities.”
Elimo is one of those rare artists who did everything well, he was a master of portrait, religious, historical, allegorical, animal and landscape painting. Like Sane Wadu, he was a contrarian of sorts. Ultimately, no fine artist did more to preface the post-independent Kenya Zenith of Pan Afrikanist art narrative than Elimo Njau. For many Elimo’s work epitomises a Pan Afrikanist in the purest of senses.