Elkana Omweri Ong’esa 1944 – Present

HE BROKE STONES TO CURVE STORIES

In the South Western Highland region of Kenya, there lives a Gusii-speaking people of Bantu heritage. Domiciled in the Tabaka region of this highland area is the Mugirango clan which boasts over three centuries of soapstone carving heritage. We have this cultural heritage to thank for the authentic Kenyan sculptural legend – Elkanah Ong’esa. Thanks, Kisii soapstone culture. Here we take a look back at this generational sculptor whose majestic sculptures cement him into some serious all-time Afrikan Greats discussions. Enjoy his art legacy while it lasts because they don’t make them like this anymore!

Born in 1944, Ong’esa grew up in Tabaka – the Soapstone-rich area of South Western Kenya and his ancestral home. He was the first child of a family of six sons and four daughters. As a child surrounded by a grandfather and father who were both excellent sculptors, Ong’esa began to make toys working with clay and sculpting as well.

Schoolboy, Student, and Teacher

Nguru Intermediate School where he went for his primary studies introduced him to the basics of wood carving through the carpentry classes offered at the school. Despite this creative pursuit, he also performed well in other academic classes. This got him admitted into the Government African School in Kisii (today known as Kisii High School). 

Fine art was not offered at the school but this barely dimmed his artistic spark. One teacher at the school recognised his talent and offered private tutorship after consulting with the headmaster. He did stone carving as part of his form four syllabus. When the final examination results were out, Ong’esa posted excellent performance in both art the other subjects.

The mid-to-late 1960s were the formative years for the development of Ong’esa’s sculptural finesse and vocabulary, overlapping with Kenya’s establishment as a post-colonial independent state. To celebrate its achievements since independence, the Kenya Freedom for Hunger Campaign organized an art competition in Nairobi in 1965. At the urging of Mrs. Janet Green, his teacher of English in high school, Ong’esa, despite being initially hesitant, participated in the competition alongside Christie Kenyatta – the founding President’s daughter.

Ong’esa’s soapstone carving titled: Daily Bread, (1965) – depicting an emaciated human form with protruding ribs eating maize on a cob emerged best in the sculpture category. And yet what thrilled him the most was Christie’s crowning as the best in the painting category accompanied by the pair sharing a podium as the best.

“You can imagine the feeling of being mentioned in the same line as the president’s daughter,” he revealed to the Nation newspaper.

Skipping the A levels, owing to his exceptional performance (this was possible then), Ong’esa would receive two invitations for his tertiary education. One was from the Ministry of Local Government inviting him to study accounting. He was about to take accounting when another letter arrived inviting him to study sculpting and painting at the Margaret Trowell School of Applied and Fine Arts at Makerere University in Uganda. 

“[…] I hadn’t applied, but I had been submitting works to competitions in Kenya and winning awards. In those days, students’ works were well-tracked and they must have found me that way.”

Ong’esa would opt for the latter while rejecting the former – a decision that, as he stated – “To say that my parents were angry would be an understatement.”

Joining Makerere in 1967, the four years that followed created our nation’s sculpting sage – the aura of the legendary never far from him. Makerere introduced him to other sculpting mediums like working with glass, ceramics, and modeling as well as other western and local artists like his compatriot and lecturer Prof. Gregory Maloba. 

Taking painting as a major and sculpting as a minor, Ong’esa found himself enmeshed in sculpting. He began to emerge as an artist of note among his fellow art students and the Makerere art circles.  His first-year sculpture titled: “A Man Landing on the Moon,” won him the best student in art. Always academically exceptional, in 1971, the lauded artist graduated with first-class honours in Painting and Sculpting and having worn a host of other prizes in art over the 4-year study period at Makerere. 

He would return to Kenya and join his Alma mater – Kisii Teachers College to work as a teacher. While teaching at the college, Ong’esa introduced art education after consulting with his colleagues. And barely expecting a positive reception of the course, the initial 10 students that enrolled for the art classes was a surprise – one that was entirely welcomed. Contemporary Kenyan art curator Lydia Gatundu Galavu is Ong’esa’s former student at the college along with several others.

Elkana Ong’esa’s Influences 

As a kin in a family of sculptors, his father and uncle gave him the very first fundamentals of carving using soapstone. Often creating artworks whose interpretation went beyond material culture production, his uncle Alex Mogendi profoundly informed Ong’esa’s ideas about carving. In an interview with Transcultural Perspective in Art and Art Education, Onge’sa revealed:

“An old man, who was our uncle – Alex Mogendi, helped shape our ideas about working with stone. The ideas of those of my generation. He was a bridge that moved away from traditional to modern sculpture. He was very strong in that way. Others were making functional objects: bowls, candlesticks, all sorts of vases, things like that. Alexander made more figurines, naturalistic kinds of expressions. That influenced us and especially me. It went beyond the very small sorts of traditional expressions forms.

Further, talking about influences on a different occasion, the artist references several. He writes:

“Influences on my artistic creations, especially in sculpture, originate from many sources; first my being born and brought up among traditional story-tellers, weavers and stone carvers in Kisii Highlands, south-western Kenya. This was followed at an early age by an adventurous disposition to many distant regions… They include: a brief visit to the land of the Inuit in northern Canada, a spell in north eastern Uganda among the nomadic Karamajong, and a long journey to the south – to the land of the singing, dancing, and wood carving Maoris in New Zealand.”

Ong’esa is also said to have been influenced by the sculptures of the English sculptural legend Henry Spencer Moore – a master in the use of negative space. Negative space is a term in sculpture that defines the open space within and around an object or image. It can bring light and delicacy to a sculpture and it can also imply movement.  One approach (there’s another) to creating negative space that is apparent in Ong’esa’s sculptures – one that was unique to or even perfected by Henry Moore, is the deliberate insertion of holes and voids into objects. Ong’esa’s Jacaranda Wood, (2008), for instance, depicts this style (see picture at the footnote section).

Public Works & Exposure

Elkana was first exposed to the public through his first solo exhibition at the African Heritage Pan African Gallery in 1973. Founded a year prior by Alan Donovan and Joseph Murumbi, it was the only gallery that took a chance on artists who could not find gallery representation in other galleries of the time like Gallery Watatu, and New Stanley. “My Uncle Nelson supplied curios to the Gallery. So one day I showed Alan and Murumbi my carvings,” recounted Ongesa.

However, Ong’esa would wait until 1975 for his first commission. It was Joseph Murumbi – perhaps the only ever passionate politician art collector to date who commissioned an artwork from Ong’esa. The sculpture was of a bird and might be seen as Ong’esa’s breakthrough carving if one sculpture deserves that honour. It’s the same bird sculpture that UNESCO’s secretary-general Amadou M’Bow saw at a dinner party in Murumbi’s house in Muthaiga and commissioned a similar one (Enyamuchera). 

For five decades, his most famous work – Enyamuchera (Bird of Peace), 1978, has graced the entrance to UNESCO’s Mollis building in Paris. Standing over two meters tall, it’s Ong’esa’s abstract interpretation of the Magpie Shrike bird and a symbol of peace.

Freedom Fight (1982) is another of Elkana Ong’esa’s sculptures that adorns the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Battle Dance is yet another that is on display at the State Museum in Georgia, USA. This bottle-shaped sculpture was made for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Dazzling little Changchun City in North Eastern China boasts a major masterpiece by him. Created from fibre-glass and cast in bronze, the life-size artwork – Her Mother (2006), is an illustration of a mother holding a giant baby. 

And not to forget Dancing Birds (2009) – the 10-tonne granite sculpture commissioned by Michael Ranneberger – the USA ambassador to Kenya between 2006 and 2011. The statue graces the entrance to the USA embassy in Nairobi and was created as a call for peace in the aftermath of the 2007 – 2008 post-election violence. 

Ong’esa has also made a remarkable sequence of public works, sited in schools, colleges, and universities locally. For instance: Ongata Rongai, Kenya has a legacy monument by the artist at the Adventist University of Africa.

Hardly would one ever fail to notice the commonality of bird themes in Ong’esa’s works. Birds, are central to Gusii traditional tales and several songs have been written about them. In discussing his love for bird themes Ong’esa admitted:

“Birds have got many different shapes which are so interesting – I enjoy those.” “Then, their music – fantastic. They make me dream about shapes in sculpture when I’m listening to their sounds and looking at them.” 

Ong’esa and The Inuit Carvers

While studying for his Master of Education at McGill University, Canada in 1986, Ong’esa learned of Inuit soapstone carving – a Gusii equivalent but practiced by carvers in Canada’s frozen tundra (Inuit). 

“The Inuit/Kisii studies,” Ong’esa writes, “[…] sought to observe any significant difference between doodling with paper and pencil, charcoal, paint or dirt (soil), and where a three dimensional, substractive medium (soapstone carving) was used for artistic expression.”

In August of that year, the artist would instigate a novel exchange between the Inuit carvers and his fellow Gusii people. Organized by the University’s Centre for Cognitive and Ethnographic Studies, Ong’esa would be the first to host Jimmy Arnamissak of Inukjuak – Canada’s most widely exhibited Inuit artist. Ong’esa would then travel to visit Inuit carvers in 1987 in the far north of Canada accompanied by Arnamissak and  Povungnituk – another renowned Inuit carver.

This exchange brought out some differences between Kisii and Canadian sculptors. As Mary Craig,  a Fine Art Director of La Fédération des Coopératives du Nouveau-Québec noted:

“Kisii carvers are governed by quotas and deadlines in the production of standardized carvings which vary only in size…Kenyan carvers do have some distinct advantages over their Inuit counterparts. Quarrying soapstone in Kisii is “a piece of cake” compared to the struggle described by Nutaraaluk Iyaituk of Ivugivik (in “A Conversation with Nutaraaluk Iyaituk,” IAQ, Spring 1987) and shared by most Inuit artists. Also, working in a poorly heated, dust-laden carving shack during an Arctic winter is certainly less pleasant than working in Kenya’s fresh air and sunshine.”

Nevertheless, in other respects Inuit artists lead pampered lives, in control of what and when they carve and assured of fair and prompt remuneration for their work.

Unapologetic Promoter of Gusii Carvers’ Welfare

He retired from teaching at Kisii Teachers College in 1989 but never left the Kenyan art scene and the Gusii soapstone ecosystem. Not infrequently, it happened that the light-hearted sculptor never missed a chance to represent the plight of the Gusii soapstone sculptors in art symposiums, exchanges, and in the media.

In 1990 he took over The Kisii Stone Carvers Cooperative Society as its chair. Here, he sought to replicate the Inuit cooperative ethics within the Kisii soapstone cooperative structure. Changes instituted when he took over deftly tackled the ongoing problem of Kisii soapstone sculptors being undercut by middlemen.

Visiting Kisii a second time in 1990, Professor Arthur Dobrin was impressed at the presence of cooperatives within the Kisii economic fabric. The last time he had been in Kisii was between 1965 and 1967 as a volunteer with the Peace Corps. Not only had the Tabaka community gotten larger, “But the biggest change,” Dobrin writes, “was the fact that there was now a soapstone carvers’ marketing cooperative, an enterprise I had failed at starting while in the Peace Corps”

For Ong’esa, priority, if any, was always the welfare of soapstone carvers and artists. Certainly, the establishment of a cooperative for soapstone carvers was always in his mind as early as his high school days. Nothing illustrates this point more than the following conversation he had with Arthur Dobrin back in the 90s:

“Do you remember when you came to Kisii Secondary School to help us write a play? I was one of the students in the paly. You came to see it, don’t you remember?” he asked. “I never forgot it. After that, I always wanted to have a cooperative in Tabaka so everyone could sell their carvings at a fair price.”

There are generations of budding carvers and sculptors who have been weaned on his generous insights, restless innovativeness, and thorough sincerity.   

Shenanigans 

Ong’esa has seen his share of difficulties in the art world. More than once the artist has fallen victim to predatory officials in government especially when his artworks were commissioned abroad. Consider the 2014 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC in which Kenya (one of three other countries) was invited to participate.

Invited to prepare an exhibit, Ong’esa sculpted a 13-tonne granite piece titled: Hands off our Elephants. He did this in support of the campaign against the poaching of elephants for ivory that had been launched in 2013. Having completed it, Ong’esa and his team would travel to Washington without the sculpture because the Ministry of Culture had promised to ferry it on their behalf. It never arrived. Unwisely sculpted within the Kenyan borders, he seemed to regret this decision in light of an earlier offer for him to curve this masterpiece abroad.

Set to be auctioned north of one billion Kenya shillings ($150 million), the sculpture attracted the attention of unscrupulous government individuals looking to leverage its blue-chip potential to line up their pockets. That the only explanation for such a failure by the government was that the sculpture was too heavy to be airlifted is shockingly absurd. 

Ong’esa created this masterpiece on a loan and time borrowed from routine creations. To deny his work a world stage was akin to discouraging up-and-coming artists from participating in such future events.

Not once but severally have dodgy authorities short-changed Ong’esa. Remember his most famous work Enyamuchera, (1978)? Yes, it turns out the contract papers were signed by both parties (UNESCO’s secretary-general and Ong’esa).  However, when Ong’esa had completed the sculpture, the government then, decided to give the work as a gift. In a shocking turn of events, as the artist revealed: “But the government told UNESCO not to pay me as they would ‘take care of it’, but they never did. To this day, I am still waiting to be reimbursed.”

Our government’s ‘solicitude’ for his compensation turned out to be pretentious. Yes, the money was wired through the State. However, the concerned officers just decided to rip off the artist. Appallingly embarrassing!

Elephant Family is yet another of Ong’esa’s creations for which he was never compensated. This granite sculpture is displayed at Uhuru Gardens National Monument and Museum. 

The Ong’esa of the 2000s boasted of an international association that greatly magnified his ability to attract corporate patronage.

Legacy

In 2012, Ong’esa collaborated with UNESCO to organize the International Sculpture Symposium known simply locally as African Stones Talk. Modeled after a comparable event that Ong’esa attended in China in 2005, the month-long event brought artists from various backgrounds across the world to create sculptures from stone. 

“That was an eye-opening event, and one that inspired me to come home and create one of our own symposium as a way of bringing international attention to our Kisii soapstone and its contribution…,” Ong’esa admitted.

The importance of Ong’esa to Gusii soapstone carvers can scarcely be exaggerated. This is the main quarrel with university art departments’ unavailing of individual artists’ monographs that exist as dissertations for degrees to the general public. Once described as a ‘thoroughly sincere and honest promoter of the welfare of Gusii carvers,’ Ong’esa founded the African Institute of Culture and Development. Pitching himself against the idea of making art for art’s sake, Ong’esa wanted to mentor carvers on marketing skills that would see the art sales improve and perhaps even skyrocket. 

Among the reasons that motivated him to embark on this noble journey, Ong’esa stated:

“One is because I want to teach survival skills to artists so they will be able to market and sell every item they create,” he said. “I don’t believe artists can afford to create ‘art for art’s sake’; it must be able to earn them their daily bread or it doesn’t help them at all,” said Mr Ong’esa who disagrees with critics of Kenyan artists who claim they shouldn’t care about sales but only focus on their art.

In 2015, aged 71, Ong’esa’s success was such that he decided with his friends and family to establish the Elkana Ong’esa Art Museum (ELKOM) near Kisii University. He wanted to encourage wide appreciation and opportunity in fine art in particular sculpture. In an interview recounted “The idea of a museum was not mine. It came from several members of the community who told me frankly I would not be around forever,”

In December of 2024, our patron spirit of sculpture and indeed the sensibility and moral vision of his time passed on after battling illness for some time. In 40 years as a sculptor, teacher, and universal energy source to the few thousand Kisii carvers, Elkana Ong’esa had rendered the world wholly unprepared to tolerate his passing.

Ong’esa’s life and work is one of the most remarkable undertakings of post-independent Kenyan artists. We might never realize until some time in-future how this brilliant man was instrumental to the Kenyan art world and the Abagusii soapstone industry.