Joel Oswaggo

To state that pre-colonial African traditions are absent from East Afrika’s contemporary manifestation of modernist art is to deny Joel Oswaggo a place in the annals of East Afrikan fine art. Witness the artist, in his interviews with Johanna Agthe, articulating his representation of his community’s traditions in terms of cultural preservation rather than aesthetic boundaries. 

Preserve this his paintings seem to say. And they continue to snap and sing from galleries across the world especially in Germany.

This is the life of a self-taught painter who by nature is curious. And this compulsion to look under the hood of ideas and concepts in his life inspired an interest in his community’s cultural traditions. Like most curious individuals he had that teaching bug where the other side of learning was the desire to share the products of his discovery with others. 

Born in 1944 in Kawuon-Asuo village, Kamagambo West location, Migori district, West Kenya, Oswaggo and his brother Isiah Omala were the only children to their parents. In 1948, his father, Nguju Nyandama passed away leaving the two brothers and their mother, Achar-nyar-Okach penniless. 

Oswaggo’s mother would subsequently get remarried to his father’s elder brother as per Luo traditions and subsequently the couple had three more sons and two daughters. As the young family was in a very bad financial situation, it was not easy for his mother to raise her seven children. So she was only able, in 1956, to enable her son Oswaggo to start school at Rakwaro Primary School very late, at the age of 12. He attended this school for four years.

While art was not taught at the school, it turned out that the young Oswaggo had a penchant for drawing and illustrating things. So he relentlessly drew people, objects, animals, trees and birds by copying from his teachers’ books – sometimes getting into trouble for heading home with those books without prior request from his teachers.

He would in 1961 join Kuja Polytechnic School for his tertiary studies but had to terminate his schooling owing to his family’s precarious financial situation. Joining his family’s only means of livelihood, Oswaggo participated in farming crops and grazing cattle. And while at it, he kept on creating art; sculpting from clay, carving from wood and painting on the walls of their traditional African hut. The latter being inspired by the aesthetic designs and drawings frequently done by his mother on the said hut.

Oswaggo at Crossroads

In 1962, the young and wilful Oswaggo left his home to look for work and it was in the Maasai region he went. Here, he found work that involved wood hewing and the building of temporary huts (Kraals) for the nomadic Maasai. But it turned out to be a less lucrative job and so together with three other friends the artist set off for Uganda in 1963. His first job in Uganda was working in a quarry as an excavator then as a gardener for an American immigrant in 1966 and in 1968 as a fisherman on lake Kyoga.

After saving up  a portion of his income for a year, Oswaggo would in 1970 acquire a boat and start his own fishing business.

In 1971 he found a job as a construction worker with Stirling Astaldi Construction Company on Lake Kyoga, Uganda, an Italian construction company. This would prove significant in advancing his artistic pursuits. Interestingly, he made his Italian employers aware of his love for painting and in effect his employers had him reassigned roles to sign board painter/writer. 

Consequently, with access to paint and other materials, Oswaggo was able to execute his concepts and ideas.

His friend and colleague Oresto was not only awestruck with his work but also encouraged him to keep on with his vibrant artistic spark. Soon his oeuvre was discovered by his Italian employers who acquired some of his paintings albeit freely. The artist made no reservations about their acquisition – his meagre earnings notwithstanding.

“I did not ask for payment for those artworks because they were my bosses and treated me very kindly on the work.”

The escalating civil unrest brought by Idi Amin’s claim to power saw a mass exodus of most expatriates from Uganda. Therefore, the exit of Oswaggo’s Italian employers meant that there was no employment and he too had to return to Kenya:

“This was in 1972”, he says, “and General Amin had deposed President Obote . The security situation deteriorated so fast that I had to leave quickly for Kenya. As I packed my bags, the Italians were doing the same. They left with more than 40 pieces o f my work without paying a penny.”

In Kenya he would buy an exercise book and continue drawing. This was in 1973 and a majority of his drawings consisted of embroidery patterns and designs which he sold for 50 cents to market women in his Rongo village. Speaking to New African magazine in 1997, Oswaggo was asked about his specialty back in the 70s which he (while implying the drawing of leaves) replied:

“You know nature is very interesting”, he says. “In plants you find leaves shaped like the heart, like other parts of the body, insects, all types of shapes if you look hard enough.”

Subsequently, the Kenyan legend relocated to Kisumu in 1974 and then travelled to Nairobi in 1976. All the while, he was hunting for job opportunities. His visit to Nairobi was initially unsuccessful thus prompting his return to Kisumu. It was while perusing an old newspaper, that he came across an advert by a leading gallery in Nairobi, Gallery Watatu. He swiftly took advantage of that discovery and mailed his artworks to Robin Anderson, then one of the owners of the gallery as listed in the advert.

Indeed, his mail received a delightful response, an entirely welcome surprise – one that made him aware that he could make money from his art. “Before the year 1976”, he stated:

“I did not know whether paintings are made to be sold, or exchanged with money, until I got the response from Gallery Watatu with the information that each one of my works was to be sold in a price of 300/= Kshs. And the size of each painting was 10 x 7 inches. I wondered how I have created a self-employment.”

Henceforth, Oswaggo would send his drawings to the gallery on regular intervals. 

By the time the artist had relocated to Nairobi in 1986, Gallery Watatu was under new management. It would appear that Schafneur was particularly interested in the kind of art that Oswaggo and other artists like Sane Wadu, Chain Muhandi and Jak Katarikawe created. The basic premise of such a preference being that those artists followed a conceptually imaginative path that was hardly influenced by the west. Therefore, in retrospect, with Schaffneur at the helm, there was little doubt that Oswaggo’s virtuosic talents would thrive.

An Art Subject Matter that Decidedly Evolved

In post-colonial Kenya, the depiction of animals and wildlife emerged as a common and lucrative theme among artists. Notable were the myriad of artworks covering this theme on the market. Naturally, in the face of such stiff competition, Oswaggo had to distinguish himself. And what better way than to capture his community’s rich tapestry of oral traditions and folklore.

Indeed as he revealed to the BBC World Service’s Spice Taxi editorial: 

In Kenya here we have many many artists, and everybody try to compete with each other. When I started to make my paintings about animals and birds, I could see that I am not in a good position because they [other artists] do more beautiful work than me. So I could not get the market easily. So I decided to choose a certain subject which I can follow. 

Hailing from the Luo tribe, Oswaggo skillfully depicts and narrates the Luo cultural belief system through his art. The Luo are a River-lake people of Nilotic heritage. Like other Afrikan ethnic groups, they have a strong oral tradition. His focus on Luo customs, habits and way of life meant that he had to look to the elders for cultural stories. Speaking to Alexandra Gabriel from Hinterzarten in 1997, the artist stated: 

“I decided to make my own way by creating research work for gathering more information from my elders regarding the Luo culture. And by doing so, I have learnt a lot and written a long note which helps me to create and form the drawings from.

Yet by the time Oswaggo had pivoted into creating art that documented the Luo cultural heritage, his community’s oral tradition had been gradually eroded. Sure, it’s true that the oral medium had not completely been dismantled, but there were various knowledge gaps between the elders and the Oswaggo’s generation as far as some Luo cultural practices were concerned.

Underlying these generational gaps in cultural knowledge, was the popularisation of the notion that one’s acceptance of Christianity and Western cultural conventions was synonymous with modernity and development. Initiated by missionaries, this philosophy was aggressively advanced by colonialists in the 20th century.

For this reason, Oswaggo’s art can validly be construed as a visual documentary privileging the preservation of cultural heritage – a vessel of memory, amplifying voices of protection of indigenous knowledge systems. Not quite nostalgic but commemorative. Consider Oswaggo’s reminiscence of his research work: 

“…But part of the Luo culture which I concentrate to dig up mostly, is the old and lost ones from the backdate.” 

“From these I develop the concepts that I later put on canvas. I don’t do portraits. There are enough people around doing that… I concentrate on Luo culture and folkore. I think it is a very neglected subject.”

Oswaggo’s Compelling Visual Synthesis of Luo Culture 

To be continued…