Jak Katarikawe: mind the gap.

The recent comments on Ugandan artist Jak Katarikawe by the notable East Africanist scholars T. O. Beidelman ("Dialogue," African Arts Summer, 2003), an ethnographic anthropologist, and Sidney Kasfir (review article, African Arts Winter, 2002), an art historian, bridge a twenty-two year gap in your coverage of his exceptional, prodigious, and highly personal career, last covered in African Arts in 1971, 1974, and 1981. His paintings and life story are the stuff of the project (as Kasfir terms it) "Dreaming in Pictures: Jak Katarikawe (Uganda)," devised by Johanna Agthe, a museum anthropologist until recently at Frankfurt's Museum der Weltkulturen. There she oversaw the acquisition and documentation of contemporary, mostly eastern, African art with consistent care for many years. Largely through her efforts, the Frankfurt Museum has the largest Katarikawe collection in the world, comprising 150 works covering his creative repertoire across time, media, and theme, with the exception of his elephant series.

The artist's formative phase--when he was learning about picture-making through his own determination and the mentoring of two very different dons connected to Makerere University, Profs. David Cook and S. J. Ntiro--unfolds in a set of hitherto unexhibited works of exceptional imaginative and observational coherence. These works, part of a bequest from Jochen Schneider, patron and friend of the artist in Kampala, were the specific stimulus for the retrospective exhibition and its catalogue (1) reviewed by Kasfir (2002). While these early works may not be known to the artist's present audience, primarily located in Germany and Kenya, I venture many would have resonance with the six pictures that have charmed Beidelman for thirty-five years, so much so that he was inspired to contribute to this dialogue. His refreshing memoir recalls intriguing encounters with the artist, his family, and his practice in 1960s Uganda and makes reference to specific works and their stories. Can this documentation be shared and compared with the Frankfurt collection?

Beidelman ponders the artist's language capabilities, the nature of his relationship with Makerere University, and the prevalence of the erotic in his practice--three issues also raised in Kasfir's review. These issues are also broached in the catalogue, often more than once, and answered to a lesser extent herein. The explanation for Katarikawe's competency in spoken languages is pragmatic, relating to his milieu or audience. In addition to his mother tongue--Kiga or Bachiga--he speaks Swahili and English. His own life experiences, from childhood to art workshops, provided the opportunities and context to acquire an excellent command of Swahili while his internationalist aspirations, social and commercial, motivate his preference to speak English in most art situations.

However, the more significant language issue, to which Kasfir alludes, is his profound illiteracy. Johanna Agthe and myself, as the catalogue's authors, and the artist concur it is "one of the keys to his life which we all can see and hold ... but it opens no doors" (Agthe and Court 2001:44). On December 1, 1993, in a prepared speech, Katarikawe told students, "My brush speaks better than my tongue ... ordinary people [are] reborn as artists ... your talent is your treasure" (Agthe and Court 2001:128). These insights into both Katarikawe's professionalism and his populism suggest that the effects of illiteracy for modern artists may be more social than philosophical or technical. Mrs. Sarah Ntiro--the first Ugandan woman graduate of Oxford, first wife of Prof. Ntiro, and current head of the Uganda Society--and Prof. Cook each relate that they spent "three" months teaching Katarikawe how to write his signature. He still labors with painstaking concentration to print letter by letter J-A-K. His disability, which appears to be dyslexia, may be associated with the kind of right-brain dominance that occurs frequently in the profile for artistic talent (speaking here as an art teacher) rather than a function of illiteracy, which it so obviously compounds. Katarikawe's life and personality are shaped by these conditions, which, while serious handicaps in daily life, are the source of his art-making and well-being. In conversation, Jak muses about this paradox, being grateful for his artistic career and also for his survival during Uganda's years of turmoil, when many intellectuals perished or fled. After rusticating in Kigezi from 1978 to 1981, he migrated to Nairobi for professional reasons.

A wide range of viewers respond positively to Katarikawe's imagery, citing its sensual qualities and its suggestion of amusing social adventures somewhat akin to soap opera. In contrast, in the African Arts review and dialogue I find nearly exclusive preoccupation with his depiction of sex, which could be defined as pornography only if it were intended primarily to shock. Kenyan viewers, even children, realize that Katarikawe's animals (usually cows) do not depict real animals but are agents in storytelling. (2) Thus, as indicated by the title Dreaming in Pictures, the catalogue privileges the artist's primary intention, which is the representation of his dreams. Creating picture-stories is the essence of his practice, in which he utilizes a range of subjects, such as portraits, literacy, Kiga behavior and traditions, an array of animal symbolism (highlighting cattle), landscapes, oral literature, and Christian imagery, in addition to themes that are overtly sexual.

Beidelman expresses his disappointment that the review article lost sight of the paintings in their originary context. While his intuition is most apt about Katarikawe's storytelling, it is a shame that he has not attempted to employ his erudition and commitment to moral ethnicity and its instrument, moral education, toward an interpretation of Katarikawe's parables (Beidelman 1997:252-54). Beidelman the anthropologist could go much further in "minding" Jak's "gap," but he may have to consult our book--or make a visit--to find out about his friend's progress over thirty-odd years. Indeed, my disappointment is that such a welcome dialogue about Jak Katarikawe has been resumed in a mindset typical of the 1960s. This is partly due to the nature of "gap," which implies some sort of absence that will take time and "dialogue" to bridge. It possibly derives from the emphasis on early works in the project and thus in the catalogue under review. It also relates to each writer's preoccupations. Nonetheless, the catalogue is a twenty-first century endeavor. It introduces more than sixty new paintings by theme along with their narratives and offers several chronologies and foundation essays to resource Katarikawe's own postmodern story.

Prof. Kasfir, who has admirably and resolutely explored myriad junctures of "contemporary" and "African" in the visual arts, used Katarikawe's retrospective exhibition as an occasion to consider topical, indeed global, issues of exhibitionary practice. Apart from venues in Germany, she found little overlap between "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements 1945-1994," a complicated group exhibition devised by uber-curator Okwui Enwezor which attempted to link African nationalism with modern visual expression; Documenta 11, Enwezor's exhilarating showcase of works by 162 transnational artists of whom 13--less than 8%--were "African"; and the modest "Dreaming in Pictures: Jak Katarikawe (Uganda)," a provincial show that has received international funding for a tour to Kampala and Nairobi. Both of the Enwezor-led shows neglected artists and art movements from East Africa with the exception of Uganda/UK film virtuoso Zarina Bhimji.

Remarkably, there is a poignant resonance between Bhimji's haunting, atmospheric pastel landscape with bright sun in Out of Blue (2002), a Documenta 11 commission now in the Tate Britain, and Katarikawe's Promise, a landscape painting of soft-hued planes and rising sun (Agthe and Court 2001:35). The two Uganda-born exiles lament the passage of time in their homeland's beautiful but empty landscapes, where the sun represents hope, somewhat like a talisman. Both their works contrast with the formal priority to represent an actual perception, as in Monet's iconic Impression-Sunrise (1872, Musee Marmottan, Paris). That the sublime works of Bhimji and Katarikawe have yet to be seen in Uganda is due primarily to the underdevelopment of the infrastructure for art in East Africa, with many implications of laxity shared by North and South. Thus, while I share strongly Kasfir's concerns about the gravity of this new gap generated by transnational exhibitions, I do not think that they are the appropriate foil or unit of analysis for consideration of an artist such as Katarikawe, who is misunderstood in his own context. Certainly, curators, gallerists, and scholars need to be proactive in devising ways to embrace such local practices in the larger, international narratives and canon (Arnoldi et al. 2001; Court 1984, 1999; Deliss 1995; Njami 2000).

In Nairobi, my home between 1970 and 1986, I regarded Jak Katarikawe as an establishment gallery artist whose work had a regional ambiance that was widely accessible. His paintings were exhibited at Paa-ya-Paa from 1968 (when Elimo Njau's gallery was located in town), Gallery Watatu from 1975 (predating its makeover by Ruth Schaffner), and the French Cultural Center from 1977; from 2000 to 2003, I saw Katarikawe's painting Weddiny, Dreamer in the foyer of the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi. These are nonrestrictive, public spaces, apart from Gallery Watatu, an upstairs commercial gallery which is a gathering place for its artists. In Kenya, Katarikawe's work has additional exposure on calendars and posters, some in association with health campaigns such as family planning and HIV-AIDS. Thus, it is misleading to suggest, as Kasfir does, that ordinary, urban Kenyans are unfamiliar with and unappreciative of Katarikawe's art. In my years of tracking Jak, I have encountered no one taking offence at his sensual subject matter; indeed most press accounts are unjournalistically joyous, positive responses to his colorful and humorous representation of relationships, similar to Beidelman's delight. Over the years in Nairobi, Katarikawe's most frequent accolade has been as "Africa's Chagall," because both artists employ in their practice iconic home villages, animals equally at home in fantasy and dreams as well as reality, and scrumptious color. I find great similarity in approach and content with the southern African printmaker John Muafanjego (Agthe and Court 2001:113-14). A friend recently noted commonality with the eccentric but establishment English visionary painter of village life Stanley Spencer. In Nairobi, Katarikawe's practice is not compared with the usual populist exemplars, Tanzania's Tinga Tinga or Nigeria's Oshogbo, whose collective styles display limited innovation and change. A close look at Katarikawe's practice does not lend support for such comparisons because his approach is individual and painterly, his subject matter lacks ethnic spirits and features politicians and Christianity.

Katarikawe's establishment connections and high-profile practice (3) would seem to disallow the Western art history category of "outsider" art, which, as I understand, denotes artists outside their own mainstream, in this case, in East Africa. You may smile at the notion of a visual arts mainstream in this region, whether an actual gap or missing construction makes it problematic. Whichever, the extensive documentation of Katarikawe's career in Nairobi indicates that he is regarded as a celebrity and is respected for his diligent and distinctive creativity. Like many creative people, he needs solitude to work and is a loner, although he was a more sociable person in lighter times, before the decline of tourism and the rise of terrorism in Kenya. Labels such as "outsider" and "informally [i.e., casually] taught," used by Kasfir, "pornographic," used by Beidelman, and "erotic," used by both, reduce and distort comprehension of the complexity of the painter's practice and his achievement. Jak Katarikawe devised an art-making process that is a dynamic synthesis of his own local stories--often farces--and colorful expressionism: For him every painting is a story.

I wonder why two brilliant Africanist scholars have difficulty in comprehending the regional career of a twentieth-century professional, illiterate artist from Uganda--where illiteracy is still in double figures and art college enrolment a percentage of a single figure--who managed to obtain intermittent nonformal art training in three nations and to sustain his practice despite many odds, including unstable and declining local patronage, with minimal global discourse and nascent local criticism. "Nascent" implies unusual energy, which is ever the case in East Africa's disorderly art worlds and recalls the situation some forty years ago, when, at the First Congress of Africanists in Accra, Ghana, in 1962, the veteran art-worker Elimo Njau confessed himself "puzzled by the artistic chaos in East Africa." The persistence of art-making chaos in the region and its systematic charting will require more than the resumption of this dialogue, though we may assist in mending some of the gaps.

Elsbeth Court School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London