Modernism and cultural politics in East Africa: Cecil Todd's drawings of the Uganda Martyrs.

Central to this paper is a set of pencil drawings by an artist of European origin who taught at the art school at Uganda's Makerere University in the 1960s. A contextual look at this series unveils links between art and a broader cultural politics that can augment our critical understanding of both. It enables us, first of all, to locate the nuances behind the emergence of a localized modernism in art during East Africa's transition from colonial to self-rule. Second, it offers insights into major aspects of the vibrant debates over cultural identity, which had a pivotal role in the intellectual discourse of that era. I begin with a brief discussion of the colonial agenda that determined the orientation of Makerere's education system in its formative phase and the identity politics that evolved from it in the ensuing years. Then I examine two different eras of art training at Makerere in light of the debates in the broader intellectual arena. Finally, the key issues from these discussions converge to illuminate the analysis of the series of drawings, shedding light on such crucial identity questions as, "Who is an African artist?"

Education and Identity Politics

Makerere was founded in Kampala in 1922 as a technical school. (1) The initial education surveys in East Africa, with their social evolutionist underpinnings, had always begun from the assumption that Africans were no more than children in intellectual matters. (2) Note the unpretentious paternalistic gesture of a statement made in a proposal discussed at an education conference at Budo near Kampala in 1915. "The African with his vague Animistic belief," stated the proposal,

   is happy in having nothing to unlearn.
   He is, with rare exceptions,
   troubled with no intellectual doubts,
   he accepts, as a child accepts, what
   he is told. When he comes into the
   school his mind is in a state of passive
   receptivity ... What shall be
   written on that blank sheet, and in
   what order? (Report on Educational
   Conference, Uganda 1915:14.)

In the 1920s, however, the newly introduced Indirect Rule in East Africa required that Africans be governed through local agencies. This change in administrative strategy was reflected in the memorandum of the Advisory Committee on Native Education in British Tropical Africa published in 1925, noticeable in a subtle shift from the older view of infantile Africans to Africans as children with promise (Uganda National Archive, Secretarial Minute Paper, S 112, item 2. This committee was formed in 1924 with W. Ormsby-Gore as its chair). While such phrases as "natural growth and evolution" still betrayed the memo's allegiance to social evolutionism, it began with the assumption of a pre-existing "African Personality," which it proposed to develop through a process of "adaptation." It foresaw in the educated African the potential of a "public-spirited leader" who would learn what was "good in the old beliefs"; discard what was "defective"; absorb Christian "religious teaching and moral instruction" as a "safeguard" against the pitfalls of civilization; appreciate vocational training as "honourable"; and finally, not be "antagonistic to constituted secular authority" (Memorandum of the Advisory Committee on Native Education in British Tropical Africa, 13.3.1925). In other words, himself pacified through a spurious adaptation process, the educated African envisaged by the memo was a docile cultural agent of Indirect Rule expected to pacify his own people. He would not be anxious for self-rule, as he would be "given independence," according to a newspaper from a decade later, when he was "sufficiently trained, fortified, and educated to stand on his own feet" (East Africa and Rhodesia Aug. 17, 1938).

Popularized by the title "Adaptation Theory" and ostensibly dedicated to helping Africans "develop along their own lines," this view dictated Makerere's educational policies well into the 1940s. The protectorate administration consistently insisted on vocational training against the demand for a general education; and though often raised and debated at various governmental meetings during the 1930s, the issue of a university-style higher education in East Africa was ultimately shoved to the back burner. (3) It was not until the end of World War II, when it became apparent that a generation of East Africans would have to be trained immediately as civil servants to take charge under self-rule because the colonial era would soon be over, that the policy-makers turned their attention to the development of a general education curriculum at Makerere. This, however, was easier said than done. Beginning around 1949, when the institution became the University College of East Africa based on academic ties with the University of London, debates over Makerere's mission and strategy continued to dominate the journals and seminar rooms through the late 1960s. The problem, in a nutshell, was what kind of education to offer. On the one hand was the allure for higher education of the European format, anything short of which generated the lingering suspicion that Africans were being given a second-rate survey of knowledge. On the other side was the urgent need to make education relevant to local concerns, to forge the student's identity in terms of indigenous loyalties and affiliations.

The solution to this dilemma was far more problematic than simply choosing one side over the other. It was no secret in this era that Makerere had been a pawn in the protectorate administration's experiments with education, with the end goal of securing power in East Africa, and that behind the criticism of African immaturity and the lofty ideals of adaptation or vocational training had been a realistic fear of whites having to compete with educated Africans for administrative jobs. (4) Therefore, any attempt to qualify a ffully-fledged university education--which had long been synonymous with power--in favor of local identities immediately became suspect. On the other hand, though the official glorification of vocational training and the rhetoric of Africans developing along their own lines had exploited their fundamental pride in their indigenous identity in the interest of Indirect Rule, many African intellectuals in the 1950s advocated various forms of back-to-the-roots movements to combat what they imagined would be the vestiges of colonialism in post-independence Africa. Terms like "African Personality," initially used by colonial theorists, now became expressions of identity for many Africans, though the radical difference, of course, was that now they had the liberty to redefine such identity concepts. It is in this climate that Makerere became one of the three colleges of the University of East Africa in 1962, with two sister campuses in Nairobi and Dares-Salaam.

Presence of a substantial number of European and American instructors at Makerere in the early 1960s often made the debates over the goal of higher education as much emotionally as politically charged. Views and beliefs were frequently polarized, either subscribing to a universalist utopia or pursuing an equally romantic search for an authentic African root. One of the participants in a published symposium from 1960 titled "Arts in East Africa" made a case for the former position. M.M. Carlin, a faculty member at the English Department, opposed the Africanization of Makerere's curriculum as "relativist claptrap," asserting instead his faith in an African student's ability to digest European culture. "Intelligence, in its entire fullness," observed Carlin, "is first, common, and second, inborn ... an independent natural gift, existing independently of its environment" (Carlin 1960:2). And familiarity with the Euro-American cultural paradigm, in his view, was the only way African students could cultivate intelligence. "Where else can it come from?" he asked. "Why should this be humiliating?" (ibid., 3-4). "Contemporary, to him, did not signify local, even 'African' problems or events" (ibid., 14). Carlin here professes the vision of a common human culture as an alternative to the dubious search for cultural authenticity espoused by Adaptation Theory in the previous decades. The Euro-American tradition should be the groundwork of learning for an African student, because according to Carlin, it transcends its regional identity in its unique ability to address human problems.

While many aspiring Africans wanted a European-type higher education system more for its efficacy as a symbol of social empowerment than because they would agree with the nuances of Carlin's argument, his aggressive stance against what was generally considered a retrogressive, essentialist approach to African culture appealed to them. However, unable to recognize that the very idea of a universal human heritage is pure fiction when examined in light of the reality of a severe imbalance of power in a global context, or that an underlying sameness in humankind does not necessarily imply equality, Carlin's proposition ultimately denies Africans the right of choice in the construction of their own histories and identities. Intellectuals sharing his belief at that time--who obviously considered themselves progressive--simply could not see that the philosophy of an imaginary universality presupposes that African culture, if not African mind, is like a blank slate waiting to be inscribed with meaningful narratives. Not surprisingly, being grounded entirely in Western topics, the general education curriculum Carlin proposed for Makerere had no reference whatsoever to Africa.

Not everyone among the European teachers, however, was comfortable with Carlin's view, which was an endorsement of--to borrow from Eric Ashby--"Britain's blueprint for the export of universities to her people overseas" (Ashby 1964:19). Albeit unable to suggest a clear alternative, a moderate like Bryan Langlands from the Geography Department noticed the resonance of colonial arrogance in Carlin's statements. "I merely dislike the attitude that West is the best," Langlands observed, "just as much as I dislike the attitude that Britain is right; and both attitudes are equally resented by the people whom we are trying to serve ... the missionary attitude ... is ... unwanted in these territories" (Langlands 1960:24). Indeed, such Eurocentric views as Carlin's, reflected in virtually everything from the curriculum to life in the residence halls, were frequently criticized not only at Makerere, but in educational settings elsewhere in Africa as well. It went as far as a proposal to remove Jane Austen, and even Shakespeare, from the literature curriculum. (5) Even though, as Carol Sicherman notes, Makerere's English Department took initiatives through the early 1960s to organize plays on African themes written by former student Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Sicherman 2005:46), concerns about the problem were enough to generate another symposium in 1965, where the Malawian novelist and Makerere's registrar David Rubadiri drew attention to the specialized (read: European) focus of Makerere's curriculum: "Too much emphasis on narrowly academic subjects does not stimulate the student to inquire into other areas of knowledge. Nobody was ever encouraged to do a little research on folklore at the weekend, for example" (Rubadir, 1965:14).

Ali Mazrui has noted the immense power of the written word in the colonial history of Africa, in its efficacy as a marker of an historical truth in the form of tangible records and of social status (Mazrui 1972). The unavoidable and common role of the written word in both institutional education and the practice of literature made the latter enterprise integral to the former, giving writers in the 1960s a sort of legitimacy to be in the forefront of the heated debates. Though the writers' primary concern was the role of literature in postcolonial Africa, it inevitably led to questions of identity, generating some of the most intriguing dialogues of the time. The First Conference of African Writers of English Expression was held at Makerere in June 1962, and the First International Congress of Africanists in Ghana in the December of the same year. One observer of the latter event reported that the South African and some of the Nigerian delegates had agreed, against the Ghanaian and French-African representatives, that the "African Personality [was] a fake." He went on to add:

   We want to be men; and we cannot
   achieve that status without political
   independence in a united Africa.
   We want the truth; and we
   cannot find it unless we uncover
   the African past. But to want to be
   African men, to look for a special
   form of African truth is ... dangerously
   close to fascism (Welbourn
   1963:92-3).

While it might seem at first glance that the observer here subscribes to the idea of a universal humanity advocated by M.M. Carlin, the writers' position was actually more complex. Young Nigerians like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Christopher Okigbo of the Mbari Writers' and Artists' Club (6) and the exiled South African author Ezekiel Mphahlele were all participants in the Makerere Conference, where attempts to define African literature in terms of its language or the skin color or national origin of its author failed miserably. As Mphahlele reported later: "We concluded that the richness of English goes a long way to compensate for any difficulties. But a writer should not fear to do violence to standard English if he finds it cumbersome" (Mphahlele 1962a).

That a colonial language could be used as a tool for articulating African themes was argued even more eloquently when the controversy took a new turn a year later. The Igbo scholar Obiajunwa Wali harshly criticized the conference's decision to write in a colonial language as the pursuit of a "dead end" and asserted that the vernacular was the only viable literary tool for African literature (Wali 1963). It immediately sparked responses from numerous individuals, including Mphahlele, who asked:

   Why can he [the African writer] not
   be authentic simply because he is
   using a foreign medium? He is
   bringing to the particular European
   language an African experience
   which in turn affects his style. There
   will naturally be conscious and unconscious
   imitation in the beginning,
   but if he is worth his salt, he
   will continue to clean up his style
   and eventually evolve something of
   his own (Mphahlele 1963:8).

Chinua Achebe's position was very similar to Mphahlele's. "The price a world language must be prepared to pay," Achebe wrote in an article two years later, "is submission to many different kinds of use" (Achebe 1965:29). Someone even went so far as to observe that Wali's arguments and proposals "look[ed] suspiciously like the Bantu Education policy of the South African government" (Edwards 1964:8).

With an urgency to identify with the writers of the rest of the world because of their view of Africa as a global entity, these writers argued for a literature that would speak of the dynamism of a changing Africa, yet reach a broader audience. The resilience of English or any other colonial language, they believed, would be tested when reconfigured to articulate contemporary African experience. This was a decade too early for a more deconstructionist approach to global affairs and issues of power or an awareness of the hybrid nature of identity, which is why one notices Mphahlele using the term "authenticity" even when criticizing Wali. I argue, nonetheless, that the debate provoked by Obiajunwa Wali's essay can help us today to recognize that in the polarizing scenario of those years, it was this writers' platform that came closest to recognizing such hybridity of an artist's identity in the postcolonial era. This is an opportune moment, then, to introduce the Art School for a contextual understanding of its position in this larger scenario of identity politics.

Art Training Before and During the 1960s

Margaret Trowell, a deeply religious artist and educator trained at the Slade School, founded the Art School at Makerere in 1937, when the college was still taking baby steps toward becoming a center for higher learning. A variety of sources, ranging from Christian scriptures to African material cultures, colored Trowell's views of art in the context of cultural difference. (7) There is no evidence that Trowell was overtly critical of colonialism or differed radically from the general opinion of her generation of Britons that Europe would civilize Africa. To the contrary, the following remark suggests that she was no exception in this regard: African creativity, she states, is

   the deep psychological need of the
   African to exercise his emotional
   and instinctive faculties through
   the practice of the arts, an aspect
   of development which is acknowledged
   in every stage of civilization
   but which would seem to be of
   special urgency in the transition of
   the African from the old primitive
   instinctual response to life to the
   new intellectual and rational approach
   (Trowell 1947:4).

Trowell would most likely agree with M.M. Carlin on the issue of intelligence as an innate human character, but unlike the younger English professor, she had strong faith in her students' uniquely "African" sensibility. Furthermore, she found a curious analogy between modern African and medieval European creativity. "The crux of the matter," she wrote,

   is that the unspoilt English child, or
   native African, will, if not interfered
   with, produce for his own pleasure,
   works of the nature of such things
   as the Bayeux tapestries or the illuminated
   manuscripts of the old
   monasteries. Of course there is not
   the same mastery of technique or
   material, but there is often the same
   life and vigour, the same natural
   sense of form, colour, and design,
   the same sublime disregard for the
   rules of anatomy and perspective
   when higher rules of action and expression
   seem more important, and
   the same childlike self-confidence
   and enthusiasm. It is these qualities
   that are the soul of art (Trowell
   1937:149-50).

Though it is far from clear what exactly in the vast time span in European history known as the Middle Ages and its complex array of cultures Trowell refers to, there is enough here for us to make a couple of observations. First, while she clearly echoes the Primitivist artists of the early twentieth century in implying that European civilization lost its pre-Renaissance innocence (synonymous with authenticity) through modernization, Trowell unequivocally differs from them in the alternative she proposes. She was as much opposed to teaching the Renaissance legacy of illusionism to her African students as she was against the modernist rejection of that legacy, which she saw as pointless experiments with formal possibilities (Trowell 1957:124). Her goal was to avoid both traditions by reviving the "life and vigor" of medieval creativity, her ground rule for which was to see art and spirituality as inseparable (Trowell 1937:16).

This resulted in a contradiction between Trowell's views of art and her teaching methods (for a more elaborate analysis of Margaret Trowell's views of art, life, and African cultures, see Sanyal 2000, Court 1985:35-41). While her fascination with medieval cultures inspired her to generally reject the hierarchy between art and craft and believe instead that art should have a moral message rendered through efficient design (Trowell 1952:19), she never encouraged her students to appropriate any abstract elements from the regional material cultures in their art making, most likely due to her fear that such attempts would ultimately lead to "soulless" modernist experiments. Art classes were thus completely separated from instruction in textile design, basketry, or weaving. Furthermore, in her mind, the protagonist of her medieval revival was the "native African" (regardless of age), who she believed was as "unspoilt" as the English child. (8) Finally-and perhaps most crucially for us--Trowell, like Carlin after her, was completely oblivious of her own mediating presence in this process. In her fervor to blend art and religion, she seemed to be certain that she was merely helping to develop a figurative pictorial tradition where none had existed before, without actually interfering in that enterprise with her own preferences and biases. The glaring difference between the two teachers, of course, was that while Carlin insisted that Africans uncritically emulate Western civilization in its entirety, Trowell's vision was to derive inspiration from--as opposed to simply mimicking--the creative "soul" of the "Middle Ages" to spawn an authentically African art.

Thus convinced that her adult students were "childlike" at least in matters of art (Trowell 1937:53), Trowell eventually became obsessed with her peculiar notion of originality and with the desire to capture what she regarded as the essence of a rapidly disappearing, pristine way of life. In fact, in the 1950s, when her students were inevitably drawn to urban subjects, she felt that such "less paintable" subjects were destructive to their creativity (Trowell 1957:124). She also stopped making her own art in order to avoid influencing her students. With no less than a missionary zeal, Trowell envisaged her students working to develop a genre of East African religious representations (Trowell 1957:126). (9) Such students as the Tanzanian Sam Ntiro or Elimo Njau indeed developed styles and iconographies that drew international attention as "quaint," "naive," or "outsider" art, feeding a Western audience with images of a primitive Other. As one host of an exhibition of Trowell's student works at the University of Chicago complimented in 1950, they were among the best of all the images he had seen "from the outposts of civilization." (10) This was precisely something that the new instructors in the next phase of the School's history had to undo. It must be acknowledged, on the other hand, that not only did the image of a black Christ in an African rural scene emerge in East African visual culture during this period, but a vibrant tradition of embellishing church interiors with indigenized Christian motifs was born as well. Elimo Njau's series of large biblical murals painted in the Fort Hall Chapel in northern Kenya in the 1950s to commemorate the Mau Mau revolt is one of the most noteworthy examples of this genre.

A well-known cultural entrepreneur now settled in Nairobi, Njau was one of the exemplary followers of Margaret Trowell. Consider, for instance his speech at the International Congress of Africanists in Ghana in 1962. He declared that he did believe in the existence of such a thing as a "true Africanist" in art as in other disciplines. "By true Africanists," he clarified, "I mean African artists embracing the ideology of the living God and His creative power through the mind, souls, and bodies of real people in present Africa" (Njau 1963:15). A reporter later observed: "It was obvious that when he said 'God' he meant 'God': that his painting was an act of communion." Njau held the value of academic knowledge acquired from history to be secondary to a vision achieved from inspiration, suggested that inspiration was impossible without faith, and regretted that institutionally trained African artists were "seek[ing] and believ[ing] in slogans and transient art movements" (ibid., 16; we shall soon see at whom this last comment was directed). Then he delivered his final sermon: "Do not copy," he advised. "Copying puts God to Sleep" (ibid., 17) implying that copying would not only destroy one's artistic originality, but would distance the artist from God. Needless to say, all of these views resonate with Margaret Trowell's philosophy. As with Trowell, art and faith were integral in Njau's mind; he only re-presented that idea in 1962 in the context of the burning issue of cultural identity that we have already encountered.

Following Margaret Trowell's retirement and departure to England in 1958, the Art School had a new group of instructors, several of them white. Cecil Todd, a Scottish artist trained at London's Royal College of Art, arrived from a long-held teaching position in South Africa to head the school. Despite this paper's focus on Todd, he was by no means solely responsible for ushering modernism into Makerere's art training. Rather, it was the result of teamwork, in which other European teachers, such as the much younger Jonathan Kingdon, and African instructors, like the respected Kenyan sculptor and a former Trowell student Gregory Maloba, were equally active. (11) Nevertheless, since Todd's influential role in the shaping of the Art School's future cannot be overemphasized, his work from this period merits special attention. Todd is remembered by former students as an educator particularly resolved to open precisely those conduits that Trowell had carefully kept out of her students' reach. (12) In the 1950s, when Makerere's education was desperately trying to shift its focus from the vocational training advocated by Adaptation Theory to a more broad-based general education scheme, an external examiner found the art students' understanding of world art to be severely inadequate (Sicherman 2005:178). Having inherited such a legacy, Todd insisted that students master the knowledge of pictorial grammar, the conventional mode of drawing, the science and theory of color, and the history of modern art movements (and the term "Western" can precede each of these items), as he considered them fundamental to art school training anywhere. What is more, he and his colleagues wanted to train artists who would realize their individual potentials by exploring a wide variety of subjects, styles and techniques, where allegiance to art would be more important than to the mandates of one's religious faith. The bottom line was that this new instructional model aimed for a plurality of views, leaving it to each individual artist to negotiate her/his own position with regard to the question: What does it mean today to be an African artist?

In light of the larger debates and controversies raging at Makerere in the 1960s, this unambiguous shift in the Art School's vision and goal often invited harsh criticism. Seen as the most expendable facet of a cultural superstructure because of its undefined role in African education, art, unlike literature, had been considerably low on Makerere's priority list during the Art School's formative years. (13) This peripheral status was not much different in the 1960s. (14) While an identity debate comparable to that in literature was almost completely absent among artists owing at least partly to this "outsider" status of art, people in other areas did not hesitate to criticize the Art School as a bourgeois elite wing of the university. Letters and essays in the influential journal Transition, then published from Kampala, accused the Art School of employing an imported bourgeois art culture to hijack African talents. (15) Cecil Todd, who was older, more reserved, and less social than his colleagues, had an air of authority that many found uncomfortable. While Todd was mostly silent about Margaret Trowell's contribution to Makerere's art training, he branded the art from her time "naive" and "primitive" when he did address the issue. "Some few years ago", he wrote in the catalogue for an exhibition held from November 7, 1962 to January 13, 1963,

   the prevailing style in painting was
   the primitive or naive. It was largely
   concerned with the rural or pastoral
   scene; the village scene; the
   growing and harvesting of crops;
   cattle herding and beer-drinking; a
   crowded landscape busy with figures
   ... But there was no comment
   about the individual. The human
   was anonymous as a busy ant.
   Later work shows a wider artistic
   vision but with a narrowing focus.
   Vision is more selective and a more
   potent image is created. We find
   comments on the social scene with
   an emphasis on urban life, shrewd
   observations of people and types
   ... (Todd 1962).

Todd here is determined to make a clean break with the School's Trowellian past in order to initiate a modernist awareness, and his dismissive tone in this regard is notable. What is more, when describing the art fostered by Trowell, he not only refrains from mentioning Trowell's name, but omits the most noteworthy achievement of her endeavor: the genre of religious themes, especially its application in church decoration. It is also obvious that emphases on individualities of characters and urban subjects were vital to his notion of modernism.

Such a gesture, combined with Todd's particular kind of pedagogical convictions, offended many, especially some of Trowell's early students. They saw his position with regard to culture and education in Africa as identical to M.M. Carlin's universalist claim, with its condescension toward African cultures. In fact, his conflict with Todd over such matters appears to be a major reason Sam Ntiro left his teaching position at the School. (16) Though somewhat reluctant to discuss such controversial matters explicitly after more than three decades, neither has Njau tried to hide his feelings entirely. "Todd", he says,

   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. (17)

In short, the Art School's training in the 1960s, as Njau puts it, was a "Western package of urbanization," and it was this model of instruction that he indirectly attacked in his 1962 speech in Ghana. Let us also note Njau's use of the term "blank slate," a blatant expression of vacuity of African accomplishments frequently used in colonial circles, such as in the memo from 1915 cited earlier. There is no question, therefore, that Njau not only disagrees with the modernist training Todd professed, but he also remembers Todd as a white man with a superiority complex--an Other in post-independence Africa. With Njau's aversion in mind, let us now turn to a specific example of Todd's work.

The Drawings of the Uganda Martyrs

In July and August 1969, the teachers and students of the Art School held an exhibition on the historic subject of the Uganda martyrs to celebrate the Pope's visit to the country. In four small sectional drawings, Cecil Todd planned a series of church windows. Records suggest that full-size cartoons of the individual martyrs in pen and crayon accompanied this draft in the show, proposing that etched on polished brass, each cut-out figure be installed on a window pane of colored glass (Makerere University Archives, UZ 68, 6). With the cartoons lost and the windows never built, this draft is all that remains of the project. A quick look at a chapter of the local history will illuminate the images.

When young Mwanga succeeded Mutesa I on the throne of Buganda in 1884, both Protestants and Catholics were preaching at the Kabaka's court. The most enthusiastic of the new Bible readers were the Kabaka's pages, who were sons of Ganda chiefs dedicated to serve the monarch. Increasing political uncertainty, compounded by ill advice from his confidantes, led Mwanga to gradually become suspicious of the missionary activities in his capital and to order his pages to denounce their faith. When they repeatedly ignored his command, he gave the death sentence to twenty-two Catholics and more than thirty Protestants. Some of these young converts were individually mutilated and slowly tortured to death in the span of a few days, while the rest were wrapped in a dry reed matting and burned on a common pyre at the nearby location of Namugongo on June 3, 1886. Various accounts of the event claim that the victims met their death defiantly (see Faupel 1962). These early sacrifices ultimately contributed to the popularity of the new faith, and conversely, to Mwanga's downfall. The Pope visited Uganda in 1969, five years after the Vatican had canonized the Catholic martyrs, and it is these twenty-two local saints who appear in Cecil Todd's work.

Drawing only with pencil on paper, Todd presents all twenty-two victims during their execution, in a row of tall window panels. If the four sections of drawings are ordered in a row, they propose a long line of twenty-two tall windows (Figs. 1-4). Each of the two sections in the middle has images of six martyrs, while each of the two on either side has five. The entire group is flanked by identical foliage patterns, with biblical praises for the martyrs written in rectangular spaces below the plants. Above each martyr is a rose window with his patronage emblem, and below him is his name written in a banner. Farther below the name, the man's Ganda clan symbol appears in a square or hexagonal plaque: the head of a deer, leopard, ram, or mudfish.

Once Todd remarked in an interview:

   My experience has been, as a designer,
   that more permanent works
   such as mural decorations for public
   buildings make technical and
   imaginative challenges ... Motifs,
   themes, and manner of presentation
   must be lucid, attractive, and convey
   an idea with immediacy but at
   the same time must satisfy the aesthetic
   demands I make on myself
   (Kakooza 1970:55-6).

In this series, resolutions to all the above problems related to the execution of a public work hinge on a calculated equilibrium between restraint and expression, between pictorial unity and the variety of the individual characters. Although each figure is confined in a mandorlalike compartment in the middle of a panel, his expression instantly draws attention. With remarkable clarity, Todd shows every martyr as an individual not only in physiognomy, but also in his clan and professional identity, his symbol of patronage, and in the manner of his defiance. For instance, we recognize Noe Mwaggali, a potter from the deer clan, in the fourth panel from the right (Fig. 5). Mwanga's men speared Mwaggali early one morning, tied him to a tree, and fed him to village dogs throughout the day. Oblivious to pain even under vicious canine attacks, the young Christian in this picture remains absorbed in prayers. Then two panels farther left is Kizito, the youngest of the group and merely a boy, who invites the flames of his pyre with a similar composure (Fig. 6). While he prays with his hands crossed on his chest, his mandorla assumes the shape of the flames.

Though the men mostly appear self-contained in their individual panels, Todd breaks that order with Gyavira of the mudfish clan in the eighth and Mukasa Kiriwawavu of the sheep clan in the ninth panel from the right (Fig. 7). Wrapped in reed matting, they casually bid farewell to each other moments before the fire engulfs them. Or consider Bruno Sserunkuma and Gonzaga Gonza in the first two panels on the extreme left (Fig. 8). One defying the fire and the other the machete that decapitates him, they too seem to be casting a final glance at each other. On close inspection, all the martyrs display a striking realism; their bodies and draperies are modeled with confident lines of varying depths, followed by minimal but precise shading. At the same time, however, their stoically upright postures confined in compartments and the absence of any strong emotions delimit that sense of corporeality. Harmonizing with the vertical format of the individual panels, the structural and emotional restraint of the characters contributes to the appearance of the entire series as more pictorial than illusionistic. In short, in addition to underscoring the victims' dignity, this visual stasis presents the whole work as a primarily two-dimensional design.

Todd unequivocally heightens the gravity of a religious space by recasting the violence of this historic event under the mandates of pictorial design. The flames, for instance, appear as much patterns that echo the foliage in the peripheral panels as a reference to fire. This emphasis on two-dimensionality becomes clearer if we imagine the windows the way Todd would have executed them. Placed on a glass surface, the figures would have appeared almost completely silhouetted against a sunlit background, their details visible only on close inspection. Given the martyrs' race, this seems to be more than simply a formal strategy, to which I shall return momentarily.

The most vivid visual narrative ever made on this subject, the draft shows careful consideration of historical facts. Consider, for example, the image of Mwanga's favorite trumpeter Andreas Kaggwa in the fourth panel from the left (Fig. 9). Enraged by Andreas's determination, Mwanga ordered his right hand cut off hours before his decapitation. We therefore see Andreas, flanked by his dismembered limb and his trumpet, clutching the Bible with his left hand in his last moments. What is more, Todd pays special attention to Andreas's individual identity. Because Andreas was not a Muganda by birth, but an acculturated Munyoro (the Banyoro are a neighboring people), Todd shows musical instruments instead of a clan symbol.

If we recall Todd's observation that the human figures in the pictures produced under Margaret Trowell's supervision were as anonymous as busy ants and his insistence on the priority of the humanity of individual characters in the art of the 1960s, we are able to rationalize his secular approach to a religious theme. Where Sam Ntiro and Elimo Njau represented Christ in an imaginary African setting, Todd uses the paradigm of modernist visual language to present the Uganda martyrs as individual historical characters embodying fact and myth, both operating within the paradigm of modernist visual language. And while the drawings testify to this discursivity between what is local and familiar and a foreign pictorial vocabulary, it would have been more evident in the kind of signification the finished windows would have demonstrated: the silhouetting effect I mentioned earlier. In a typical representation by Ntiro or Njau, the dark complexion of an otherwise anonymous human figure and such physical settings as an African landscape serve as signifiers--intended by the artist to have a stable meaning--of the character's "Africanness." In Todd's finished work, on the other hand, the issue of complexion as a racial signifier would shift to the silhouetting effect of the figures. But because the figures themselves would not have been painted black, the silhouette on the finished windows would be a matter of visual perception, changing with the slightest alteration in the real-as opposed to painted--light, or in the viewer's position before the windows. In other words, here the "blackness" of the characters would be no more than a temporary presence. Then, as a close scrutiny revealed the individual nuances of the martyrs, the local significance of the project would become clear; one would recognize how facts and myths of a local history collaborated with modernist pictorial strategies to produce a body of site-specific images. In light of this shift in signification, I argue that whereas Margaret Trowell wanted her students to emulate her notion of the medieval creative spirit in order to produce an authentic African art--which to us may appear to have a mere look of Africanness--Todd appropriates the look of Gothic windows and renders it in a modernist framework to produce an art that is willing to lend itself to reconfiguration by successive generations of artists. The "medieval" here turns into a sign--a motif from the past. It is subject to changes initiated by discursive cultural agencies because it is fundamentally a pictorial concept, rather than a transcendental idea of one culture serving to essentialize another.

However, despite Todd's obvious difference from the earlier Makerere artists, and despite his own belief that he made a clean break with the Trowellian past, his work actually builds a bridge with it. Both Todd and his predecessors, for instance, document Africa's role in the global expansion of Christianity; where Margaret Trowell's students realized it through faith, Todd historicizes that global role by emphasizing the nuances of local characters, couching it in the discourse of art. Further, the very genre of embellishing religious spaces, in which Cecil Todd invested so much effort but failed to recognize Trowell's role in espousing it previously, is what links him most strongly to a crucial aspect of her legacy.

The Visual Arts, Literature, and the Thorny Question of Identity

If history is merely a construct inevitably subject to the critique of posterity, then perhaps we can try to locate the mediating agents that were often unnoticeable to those who were engaged in the making of a history. By discarding European conventions and practicing a form of self-effacement (ceasing to make her own art, that is), Margaret Trowell believed that she could create an indigenous frame of pictorial reference for her students to bring to fruition an authentically African creativity. She was completely unaware of the inevitability of her own mediation in this endeavor, the most obvious aspect of which was her insistence on the spiritual goal of art. Likewise, by denying any legitimacy to diversity of views in the cultural arena of independent Africa, Elimo Njau wanted to foster that same vision of an indigenous identity grounded in faith. From his perspective, Cecil Todd was clearly an Other, representing an unacceptable difference. Njau was unable--perhaps also unwilling--to recognize that whether he liked it or not, the views of that Other were historically destined to mediate in a contemporary African artist's creative endeavors. Carol Sicherman makes a keen observation in her discussion of identity in the context of the Art School's training in the 1960s. "To suppose that 'authentic' art could emerge from Makerere, a European institution," Sicherman explains, "was both romantic and--with hindsight--ridiculous. A red herring, 'authenticity' was a screen for European ideas of what 'African' should be" (Sicherman 2005:184).

Cecil Todd, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge that the legacy of Margaret Trowell was an inevitable mediating factor in his own task of producing contemporary artists in East Africa. In its refusal to tolerate diversity of opinions, his dismissal of the Art School's past as "primitive" and "naive" was not much different from Njau's position. But at the same time, Todd's employment of an alien pictorial language in the treatment of a local subject is evidence of a local reinvention of modernism that I find analogous to the writers' employment of a colonial language to speak about contemporary Africa. The difference, however, is that while those writers made an informed decision in this matter, the discourse of the visual arts at Makerere in the 1960s was not aggressive enough for Cecil Todd to have consciously recognized the choices he made in his work.

There is no evidence indicating that Cecil Todd was ever inclined to discuss his own identity in the context of the East African cultural milieu of the 1960s. But if the question, "Should Cecil Todd be considered an African artist?" is asked anyway, and even if we decide to overlook the fact that the "Africa" in this question is reminiscent of a failed pan-African vision in its tendency to gloss over the complexities of the continent, we can pose a couple of reverse questions in response: Does an artist of European origin, who is sensitive to a local history and has the dexterity to combine that insight with the language of modernism, nonetheless remain an Other in the modern art scene of Africa? Should he still be regarded as someone who considers Africa a "blank slate," waiting to be inscribed with an alien paradigm disguised as a universal human heritage? Answering these questions affirmatively would make it one's burden to face the question initially asked in this paper, which the writers' conference in 1961 failed to resolve: Who, then, is an African artist (or writer)? Is the individual's skin color or nationality the determinant, or a curious combination of several such factors? If this strategy seems evasive at best, that is because such questions about identity are tentative at best. As we try to reconstruct a history by locating a continuum where individuals and groups in that era only saw fissures and ruptures, perhaps we can also recognize that no matter how determined certain individuals were about the stability of their own polarized responses to the identity question, it is futile for us to try to concur with the finality of any of those either/or choices. For while we may be able to see the rationales of their positions in light of the historical specificity of their perspectives, we can only regard the identity issue as an unstable one from our own vantage. A remark Ezekiel Mphahlele once made in a similar discussion of a writer's identity can serve as an apt visual metaphor of this instability: "The needle quivers around the central point--the meeting point between rejection and acceptance" (Welbourn 1964:35, quoting from Mphahlele 1962b).

Commentary

by Kizito Maria Kasule

Makerere University

Sunanda Sanyal's comprehensive examination of the cultural identity debates at Makerere which preceded Todd's execution of the set of the Uganda's Martyrs drawings and how these debates influenced the growth and development of localized modernism in art make his paper particularly important and appealing.

Sanyal begins with the Adaptation Theory, by means of which the British colonial rulers gradually changed their old view of "infantile Africans" to "Africans as children with promise." Sanyal's insightful analysis shows that it was intended to keep Africans subjugated to colonial rule and to prevent them from competing for jobs with Europeans in the colonial service. It is against this background that Sanyal evaluates the art teaching philosophy of Margaret Trowell at Makerere Art School. He presents an artist who believed in blending art and religion and who saw art and spirituality as inseparable.

However, what Sanyal's analysis does not reveal is whether Trowell's beliefs in blending art and religion went beyond her Christian background to include precolonial African religions that inspired African "primitive" art. Instead, the reader gets an impression of an artist who was torn between what she believed and practiced. I am therefore unconvinced by Sanyal's view that Margaret Trowell wanted her students to derive inspiration from medieval European art. Instead I get an impression of an artist whose intentions were bent on making her students discover their identity through European eyes.

Sanyal next examines Todd's set of drawings of twenty-two of the Uganda Martyrs. Through his analysis we see an artist who had the capacity to develop an insightful examination of indigenous symbols and forms related to local traditions and integrated with his European art background, an artist whose approach to art was based more on observed forms, as opposed to Margaret Trowell's stylized imagination. It is therefore not surprising that Todd's drawings reflect each martyr as an independent character in terms of individuality, clan, and professional identity. Sanyal also challenges the reader to reflect on the sense of secularism in this work. Todd, while he is conscious of Christian martyrdom, is not a slave to it. He looks at the Uganda Martyrs as ordinary individuals in the first place and secondarily as martyrs.

In his conclusion, Sanyal points out that, despite Todd's conspicuous differences from earlier Makerere artists and despite his own belief that he made a break with Trowellian past, his work actually builds a bridge with it. I concur with this observation. I however feel that Todd was more sincere toward what he wanted his art students to be than Margaret Trowell was.

Writing a paper such as this is not an easy task. Sanyal has managed to give a balanced analysis of the theme of modernism and the cultural identity at Makerere. His analysis of Trowell's teaching philosophy in relation to Todd's drawings challenges everyone to think about this ongoing debate about modernism and cultural identity and to evaluate its relevance to us today. While this paper might lead to more debates dealing with solutions to the problems of cultural identity, with time The Uganda Martyrs project will be seen as an independent artwork not associated with any single cultural attachment.

References cited

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(1.) Makerere became the Higher College of East Africa in 1938; the University College of East Africa in 1949; and the University College of the University of East Africa in 1962.

(2.) For a brilliant analysis of English racial views during and after the Victorian era and colonial education in the context of that, see Lyons 1975.

(3.) The question of a general education came up once in 1933, but was rejected (UNA, SMP, S 31/61, item 6 [2]. Report of the Sub-Committee of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies. Colonial Office, 4.12 1933). The same thing happened two years later (ibid., excerpt from the conference of the Directors of Education in Kenya, min. 35, 1 January 1935).

(4.) As early as 1902, for instance, a government memo had pondered the possible consequences of a well-rounded education in East Africa. "Is there any opposition," it had asked, "on the part of any section of the white population to the provision of natives of a kind of education which might enable the natives to compete effectually with skilled labour in various industrial occupation?" (UNA, SMP, A 23/1, 1900-1906, item 7. Outline of information required by the Board of Education for a volume on educational systems in vogue in certain Colonies and Protectorates, 16.6.1902).

(5.) This issue came up at the writers' conference at Fourah Bay in Sierra Leone in April 1963. See Moore and Stuart 1963:29-34. For an insightful discussion of this conflict of values, also see Ashby 1961, 1964.

(6.) Funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was later alleged to be a CIA front organization, the Mbari Writers' and Artists' Club was founded in Ibadan in July 1961, while Mbari Oshogbo and Mbari Enugu were established in March 1962 and February 1963, respectively. Though the group primarily represented rising Nigerian artists, it made seminal attempts to communicate with intellectuals working in various disciplines throughout Anglophone Africa.

(7.) Margaret Trowell was honorary curator at the Uganda Museum from 1939 to 1945, and acting chairperson of the Trustees in 1946. While at the job, she avidly collected indigenous artifacts, catalogued the existing collection as well as new acquisitions, and cowrote a book on regional material cultures. See Trowell and Wachsman 1953.

(8.) Trowell was so convinced of the analogy of her adult African students to English children that she employed the same methods of art teaching that her mentor Marion Richardson had used to teach children in England. For an explanation of these views and methods, see Richardson 1946.

(9.) Other than the artworks at different sites in East Africa, one of the tangible records of her achievement in this vein is the book And Was Made Man (1954), a compilation of pictures of the African life of Christ produced by her students. The book was made possible by the Cadbury Trust Fund.

(10.) Ulrich Middeldorf, an art historian with expertise in the Renaissance, was the head of the art department of the University of Chicago when he wrote a letter to Alexander Galloway, possibly an administrator at Makerere, to compliment him for sending an exhibition of student art from Makerere. "I have seen many things coming from outposts of civilization, from Asia, from the Americas, from our city slums, etc.... But the material which you lent ns is really the most surprising and most satisfactory which I have ever seen." The letter then goes on to clarify Middeldorf's opinions about such art. (Uganda Museum Archives. Minute Paper, 271 A II. Middeldorf to Galloway, 16.5.1950).

(11.) Maloba's multicultural views were radically different from those of any other students supervised by Margaret Trowen. He taught at the Art School until 1966, when he left to head the new design department at the University College in Nairobi. This departure, however, was entirely a career move and was not motivated by any antagonism toward Cecil Todd or anyone else. On the contrary, he was greatly respected by all the instructors and students. For a critical discussion of Gregory Maloba's work and contributions to East Africa's modernism, see Sanyal 2002:133-59, 2003:76-9.

(12.) Ignatius Sserulyo, personal interview, Kampala, September 18, 1997; Kiure Francis Msangi, personal interview, Nairobi, April 8, 1998; Pilkington Ssengendo, personal interview, Kampala, August 19, 1997; Jonathan Kingdon, interviewed by Carol Sicherman, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, May 1, 1998; Jonathan Kingdon, personal interview, Duke University, North Carolina, March 12, 1999.

(13.) There was even a time, right before the institution's transition ha 1949 to the status of a University College, when the decision to close down the Art School was all but finalized. Margaret Trowell's personal contacts, combined with her relentless attempts to persuade a male-dominated administration, was the only reason it survived. (UNA, SMP, S 88/36, item 10. Minutes of the 7th meeting of the College Council, 8.10.1941, 10:00 a.m.; item 35. 21st meeting of the College Council, 27-29.8.1947. See also Trowell 1957:108-9, McPherson 1964:49, 57).

(14.) The art teachers had to engage in a two-pronged fight in the 1960s. On the one hand was art education's need to find legitimacy in a higher education scheme; on the other hand its struggle to preserve its own autonomy so that the peculiarities of art practice were not compromised when facing the demands of that larger educational enterprise (Jonathan Kingdon, personal interview, Duke University, North Carolina, March 12, 1999).

(15.) A conference on East Africa's cultural heritage was held in Nairobi in December 1965, the proceedings of which were published as a book. Sam Ntiro's paper, titled "The Future of East African Art" (Ntiro 1966), which offered alternatives for the development of art in the region in a combination of Margaret Trowell's views and Julius Nyerere's socialist principles, was an indirect critique of the contemporary education at the Art School. Jonathan Kingdon adversely criticized Ntiro's essay when reviewing the book (Kingdon 1967:45-7). Among other debates over the alleged elitism of the Art School, one was sparked by a short essay by Michael Adams, who was one of the white instructors at the school (see Adams 1962:35, 1963:7). Also, a Tanzanian former Makerere graduate named Winifred Obed delivered a paper titled "The Attitude and Transition of East African Art" at a workshop organized by the Chemchemi Cultural Center in Nairobi, in which he severely criticized the Art School. Even the Kenyan playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a Makerere graduate, was unhappy with the Art School's culture at that time (Sicherman 1995:11-41).

(16.) Ntiro left the School in 1961 to work for the Ministry of Culture under the Nyerere administration in his native Tanzania and then was appointed as Ambassador of Tanzania in Britain.

(17.) Personal interview, Nairobi, April 10, 1998.