WORDS AND IMAGES: Painting the possibilities
Trip Start
Aug 18, 2005
1
26
Trip End
Feb 20, 2006
Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
Scene after scene of life in Tanzania -a woman with her child, a farmer in the field-line the rims of the building's courtyard just before it meets the sky.
The relief panels are the work of artist Robino Ntila, who is standing beside me at Nyumba ya Sanaa, reminiscing about the art centre's glory days now long gone.
For years until the early 1990s, he headed this gallery, hobnobbing with local artists and international personalities. It was a dynamic and thriving world of colour and creativity. Today, it's more like a bottle emptied of its sweet wine
01-Show
.Instead of canvases, there are curios and touristy knick-knacks on sale. Instead of sculptures, there are stalls and a mostly empty restaurant. And now there's talk that they will turn the whole complex into a casino.
He seems sullen when he looks around the place. After many years of working in different mediums, he now adds the title of art promoter to his self-styled description.
Robino has started several artists associations, but nothing lasts very long.
"There is no unity among the artists," he explains.
But he isn't giving up. Even tonight there's to be an informal meeting of minds interested in rejuvenating art in his beloved Tanzania.
***************************************************
Splinters are scattered around the grass and dirt on which the large logs lie
02-Orphan
.It takes Felix Malyi three to four months to carve the unique bold forms into the totem-pole sized wood. Or a month if it's one of the smaller pieces.
Felix is one of the only non-Makondes working in the well-known Makonde Village of carvers. Around him echoes the music of hammering, chipping, and sanding.
A little way from Felix's big rosewood and ebony pieces, about 50 carvers are squeezed by the road side at the back of the village under the shade of trees.
"The master becomes slaves," Robino comments.
According to him, many of the Makonde were originally given a stall in the village by the government. But over the years, the carvers sold the shops to businessmen.
Now, the artists sell their works cheaply to the vendors who make large profits from the tourists that flock to this packed and colourful market
03-Robino
. There are dozens of stalls and they are all packed with candlesticks, abstract faces and bodies, animals-each one not much different from the next. Felix's forms, however, stand distinctly away from these.
He chooses his heavy raw material carefully but buys wood that is already cut into logs from the Tanzanian government.
His keen eyes make the selection based on size, but he's also looking for something else that's more difficult to spot.
"It has to have special purpose," he says.
****************************************************
Over the past three weeks, Robino has provided a crash course in the local art of Tanzania.
By sheer good fortune, I tag along on impromptu visits to galleries and local artists' homes and studios when he hosts Yacouba Konate, a professor of philosophy and an art critic from Cote D'Ivoire. Yacouba is on the hunt for works to showcase at an upcoming biennale of African art, to be held in Dakar, Senegal.
The professor, who hails from Abidjan, instantly takes very well to the art from this side of Africa
04-Yacouba
."When my city shall become powerful again, we shall arrange an East African exhibit," he says hopefully. It's still holiday season and we don't yet know that in a few weeks' time a few corners of his country will erupt into political violence.
As we move from site to site, Robino seems pleased that Yacouba has chosen Dar as a stop along his search for masterpieces. In East Africa, the Tanzanian city is usually overlooked for Nairobi.
In the Kenyan capital, "you can find local people that like paintings and it's not just the tourists," he says.
It's what he hopes for Dar es Salaam-a resurgence of a once vibrant art community. The grounds of the National Museum will host a new Belgian-funded gallery in a few years, but it can't come soon enough.
"I don't know if I will live until that time, so why can't you do it before?" he says laughing.
