The Heron And The Snake In A Tale Of Two Cities

Uganda Mon 07-06-2010

The Heron And The Snake In A Tale Of Two Cities
By David Kaiza/Africancolours.com

“He is somewhere in there, looking like an artist,” Alan Donovan said, and well, there he was with the kind of look much affected by artists in the region: Big hair under a voluminous hat, hunting vest, khaki trousers – and there was the art magazine whose name I forget.

Expedito Mwebe when I first saw him was absorbed in the magazine – the kind of inattentive reading absorption someone has who is waiting an appointment and is unused to sitting around doing nothing. I thought that sitting there in the Nairobi Serena Hotel lobby, that he looked a little understated.

The artist Expedito Mwebe

Two minutes later, I was disabused of this impression. Walking over to the Bambara Lounge that he has made famous, we decided to sit for a little introduction and once I said who I was, we seemed to have covered the entire gamut of any contemporary East African conversation – the Mau forest, Migingo Islands, credit crunch, Barrack Obama, 1960s Tom Mboya Airlift, Wangari Maathai - in only two minutes. He talks fast and furiously.

We were starting to move to on to Southern Africa when Mr. Donovan, who is holding a historical retrospective in Nairobi of which Expedito is one of the artists on show, arrived, and we decided to move over to Bambara Lounge.

That insatiable capacity to talk, that ability to choose the right word at the right moment, to craft a phrase with such ease that kept me pinned to my chair, I was to find out inside the lounge, is more than casual:

The last of the 18 wood panels inside the Bambara Lounge - the poetic sculpture of the antelope; animal of fragile grace walking in a grass thicket, her peculiar loping form so conveyed, alertness watching for predators over the grass so effortlessly rendered, down to the grass cut into the wood with such creative attention that you practically hear the grass rustling – took me back to the first two minutes of our meeting:

It is the man’s capacity to see everything at once, to condense it all and to put everything he has seen in their exact place without the many elements crowding in on one another, which is perhaps the chief technical achievement of this man.

As a Ugandan writer with some interest in art, I had long heard of Expedito but from a distance because he, like so many Ugandans, fled the country in the 1970s and made Kenya his home. So it was reputation from a distance. I first saw echoes of his reputation in the works of younger artists – chiefly Henry Ssegamwenge – whom he has inspired. So I could call a Mwebe School, this technical absorption and thorough-going aesthetic keenness with wood.

Hence walking into the Bambara Lounge, I had in a sense, already “seen” Expedito Mwebe’s art. The insight about the antelope came after a walk across the Bambara Lounge.

First about the stories: the commissioning of the Bambara works has been told several times already. But it is the 20th anniversary since they were chiseled out. Two decades later, the artist created another panel of wood work at another Bambara Lounge – at the new Serena Hotel in Kampala and I wanted to absorb the man and the years.

A section of the Bambara Lounge in the Nairobi Serena Hotel

To travel between the two countries and see the two lounges, you can’t help feeling that the artist has become a grander master at his work.

The story that the panels at the lounges tell leaves you with a smirk on your lips afterwards. The first panel in the Nairobi lounge is a big spider in a spider’s web. The second is birds feeding on worms and getting fed on; the third is a fable and this needs to be told:

In Mwebe’s Buganda is a story told of friendship between a heron (Ssekanyolya) and a snake (Omusota); the snake invited the heron for dinner and proceeded to serve balled portions served on a flat tray. Give the architecture of his beak, the heron could not pick the food and the snake went ahead to eat everything. In return the heron invited the snake into his house and served food in long, thin-necked gourd with the result that the snake could not risk getting into the gourd, whereupon the heron ate all the food alone.

It might seem a tedious retelling of African folklore, except here in the lounge, and in the hands of Expedito:

“When people meet in a lounge, they have come to gain advantage over another person,” Expedito says and I can’t help smiling sheepishly. “It involves a lot of trickery;

“There is entrapment,” he says and I looked a second time at the spider panel.

“There are those who feed on others,” I looked at the birds. “In the lounge, you think you are meeting as equals but there are people who take your information and use it to their gain. It is not a win-win situation.”

With this re-telling of the old tales, the panels open up. But it is a grim story in certain respects for there you have the crocodile with its jaws open and the birds that come to pick and clean his teeth that then get eaten up. There are the shape and colour-shifting chameleons for which personal integrity means little when there is advantage to be gained or danger to be escaped.

Detail of one of the panels commsioned by the Nairobi Serena Hotel

There are the very sad panels about fish – first the adage of big fish in small ponds but the other on the facing wall in which fish swim in water surrounded by pelicans, crocodiles, herons, fish eagles:

“One animal, too many predator’s” Expedito says. I am feeling a little ruffled by the unflinching realism of all of this but Expedito himself goes on telling the tale as if he has come to terms with what the world is.

We have been through the owl already (“you may think you are safe, but some of us can still find you”); we went by the crow filling a jug with rock so as to raise the level of water to a height he can drink, the tortoise teaching their young the importance of shells. There is survival too, not just ruthless dagger and cloak tales.

Cozy, ambient and thoroughly authentic, Expedito’s panels make this lounge priceless. There is a magic and charm inside the Nairobi Serena Hotel that its grotto-like exterior belies and the Expedito art heightens this; his sense of realism in storytelling and the hardy, honesty, of his execution legitimating air, making it serious.

The hotel with its huge collection of African Art, much of it from Mr. Donovan’s African Heritage collection, is like few hotels you have been to. A museum hotel, to use Mwebe’s qualifier, it was crafted rather than delivered in wooden boxes.

The two Serenas – in Nairobi and Kampala – seem to be deliberately camouflaged. Both can be an eyesore on the outside; in fact, the old Nile Hotel the Serena Kampala replaced had a more visually balanced façade. But it was nothing approaching the sheer artistry of the interior of the new hotel.

Breath-taking and very environmentally sensitive, the interior deco will be hard to beat by another hotel – unless others hire artists of Mwebe’s genius (another reviewer’s description of the artist).

The new Bambara Lounge in Kampala is a much larger, airier version of the old one (Kampala is hotter than Nairobi and houses can afford to look airy). Mwebe’s art here has moved on in terms of technical finesse. Unfortunately, the new panels don’t have the narrative energy that the younger Mwebe (b.1951-) executed in his late 30s.

Here, the soul of the story has given way to sheer technical mastery, although this does not appear to be because so much time has passed. In fact, I am inclined to look at the Kampala collection as extensions of the Nairobi.

If looking at the Spider Panel as his first work in the series, then the difference with the Kampala works is stark.

When I met Henry Ssegamwenge in Kampala last year, he explained to me the technique of working wood in this fashion. To see the manner in which these artists work wood is to be assailed by paradoxes and seeming contradictions.

Multilayered and 3-dimension, yet not sculpture in the traditional reception of it, these are more like paintings or drawings done on flat surfaces using chisels and Rota machines. They achieve a finesse that is hard to believe and the one question that remains is: how do you do that on wood?

So it seems more like trick question than art – more riddle than creativity (not very good juxtapositions) but there is the constant sense you get that the wood was melted and cast. Worked at with precision, incredibly thin surfaces which still are graceful, the artists have the wherewithal to jump from the symmetrical to the lumpy within the space of a centimeter.

Enlarged, put on these panels measuring some 2m by 0.5m, the effect is achieved by simply overwhelming the eye. Essentially, they get wood to sing.

Expedito discusses his work with writer David Kaiza

In the Kampala collection more than the Nairobi, this capacity to overwhelm the eye – that capacity to see and compress everything - is what boggles the mind.

They don’t have the narrative continuum of their Nairobi cousins, although with the chameleons and the fish and the birds, elements of those can be gleaned. What they have is technique.

There is a fish swimming and currents of water (too small to be proper currents), are going in waves past his eyes. But these are done in such incredibly thin ridges that you bring your nose close to the wood to make out the working. It’s as if the wood was born looking like that.

The question is how does he manage to cut such fine lines without the chisel slipping and chipping the millimeter deep valleys?

I had put these questions to Expedito in Nairobi after looking at his combs (for which he is also well-known). The size of a big man’s palm, the lion’s head etched into the comb with such striking precision had seemed too thorough for sculpture (especially on hardwood) and I asked him how he does it.

He held up his thumb and said “I work on surfaces as small as my thumb” (Expedito has this tendency to do suspense and surprise) and then with characteristic mien, he adds with a puckish smile – “You will even think all mahogany should be given to me.”

'Comb' by Expedito

“You must use very small chisels and cutters?” I ask.

“I make my own tools when I can’t find what I want,” he says. “Some of my chisels are as small as pins.”

His talk is punctuated with technical knowledge about wood and tools (calling himself a “toolist”) and when he explains how his ideas come, he has the uncomplicated sound of a man for whom art has broken away from its structure and technicalities and become a family member, homespun and creaturely.

“I start with an idea and then it’s off and on and among other things I do, I live with it day and night,” he says. “It’s like a pregnancy. You live with it. You suffer with it. You sleep with it. All the while, it is developing.”

His Nairobi show is a dramatic staging in which narrative and technique combine to aid and carry his ideas. In Kampala is the minimalism that comes with maturity. The woodwork gives the lounge an expansive flourish and what he did not do in Nairobi, he did here, curving the door and wrapping wood around pillars.

In all, his new work is of such intricacy that it makes the distance between the artist and his audience unbridgeable and immense. It is a little intimidating to look at it all and art, when you cannot immediately see the manner in which it is done, can be a little unfair.

It is perhaps a lavishing of what he has learnt of wood than Mwebe will or should ever do. He has shown us 20 years later that he knows how to do the small with the panache he has of doing the big:

“Are you a magician?” I had asked him casually in Nairobi.

“Maybe art is magic,” he said.

In terms of subject – minimalist though the story is - Mwebe’s work in the Kampala lounge appears deeply felt, for you cannot help feeling, with all the fish swimming, that the artist had his home country in mind when making these works. The fish and swirling water give the sense of drowning.

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Your Comments

Bayo: excellent craftsmanship!

David Kibuuka: I have always loved his work. Totally outstanding. There is another hotel in Nairobi where he carved pillars that are 15feet tall.

Nuwa Wamala Nnyanzi: Mwebe has talent and enduring artistic stamina. I am a proud collector of two of his combs from his first solo art exhibit at the Goethe Institut, Nairobi in the early 80s.

Theo Stone: Am so glad to see Expedito is still with us as i have always loved his work.Glad hes able to go back home.

Gachanja Kamau: I'm glad to see that Expedito still rocks. I had the honor and pleasure of working under him back in the days on the Nairobi projects. I now live in the USA.