The Mysterious Eino Nangaku

Zimbabwe Wed 29-09-2010

The Mysterious Eino Nangaku
Stephen Garan'anga | AfricanColours.com

Eino Nangaku is something of an enigma and an outsider in Zimbabwean society. Born in Ovamboland, north eastern Namibia in 1936, he came to Zimbabwe seeking employment at the age of 25. After several years as a farm labourer, he lost his job and decided to make art for a living. He met Tom Blomefield at Tengenenge Sculpture Park and did some stone carving but soon gravitated to wood and later clay - both materials which were used by his parents.

He remembers his mother collecting clay from ants' nests, moulding it into pots and pit¬-firing using cattle dung as fuel. He himself collects clay from the bush around Harare and fires his work using brushwood in an old oil-drum. His father and other men in the village carved wooden objects such as walking sticks and head rests.

Baby by Eino Nangaku

Eino Nangaku cuts an unusual figure in Harare. Tall and thin, he seems to drift rather than walk; quiet, ethereal, he seldom talks much and understanding can be difficult. Exceedingly gentle, he will sit motionless for hours in his only regular employment as a model for art students. He makes his own clothes, a curious-mixture of Western garments and idiosyncratic decorative elements. He loves hats, also homemade, consisting of striped cloths and feathers, which he drapes over his lofty head. When asked about his clothes, Nangaku laughs and says he likes wearing things that are different and that only women in Ovamboland wear such hats.

His quirky sense of humour is again revealed in the creation of Justin Nangaku. This tall, elegant figure in clay with a half moon over his head, one of his largest works - a quiet, dreamy presence. Immersed in the narrative, sociological aspects of local art, asked who Justin was - a brother or son perhaps? Nangaku cackled heartily for a while before exclaiming, "There is no Justin Nangaku."

Justin Nangaku is entirely imaginary, a young man in the prime of his life. Many of Eino Nangaku's works appear to be embodiments of cyclical aspects of life. They represent the essentials: Baby, Egg, Man, Woman, Pot, Ghost, Totem, Spirit, Owl, Hyena, Ball. Not all are African: Tiger, St Mark, Jesus in Gethsemane, English Pot.

In the West, mankind concentrates its energy attempting to control and 'improve' on natural reality. However, birth and death and the body return us inevitably to the simple basic facts of life. It is these facts that Eino is concerned to represent, using that most basic of materials in its simplest technique - open-fired clay.

'Modern' mankind predicates existence on the illusion of linear time: progress, achievement, change, development. Histories come and go. Technologies bring changes. We have computers and space shuttles and antibiotics and yet they do not alter the basics: birth, death, the body, earth. For all our remarkable inventions we have not altered nature and many people point to humanity's psychological and biological stasis - from the time the massive single piece of land fragmented away from mother Africa into various continents and Islands.

Religious beliefs demonstrate an underlying difference in orientation. In the West, mankind is on a linear course from birth (a state of 'sin', immaturity and perhaps related to a nation's definition as 'under-developed') - a uni-directional striving towards the ultimate goal of immortality ('heaven' or the 'paradise' of 'developed' nation status). In African religion (and possibly the beliefs of the East and other 'under-developed' regions), mankind is more commonly conceived as part of a cyclical geometry of time where birth involves the re-introduction of a past spirit and death a return to the ancestors until re-appearance in another birth or spirit possession.

Clay Figure by Eino Nangaku

Climate has impacted on these orientations. The harsher northern hemisphere requires mankind to protect itself resulting in invention, competition and individualism. There is the continuing attempt to control nature. The warmer southern climate makes less stringent demands and, on the whole, existence is more dependent on maintaining a balance which fore grounds the continuance of successful traditions, co-operation and group ethos, with a greater acceptance of nature as it is.

Eino Nangaku's awareness seems to be concentrated on those essentials which remain the same from century to century - the cyclical basics of life. Thus while styles may differ as in Vambo Pot and English Pot, they are both just types of pots - basic vessels.

Many of Nangaku's works, can be placed in a sequence which creates a circle of time rather than linear time. An interesting work entitled Jesus in Gethsemane shows us a small, intensely blackened, vulnerable creature. The figure sits on the ground, head bowed down, body curled into a self-protective circle. He does not writhe or strive; we don't see his face; there are no clothes, no halo, no theatrics. He is still, submissive before his fate. Jesus in Gethsemane becomes the representative of a phase - a small ball of pain-filled humanity facing death.

This shape is reversed in Baby whose body also forms a curving roundness of soft flesh with a sense of containment and passivity. Here the body lies upwards and open to life - a "Song of Innocence" in contrast to the Gethsemane "Song of Experience". Egg and Ball offer us a representation of life before birth and after death, when the body takes its simplest, possibly original, form uncurling into life and curling up towards death in an eternal circle.

Some of his upright figures are at various stages of their life span. They include Girl, Justin Nangaku, Man I, Woman I, Chief and Boxer. The bases of all Nangaku's works are proportionally large and solid, indicating a strong attachment to the earth. The heads too are large while the bodies are reduced in size. Even Boxer, though his hands are prominent, has head and feet disproportionately larger than his body.

Nangaku says that knowledge is most important in life, a belief reflected perhaps in the emphasis on the heads. Several of his figures are portrayed with books and Reading in particular conveys a sense of concentrated mental activity. No indication of gender is given in either the male-titled or female-titled works. All the figures are solitary except for the few that have a spirit companion. Each work is unique - there is no copying, no reproduction. It is certainly not the tourist -oriented mass production we see in local stone 'sculpture'.

Nangaku's largest clay figure to date is Chief. This solidly based man, firmly planted on the earth, is also the only clothed figure. He wears a cloak, perhaps a scarf, and a tall hat. The imposing head and hat may indicate the wisdom of the elders, a universally held African belief which again reveals the different attitude to 'progress'.

Chief III by Eino Nangaku

In the West, youth and 'newness' are worshipped while in Africa, age and experience are more highly respected. Chief is a motionless figure. He holds in his right hand a soft, lifeless animal. There is no weapon depicted and no triumphalist attitude conveyed. The hand, the stance and the animal form convey gentleness. The animal is not flung over the shoulder or dragged by a hind leg. This work offers an antithesis of those photographs showing colonial hunters proudly brandishing their guns with one foot triumphantly stamped on the animal's dead body.

Taken together these works provide an eternal circle: Egg (birth), Baby (innocence), Girl (youth), Man/Woman and Boxer (adulthood), Chief (wisdom of age), Jesus in Gethsemane (experience and suffering), Ball (death)/Egg (birth). And Justin Nangaku? Perhaps the embodiment of creative imagination? This is not suggesting that the artist intended this projection but rather that when considered together they reveal an underlying conception. Eino Nangaku also writes songs which add something to our perspective on his work.

The enigma of Eino Nangaku's art is the contemporary reality in which he exists: How is such art created by a man who lives in Harare, a twenty-first century city teeming with the trappings of 'modernity': the fashionably dressed youths toting smart phones, the snazzy cars, the high-rise blocks, billboard advertising and consumerism, TVs, iPads, state of the art computers? Perhaps it is an indication of how little so-called modern inventions and developments impinge on real life here?

Clearly Eino Nangaku's art comes from the inner realm of his philosophy and a view of life which remains relatively untouched by the changing fads of 'progress'. His work has a raw integrity that is uniquely and originally his own. What it has to tell us about life in 2010 is that the paraphenalia of consumerist modernity is superficial and, in the end, irrelevant.

Despite its seeming lack of 'modernity', Eino Nangaku's art is entirely modern, of today, a relevant expression of contemporary reality both in Zimbabwe and in the rest of the world. We may communicate by internet and fly to the moon but, in reality, our humanity remains raw clay, forming and reforming into Eino's open-fired clay art pieces.

Posted By: Hirum Ndungu

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