Telling Kenya’s history through clay works

Edward Njenga with the artwork depicting the treatment of detainees in a camp, which sold for Sh2.4 million. PHOTO | MARGARETTA wa GACHERU

What you need to know:

  • Edward Njenga’s arrest ‘for helping the Mau Mau’ saw him thrown into detention, where he saw the freedom fighters beaten on orders of the colonial officers
  • Edward Njenga’s earthen figurines are powerful statements on the country’s stratified society.
  • Many of those sculptures are locked inside glass cabinets which people can see only if they visit Njenga at his Gigiri home, around the corner from the United Nations Headquarters on UN Crescent.

Edward Njenga was riding his way back home after buying a loaf of bread — his lunch — at a Hardy Estate kiosk in Nairobi when he saw the Police Land Rover heading straight his way.

That was his last day as an employee of  the East African Post and Telegraph, the British colonial agency that had trained him as a mechanical engineer Grade 2 at the Mbagathi Training School (now the Kenya College of Communications) in 1950.

“I didn’t even get to eat the bread I’d just bought,” Njenga recalls as if it were yesterday and not September 1954.

The 95-year-old veteran sculptor is seated comfortably in his workshop-cum-studio, which was once a three-car garage before he and his wife, Hannah, bought the house in 1985 from the House of Manji (biscuit making) family.

“I’d been working with the post office since 1950, repairing telephone wires and putting up new ones, like those that we ran from the Muthaiga Police Station to what is now Safari Park Hotel, and the ones we brought from Kinoo all the way to Dagoretti Corner,” the former Mau Mau detainee recalls.

The police didn’t believe he had bought the bread, nor that the bicycle he was riding had been given him by his employer — which paid him Sh290 a month — to make it easier for him to move around.

“All they wanted to know was my tribe,” he says, recalling that  he was taken for interrogation, first to the Langata Police Station, then to the Pumwani DC’s office, and finally back to the Langata Detention Centre (all in Nairobi), where he found 600 Africans, and where he stayed for six months.

“They were convinced that I was one of the people helping the Mau Mau who were camped out in Ngong Forest,” he says. “But they did not beat me.”

Nonetheless, Njenga quietly confirms that that he, indeed, helped the Land and Freedom Army.

MILLIONS IN THE BANK

“I used my Kodak box camera to take photos of them when I was working at the Bogani Telephone Exchange. I’d process the photos and attach them to “Green Cards”, which were given only to loyalists,” he says, then goes on to explain that the “Green Cards” were brought to him secretly.

“I think they must have been smuggled from the DC’s office,” he adds.

But Njenga never revealed his secret to the British. Instead, he spent part of 1955 at the Langata Detention Camp in Nairobi and another six months at the Manyani Detention Camp at the Coast.

It was at the camps that he saw African prison warders viciously beat the detainees while a British officer watched,  reminding the warders that “the Kikuyu are cannibals”. That taunt would terrify the warders, who would beat the detainees even more mercilessly.

It was that image that stuck in Njenga’s mind and  also inspired him, many years later, to create a collection of terracotta figurines that bore witness to what occurred in those camps.

It certainly didn’t cross Njenga’s mind at the time that one day he would create a miniature clay sculpture that would be sold to a private British collector of African art, who will put the collection (of six Mau Mau detainees, three African warders and one British officer) on exhibition in London later this year.

It was Danda Jacoljmek of Nairobi’s Circle Art Gallery who negotiated the deal on Njenga’s behalf. The collection of sculptures sold for Sh2 million (exclusive of VAT), with Njenga saying he made Sh1.5 million while Sh400,000 went to Circle Art.

But he is not complaining. He might have liked that particularly poignant piece to remain in his care just as it had been until 2013, when it went on display for six months at the Nairobi National Museum as part of the institution’s Jubilee celebrations commemorating 50 years of Kenya’s Independence.

Nonetheless, Njenga has saved quite a few of his early sculptures, which make equally powerful social statements about the oppression Kenyans have faced since the coming of British colonialism.

The main difference between the two sets of terracotta figurines is that the ones he’s remained with are from the 1970s and thereafter, and mainly relate to the country’s post-Independence period. These are the ones that he created primarily while working as a social worker, first for the Quakers at the Friends Community Centre in Ofafa in Nairobi’s Eastlands, and subsequently for the Presbyterians at the Eastleigh Community Centre.

These images are untitled but could easily be called “Portraits of Poverty” since he captured images of a little boy (one we now call chokora) crawling inside a dustbin to scavenge for food, a poor mother cradling her sickly child as she wearily waits her turn at the dispensary down the road from the Eastleigh Centre, and men dressed in rags pulling mikokoteni (hand carts) overloaded with sacks of potatoes, maize, or charcoal.

Many of those sculptures are locked inside glass cabinets which people can see only if they visit Njenga at his Gigiri home, around the corner from the United Nations Headquarters on UN Crescent.

MAKING OF AN ARTIST

At 95, Njenga is still a skillful sculptor although nowadays he works with wood. PHOTO | MARGARETTA wa GACHERU

His current residence is a far cry from the homes in which he grew up, first with his parents, and later with his mum after his father moved  to Rumuruti with two of his older brothers.

He was born in Nyeri, where his grandmother had taught his mother, as a little girl, to make clay pots. It was a profession that would later sustain the family and enable Njenga to go to school in the 1940s, first at Kirangari Elementary School, then at Kabete Primary School, which was about 25 kilometres from his family’s home in Thingati Village in Ngecha Location.

His parents were originally from Nyeri, but they both moved to Kiambu in search of work. His father, Musa Wambugu, got a job as a cook in Redhill, working for a British family that had acquired land there after the First World War. Meanwhile, his mother, Mariamu Wanjiku Wambugu, was one of the few potters in the region, so she enlisted his two sisters to help her meet the demand for her pots.

As a little boy, Njenga was also recruited to dig for, and mix, clay for his mother.

“I would also help her by digging the holes she used to fire her clay pots,” he says.

Njenga recalls being bullied for doing what the boys in the village saw as work for women and girls. He says he didn’t actually make pots back then, but once he got the chance to learn to sculpt in clay, the skill seemed to be in his DNA.               

But that process didn’t begin until he was transferred from the Manyani Camp to Wamumu Approved School, together with a number of Mau Mau children under the age of 15.

“The detention camps were divided into three sections: section A was for the hardcore Mau Mau; Section B was for the more moderate ones; and Section C was for those who were seen as non-threatening,” explains Njenga who, thanks to his good grasp of English (reading, written and spoken), his jovial personality and his early signs of artistic talent, was placed in Section C.

Section C included children that some settlers who were members of the Kenya Regiment — like Geoffrey Griffin who subsequently founded Starehe Boys Centre — realised were innocent of the crimes attributed to the Mau Mau. It was those children who were taken to Wamumu Approved School for “rehabilitation”.

It was at Wamumu that the relative freedom he enjoyed enabled him to start responding to his artistic inclinations. So it was while most of the children were being taught to read and write that Njenga requested the chance to draw. His request was granted and he was allowed out of the school compound, so long as he was accompanied by a home guard.

“I wanted to start drawing landscapes and asked to be allowed out of the compound so I could get a better view of the area,” says Njenga, who would then take his drawings and pin them up on the canteen notice board.

“It was those drawings that attracted the attention of two Quakers, Walter Martin and John Stark, who had come to visit the school and asked the man in charge, Captain Gardener, who the artist was,” Njenga explains, adding that another Quaker, Gordon Fry, was the first person to tell him he had the makings of an artist.

It wasn’t long before the Quakers requested that Njenga be released to their custody to work at the Friends Centre in Ofafa, Nairobi.

“It was there that for the first time, a White man served me tea and cakes. And there that I had my first mzungu roommate, a young man from Denmark who was attending one of the Quakers’ international work camps,” he says.

GOOD UPCOUNTRY GIRL

Almost immediately, he began teaching children at the centre to draw. Soon he was given an actual job — earning Sh80 a month — for teaching art.

Njenga got along so well with the Quakers that they sent him to study social work at the Quaker College in London, UK, from 1961 to 1963.

“It was a month before my scheduled return to Kenya that I discovered that near our school, Woodbury College of Social Work, there was a Cadbury’s factory that had a small art school. They had evening classes in sculpting, which I attended for three weeks,” says Njenga, who regrets not having discovered the school earlier. But what he gained in that short time set him on a course that he’s been on ever since.

“I made two sculptures at the time: a Maasai bust that I actually sold, and a child, which I still have,” he says.

Returning to the Friends centre at the dawn of Independence was an exciting time for the man who now had a whole new lease on life.

He asked one of the askaris at the centre to help him find a “good girl” from upcountry, and the man came back with Hannah, a teacher near Githunguri, who was amiable, attractive and polite, but rather aloof.

“It took nearly two years to convince her that we were meant for each other, and she finally came around,” says Njenga, who has been happily married ever since.

There was a problem, however, since Hannah’s uncle demanded a Sh3,500 bride price, which Njenga, clearly, didn’t have. Fortunately, he told his friend Walter Martin of his plight just when one Quaker philanthropist was passing through town. The man heard about Njenga’s dilemma and gave him a loan for the exact amount required. His only condition was that Njenga pay him back, no matter how slowly, which is exactly what Njenga did, assisted by Hannah, who was earning Sh200, a whole Sh50 more than him.

Njenga had already begun exhibiting his sculptures, first at the Goethe Institute, then at the French and American Cultural Centres. His big break came in 1970, when he organised an exhibition at Gallery Africa on what is now Tom Mboya Street.

“I invited Charles Njonjo to open the exhibition and my German friend, Fritz Paveltik came with a German MP, Frau Dr Hannah Lory Henkel, who was amazed that I was virtually self-taught,” he says.

She’s the one who arranged for him to study fine art for three years at Hanover University, where he learnt to work with a whole range of media using a variety of new techniques. Upon  his return, Njenga moved from the Friends Centre to the Eastleigh Community Centre, where he worked both as a sculptor and social worker.

By the time he retired in 1981, Njenga was a big name on the Kenyan cultural scene. But the public lost track of him for several years, until he was “rediscovered” by the media, which recognised that he was one of Kenya’s greatest living artists, a national treasure and a veteran whose talents are now even recognised by the British as one of East Africa’s most important sculptors and humanitarians.

But while Njenga has earned recognition for his art, which was largely inspired by his mother, none of his three children is following in his footsteps.

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FYI

 

Njenga outside his house with a dragon he sculpted while studying in Germany in the 1970s. PHOTO | MARGARETTA wa GACHERU

Highlights of Edward Njenga’s life

1955 

He’s detained at the Langata and Manyani detention camps

1961-1963

he studies social work at the Woodbury College of Social Work in London, UK

1970

He gets his big break after holding an exhibition at Gallery Africa on what is now Tom Mboya Street.

1970s

He studies art for three years at Hanover University in Germany.

1981

He retires from formal employment after making a name for himself