Roots - The Weganda Review

Nuwa Wamala Nnyanzi, who has been active since the 1980s, is best known as a batik artist of the very first rank. Much less known is the versatility of his practice that cuts across media, from painting to graphic design. The range of his oeuvre is so enormous – and so elastic – that it can seem deficient to describe him simply as a multi-media artist. He has created murals, oil and acrylic paintings, serigraphs, batiks, drawings, woodcut prints, and other works in a career distinguished by respect for traditional knowledge as much as experimentation with materials. And yet, despite everything we know, Nnyanzi prefers to describe himself as a “God-taught artist” whose only wish is to “touch” the hearts of those who encounter his work. He has achieved way more than that, and he belongs in the pantheon of the great artists of our time.

Nnyanzi’s studio for years has been a small lock-up station within the precincts of the National Theatre in Kampala. His studio is surrounded by shops selling mostly cheap curios that appeal to tourists, making Nnyanzi’s presence there a curiosity for an artist whose work belongs in a national gallery. He can be found there, perhaps even right now, engaging warmly with visitors, or reading, or looking after his work. His energy belies his seventy-two years.

TWR is publishing images of only 12 of countless works by Nnyanzi. They are, many of them, wonderful. Most are batik artworks that illustrate his engagement with our cultural heritage, our roots, the tentacles that tie us to our ancestors. His best work is vaguely reminiscent of European abstract expressionism in the last century, but the aesthetic vocabulary is his own. Nnyanzi creates art with freedom and the kind of vernacular authority granted only to those who aren’t constrained by formal art education.

Nnyanzi said of his work that it aims to represent his inner feelings or interpret the experiences of others, and the best artists do just that. His true gift is his success in helping to elevate the batik medium to serious art. In 1980, when his artistic career was just starting, the Goethe Institute in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi gave him a groundbreaking solo exhibition. The decision was shocking because gallerists didn’t take batik art seriously in those days. “They used to sell them in shops, but not as an exhibition,” Nnyanzi said of batiks. The show’s success marked him for greatness, and another important exhibition followed in 1984. “Wondering,” a batik piece executed in 2012 and chosen as cover art for this issue, represents the best in Nnyanzi: beautiful abstraction, technical dexterity, excellent storytelling.

Nnyanzi was born in Mityana in 1952. He went to school there and elsewhere in Uganda before enlisting in the army. He had achieved the rank of corporal when he fled Uganda to escape the turmoil of Idi Amin’s regime. In Kenya, unable to find work, he focused on exercising the talent he had first shown as a young student at Mityana Secondary School in central Uganda. The transition from batiks to other media came later, inspired partly by the words of those who spoke ignorantly of his work. “After doing these batiks, then I was challenged. People said, ‘Batik is not art.’ And I told them, ‘By the way, I can do whatever I do in batik using oils or watercolor,’” he told TWR. “The only difference is people who use watercolor and oil cannot manage batik. Technically they cannot manage batik.”

Nnyanzi’s work has been collected by many institutions, notably the Museum fur Volkerkunde in the German city of Frankfurt, Coca-Cola International, and the state houses of Kenya and Uganda. His personal album is filled with images of important people he has met or known, from top government officials to noblemen and entertainers.

Nnyanzi has trained apprentices over the years in the creative handling and application of materials in ways that highlight tradition and elevate knowledge, and his work graces multiple book covers. For him – as an artist with aristocratic pedigree on both sides of his family and who once served as the arts minister of Buganda Kingdom – this is a key part of his legacy. His work was most recently shown in the group show last year that launched Kampala’s Bumu Art Gallery, a project spearheaded by Buganda’s Princess Agnes Nabaloga. But perhaps the most thoughtful tribute to Nnyanzi is to be found at Mityana Secondary School, where the art studio is named for him.▪