When every piece of art tells a story

I’ve always been fascinated by art – genuine African art that gives a detailed account of the life and times of our forefathers.

During my recent trip to Kenya, I got the rare opportunity to marvel on ancient paintings etched on walls at a secluded and tranquil forest lodge – Shimba Hills, tucked in the Coast Province of Kenya.

According to the lodge’s managing director, Gabrielle Kampenhuber, Shimba Hills was built in 1986 and it was commissioned as a coastal alternative to the famous Tree Tops.

There’s an untold story about the lodge that speaks volumes about it. The mural on walls using cave art is painted throughout the place so as to be in sympathy with architectural concept of the lodge within its natural environment.

According to Gabrielle, this form of art on the walls is known as the cave art mural. She tells The Beat, that “The art form displays the daily life in African villages, so what the artist has done is that he took relation of different tribes and to the different lifestyle – displaying when they were hunting, dancing and even on the costumes that he did depending on the tribe the people where from and depending on the occasion they were celebrating. So, this is definitely a piece of art that makes the place very special.”

The art work on the wall includes mythical figures, masked men, some of them with body paintings, hunter and warriors with sticks, bow and arrows, abstract symbols and a variety of animals including cattle, buffalos, goats, antelopes, giraffes, elephants and snakes. The figures on the wall appeared in monochrome or in silhouette, varying in size from miniatures to those that were a metre long and even larger. The artist appeared to be telling stories of their people in ancient times, their struggle with the hostile environment, the life of their society and their fear of the unknown.

Abadallah, one of the caretakers of the lodge explained to The Beat that many of these works are found in caves, open shelters or on rough rock surfaces and were produced over a very long period of time by successive generation of artists. He adds, “These beautiful rock painting that you see form a very special part of the restaurant and depict the focal point of early man’s initiation ceremonies, the complicated systems of family relationships, hunting activities, ceremonies, taboos and everyday life.”

Excerpt from the artist who did the mural on the walls, Expedito Kubulla, reveals that although he was fully aware of the immense challenge involved of recreating cave art mural on the walls of the lodge and of his own limitations in attempting to create a mural based on this theme, he was convinced that the time had come to make such an attempt.

Expedito writes, “Much of what appears in this mural are familiar scenes extracted from the multitude of known and available African and European visual arts of the past, which if selected, studied and from which I created my own inventions and imagery which were then mosaiced together to form this composition. Once I became involved in this work, I felt as though I had become transformed and had made contact with the ancient spirits which assisted me with re-creative process which continued to develop.”

The story within the mural

Scenes of people seated and sleeping in a circle outside a hut starts this panorama of ancestral imagery. Men, women and children are shown going through a forest carrying weapons gathering food, hunting and dancing in ritual activities.

A pregnant antelope portrays the multiplication of game thereby ensuring the continuity of species. Mysterious magical hand and foot prints are depicted together with masked men at a ritual together with a number of symbols emblems.

After a successful hunt, the leading figures of a procession appear carrying a dead buck depicting their return from the hunt. Numerous figures, some masked and some with body painting (supernatural beings) can be seen sitting or standing in groups, running or dancing in celebration after successful hunt.

Having satisfied all their physical needs, there is then the desire to have faithful partners and to become devoted parents, to establish permanent grazing land for domesticated cattle and to live in good health and satisfy every human instinct. With surplus energy, people could still continue to practice the art of mine, dancing, music, story-telling, engraving and painting.

These new changes in life styles, however, brought about the partitioning of land and the reduction of wild animals that led the hunters inevitably into conflicts resulting in wars and immigrations.

Certain images are deliberately left without description, to give the viewer room for imagination and interpretation, to provide stimulus to the artist and life which is in all over us.