Henry Mzili Mujunga, African Odalisque, 2016, Courtesy of the artist

By Lara Buchmann

Did the modernist mindset of his predecessors leave a mark on Mzili’s thoughts and practice? Can we find consistency? Dis rupture? Agreement and disagreement? And lastly, how can we contextualize his practice into a local and eventually into a global art history? While these are big questions that might not all be answered in this article, I’d like to offer a space of inquiry, hoping to invite different ideas and ways of connecting the dots.

Reflections from Bagamoyo; In response to the eurocentric gaze on art coming from the continent

An event that undoubtedly sticks out in Mzili’s iterations is an artists’ workshop he attended in Bagamoyo, Tanzania in 2001. Six years after graduating from Makerere University, for the first time he travels to a neighboring country to meet fellow artists and age-mates from different African countries. This exposure and engagement must have led to a realization that many young artists from the continent had been grappling with similar issues. They re-discovered and identified with the ideas of Pan-Africanism and Afrocentrism and later-on Mzili and some his peers founded the collective Index Mashariki, meaning Indigenous Expression East.

‘Msimamo wako’

Expressed in Kiswahili, a language that has been a major vehicle for the first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to turn Pan-African thought into political practice, the piercing question among the young artists in Bagamoyo was: „What is msimamo wako?“, meaning “What is your point of view? “In a less literal sense: What is our perspective? What is our standpoint as young artists working on the continent?

Fueled by the energy, spirit and confidence from Bagamoyo, while trying to find his place as a young artist, Mzili realized, there was no category in which he felt fit, and if there is no category for you, you don’t exist – especially with the persisting Eurocentric gaze at art from Africa at the time. So instead of being forced into what had already been there, he came up with a category of his own: Indigenous Expressionism.

At the same time African and diaspora scholars started to theorize what has been coined African Modernism. With no reference to their thoughts yet, Mzili and his contemporaries still grappled with a Eurocentric gaze at almost all art coming from the continent and the exclusion from a contemporary global art history. There was hardly any literature to refer to, no academic, no journalistic or even archival knowledge was available, apart from knowledge that has been accumulated around stolen objects in Western ethnographic museums and accounts of missionaries, anthropologists and Western explorers.

Research around modern and contemporary art from Africa – and most of all knowledge production from within the continent – with a critical perspective on colonialism, post-colonialism and major power imbalances within the local and global art scenes existed but were still in their early stages.

“Indigenous means coming from you.”

To better understand Mzili’s approach and choice of words, let’s take a look at the word indigenous. Merriam-Webster defines indigenous as, “produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment “, as for instance indigenous plants or indigenous cultures [2]. While there is an obvious focus on locality and origin in this definition of the word, Mzili takes the gist of the term and expands its meaning to the locality of our minds, and perhaps our souls. “Indigenous has to do with your nativity, where you are rooted, where you are coming from, what your background is. Indigenous means coming from you.” [3] he proclaims.

However, he then adds a metaphor that extends beyond locality: The window through which you perceive the world, and perhaps also the window looking inwards, framing how we perceive our own existence. Imagine standing inside a building and looking outside, through a window. What we see cannot be seen by any other person. Nor does the same person looking out of the window at different times see the same. Perception changes with light, shadow, flora and fauna, growing and decaying, changes in weather, and so forth. In Mzili’s accounts, indigenous therefore means your personal point of view, as it is shaped by your locality, culture, upbringing and personal experiences.

Indigenous Expressionism through the lens of Western art history

What does Mzili’s definition of the term indigenous become, though, when combined with the often heavily charged term – Expressionism in Western art history? Just like there was little to no literature on African artists at Mzili’s at art school, the curriculum centralized Western references and art history. During and after his art school years, he was drawn to the style of Expressionism as it’s been coined and practiced in Western, mostly Western art.

At this point, let’s take a quick detour into European art history. “Expressionism (is an) artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. “[4] While depicting their “inside world “, the European expressionists commonly used formal abstraction, distortion and bold brush strokes. As much as the term expressionist it can be descriptive for any artist’s work at any point in time, it is commonly used for certain artists and art movements around the 20th century in Europe. As industrialization and urbanization was moving at a tearing pace, Expressionism emerged, “as a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity’s increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and spirituality. “[5]

The meaning of Expressionism within Indigenous Expressionism can be looked at from two angles: First, there is Mzili’s interest in the style as taught in art school and its obvious influence onto his work and incorporation of stylistic and expressive features. The connection is still evident in Mzili’s, “African Odalique“from 2016, where he re-appropriates Picasso’s cubist distortion of bodily features inspired by masks stolen from Africa during colonial rule.

Indigenous Expressionism through the lens of individual perspective

Secondly, the meaning of Expressionism within Indigenous Expressionism can be regarded as a metaphor of what young artists in Africa were grappling with: Feeling a need for authenticity but not knowing what their own authenticity is. While Mzili and some of his contemporaries at art school admired the great expressionists of the 20th century, they were doing “something” that didn’t quite fit into the picture. They didn’t know where their expressions were coming from and didn’t have any words to describe them. However, it felt authentic, and it felt like freedom. So, they went ahead with it. This experience in itself hints towards an expressionist practice. Authenticity might rather be a feeling of comfort and confidence in yourself other than a set of features, oftentimes popular opinions, of what your practice as an African artist should look like. The latter rather evoked feelings of disconnection from the artists within their practice.

In Mzili’s understanding of the term, there are no restrictions to any particular art form, style, medium and so on. As long as your point of view is expressed artistically, it’s Indigenous Expressionism. Freedom and individualism are key, since at the end of it all, it’s all about your perspective, your window. On that account, Indigenous Expressionism is an intellectual framework rather than a style; an underlying foundation for artistic thinking and production, that centers the artist him- or herself. This clearly reflects in Mzili’s practice over the years. As much as his style changed from abstract figures in for instance “Okuwonga,“ from 2001 and “Buffalo woman,” from 2010 to rather realistic forms in his most recent works, his point of departure has remained constant. His recent paintings such as “Training Day,” from 2020 depict abstract backgrounds, semi-abstracted foliage and realistic depictions of mostly the artist himself, his wife and/or son. He draws inspiration from his immediate environment, his family, his intuition and his learnt practice to shed light on identity-making in Uganda.

Mzili felt the need to consolidate his framework as a response to continuous efforts by collectors, writers and art enthusiasts to contextualize his art within western categories. Hence, Indigenous Expressionism can be seen as both a framework for artistic expression and as a mode of resistance against forms of racism and paternalism commonly experienced by artists from the Global South. Therefore, Indigenous Expressionism is always political.

Written by Lara Buchmann (July 2021)