The Local and Beyond: Francis Nnaggenda's Sculptural Innovations

The Local and Beyond: Fr a n c i s Nn a g g e n d a ' s Sculptural Innovations Sunanda K. Sanyal ow in his late sixties, Ugandan sculptor Francis Nnaggenda has been both artist and teacher for almost three decades at Makerere University's art school in Kampala. Nnaggenda himself was trained in Europe during the sixties. ^ He finally returned to Uganda in 1978, having extended his stay to escape Idi Amin's regime. The ideas and skills he brought home have ushered in a new phase in Makerere's sculpture training, through an experimental approach to subject, form and technique. This essay discusses a few of Nnaggenda's recent works. It examines how these images, often grounded in an awareness of ethnicity and tradition, ultimately transcend provincial claims to affirm the sculptor's identity as a modern artist. Furthermore, interpreting the symbolic ties between his work and his predecessor's at the Art School, the paper locates Nnaggenda's place in the legacy of Makerere's history of sculpture . While much of Nnaggenda's work from the seventies speaks of an exile's reminiscences of home, his production in subsequent years draws its themes primarily from contemporary events. Between 1983 and 1990, for instance, Nnaggenda redefined a destroyed tree trunk as a h u m a n torso, which he named War Victim. The violent persecution of the Baganda (Nnaggenda's people) during Milton Obote's second regime in Uganda through the mideighties inspired this piece, as he saw the shadow of that trauma in the remains of a charred mukebu tree that he discovered accidentally. ^ "Somehow it seemed so connected to the war," Nnaggenda observes, "and symbolic of the thoughtless killing of h u m a n beings. I rescued the burnt and broken piece of wood. It became War Victim!' The figure confirms Nnaggenda's indisputable authority over form and space. Turning the trunk upside down to expose the latent h u m a n figure, he shapes the anatomy without interfering with nature's idiosyncrasies. It is necessary, however, to glance momentarily at another work in order to grasp the significance of this image beyond its formal artifice: Independence Monument, executed three decades earlier by Nnaggenda's predecessor, Gregory Maloba, celebrates Uganda's independence from British rule. A protege of Margaret Trowell, the Art School's founder, in the early 1940s, Kenyan Gregory Maloba later attended several British institutions to train as a sculptor.-^ Independence Monument, Maloba's largest public work in Uganda, overlooks a busy War Victim 1983 1990, sculpted tree trunk, Makerere University Library, Kamapala. 7 6 • N k a J o u r n a l o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c a n A r t Flute Player, 1998, oil on canvas street in downtown Kampala. This work is as much a testimony to a crucial event in Ugandan history as it is to Maloba's artistic inclinations. Dressed in bark-cloth, an indigenous material of great cultural pride to the Baganda and their neighbors, an African mother holds up a jubilant child, asserting the role of a pre-colonial past as they celebrate the end of colonization. As a student, Maloba admired Jacob Epstein, w h o m he now recalls in his formal approach. Though freestanding, Monument has a frontal emphasis characteristic of Epstein's public work.^ "The truth [is] that students ought to look at work by artists of every race and generation if possible," Maloba once said about the intellectual growth of his students. "Freedom for each individual to develop along his own line.. .must be there." Thus, while commemorating the birth of an African nation, he saw no clash of identities in borrowing from a British artist. "The female of the Independence M o n u m e n t grows like a tree," remarked Cecil Todd, who succeeded Trowell as the head of the School in 1959. Indeed, it is a tree of life realized in concrete . The enormous triangle of the mother's planted feet suggests a powerful trunk, and the inverse form of the child's raised arms...