Abstract
This chapter concerns the work of a White British woman named Margaret Trowell (1903–1989), who founded anglophone East Africa’s first “professional” school of fine art in the Uganda Protectorate in the 1930s. Trowell is still popularly remembered in Uganda as someone who, contrary to the dominant European views of her day, genuinely believed in Africans’ creative abilities and championed their artistic expression. However, I argue that both her pedagogical theories and her teaching practice were strongly influenced by colonial government policy and that as a consequence her stated commitment to supporting the development of a “true African tradition of art” was far less emancipatory than it at first appeared.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Trowell studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London 1924–1926 and then did a one-year course in art education at the University of London, Institute of Education.
- 2.
By contrast, according to official estimates, there were just under 17,000 Europeans resident in Kenya in 1930. The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (1932, p. 9).
- 3.
See also Wolukau-Wanambwa (2014, pp. 103–106).
- 4.
See Kasule (2003, pp. 23–52).
- 5.
See also Latham (1934), p. 424.
- 6.
“The African holds the position of a late-born child in the family of nations, and must as yet be schooled in the discipline of the nursery” (Frederick Lugard, the architect of indirect rule, 1893 cited in Sanyal, 2000, p. 32).
- 7.
For a succinct account of the “scientific” theories that informed British colonial policy in the Uganda Protectorate in the early twentieth century, particularly with respect to social evolutionism and Indigenous education, see Sanyal (2000, pp. 29–52).
- 8.
See I. F. Haney-López (2013).
- 9.
General J. C. Smuts, ‘Africa and Some World Problems’, quoted in: Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: The Legacy of Late Colonialism, Kampala: Fountain Press, 2004, p. 5.
- 10.
For example: “we know practically nothing at all about the African’s sense of beauty” (Trowell, 1937, p. 21). The vast majority of Trowell’s writing on art education is explicitly addressed to a European audience. She rarely wrote with an African reader (or teacher) in mind.
- 11.
“[B]ourgeois individualism and the nuclear family, […] private property and commerce, of rational minds and healthily clad bodies, for the practical arts of refined living and devotion to God” (Comaroff, 1989, p. 673).
- 12.
Not least because using imported Indian labor in East Africa was becoming prohibitively expensive (Kyeyune, 2002, p. 38).
- 13.
Mamdani argues (2004) that the logical conclusion of this principle is the Bantu Education Act, passed by the apartheid government in South Africa in 1953, which, while purporting to make adequate provision for the development of supposedly ethnically distinct institutions, in actual fact aimed to drastically curtail the educational opportunities of Indigenous populations.
- 14.
“Uganda is in very bad need of education to enable her people to meet modern affairs. The present schools we have in Uganda are under the management of missionaries whom we thank very much but the standard of these schools is very low. It is so low that one who leaves these schools after having obtained a first certificate hardly gets any good job in offices” (“Minutes of a meeting of the Young Baganda Association,” 1919, cited in Low, 1971, p. 52).
- 15.
cf. Footnote 6.
- 16.
My emphasis (italics).
- 17.
When I interviewed the late Charles Ssekintu, one of Trowell’s original group of students, he told me that he and his fellow students thought that the West African sculptures Trowell showed them were “really ugly.”
- 18.
We know that Trowell was well aware of the significance of West African sculpture and Central African masks for the European avant-garde because the chief intellectual authority she cites when making her case for the caliber of African art is the established British avant-gardist Roger Fry (1866–1934), who organized some of the first exhibitions of “primitive,” cubist, postimpressionist, and child art in the United Kingdom in the 1920s and who also championed the work of Trowell’s mentor, the art teacher Marion Richardson (See Trowell, 1939a, p. 169; 1937, p. 31, also Fry, 1919).
- 19.
Note Trowell’s deployment here of the racist correlation of the intelligence of an African male with that of a European child.
- 20.
“We do not set children to copy other people’s essays, nor should they copy other people’s pictures; if they do that they will never learn to do anything on their own. Even a poor original picture is worth more than a good copy; copying should never be allowed in the school” (Trowell, 1952, pp. 7–8). This text appears on the frontispiece of every booklet Trowell wrote for African art teachers.
- 21.
As Trowell recounts it, Maloba, who was the first of her students to become a “professional artist,” did gain access through her to images of contemporary European art but only by sneaking into her library to look at books when she was out of the house (1957, p. 104).
- 22.
“[E]ducated Africans must realize that if they wish to enjoy a greater share in the administration of their own affairs they just fit themselves for such responsibility, and that what they need is not so much a matter of book knowledge as of character. They have to learn self-criticism, reliability, self-control, and a genuine sense of responsibility before they can be entrusted with a considerable share in the direction of the destinies of their race” (Latham, 1934, p. 427).
- 23.
Sanyal further argues that another reason Trowell refused to draw upon the aesthetics of traditional East African artifacts in her teaching of painting and sculpture was because it would have resulted in abstract or non-figurative forms. Trowell displayed a marked personal antipathy to modernist abstraction in art, and her students’ work also had to be figurative if she was to achieve her aim of pioneering a religious pictorial genre (See Trowell, 1939a, p. 170; 1957, p. 160).
- 24.
“They were, of course, very annoyed that I would not teach them the way. They have told me since that they felt I was lazy because I would never take up a brush and show them how” (Trowell, 1957, p. 115).
- 25.
Trowell never visited Uganda again after she retired to the United Kingdom in 1958. A few years before she died, she donated her papers to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England.
References
Arts and Crafts in Africa. (1934). Oversea. Education, 5(4), 203–204.
Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of culture. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Boas, F. (1940). Race, language and culture. New York: Columbia University.
Bowman, P. (2014). Universalism and particularism in mediatized martial arts. Paper presented at the conference, Universalism and Particularism in Postcolonial Media Theory, Braunschweig, Germany. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/3447058/Universalism_and_Particularism_in_Mediatized_Martial_Arts
Carline, R. (1968). Draw they must: A history of teaching and examining of art. London: Edward Arnold.
Chow, R. (2002). The Protestant ethnic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Colony and Protectorate of Kenya: Report for 1930. (1932). Colonial reports – Annual, 1562. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Retrieved from http://libsysdigi.library.illinois.edu/ilharvest/Africana/Books2011-05/5530244/5530244_1930/5530244_1930_opt.pdf
Comaroff, J. L. (1989). Images of empire, contests of conscience: Models of colonial domination in South Africa. American Ethnologist, 16(4), 661–685.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Fry, R. (1919). Teaching art. The Athenaeum, 4663, 887–888.
Haney-López, I. F. (2013). The social construction of race. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical race theory: The cutting edge (3rd ed., pp. 2238–2248). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hobsbawn, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Kasfir, S. L. (1992). African art and authenticity: A text with a shadow. African Arts, 25(2), 40–53 & 96–97.
Kasule, K. M. (2003). The Renaissance of contemporary art at Makerere University Art School. (Doctoral Dissertation, Makerere University).
Kroeber, A. L. (1948). Anthropology: Race, language, culture, psychology, prehistory. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Kyeyune, G. (2002). Art in Uganda in the twentieth century. (Doctoral Dissertation, University of London).
Lamont, M., & Fournier, M. (1992). Cultivating differences: Symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality. London/Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Latham, G. C. (1934). Indirect rule and education in East Africa. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 7(4), 423–430.
Lawler, S. (2005). Disgusted subjects: The making of middle-class identities. The Sociological Review, 53(3), 429–466.
Low, D. A. (1971). The mind of Baganda. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Mamdani, M. (2004). Citizen and subject: The legacy of late colonialism. Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Press.
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York/London: Routledge.
Modern African Art: Makerere Students’ Exhibition. (1946). The Uganda Herald, 50(1831), 15.
Mumford, W. B. (1936). Notes on Mrs Trowell’s proposals. Oversea Education, 7(2), 84–86.
Noor, I. (1966). Art in Africa-backwards or forwards? Transition, 27, 39–41.
Oguibe, O. (2004). The culture game. Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Picton, J. (2002). Reality and Imagination: An introduction to visual practice in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. In J. Picton, R. Loder, & E. Court (Eds.), Action and vision: Painting and sculpture in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda from 1980. Rochdale, UK: Rochdale Art Gallery.
‘Recruiting’ by S. Okello (n.d.). [Watercolour on paper] Imperial War Museum, London. Retrieved from http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/20585
Sanyal, S. K. (2000). Imaging art, making history: Two generations of Makerere artists. (Doctoral Dissertation, Emory University).
The African’s changing values: Conflict between old and new. (1946). The Uganda Herald, 50(1846), 3–5.
Tiffin, C., & Lawson, A. (Eds.). (1994). De-scribing empire: Post-colonialism and textuality. New York: Routledge.
Trowell, K. M. (1937). African arts and crafts: Their development in the school. London: Longmans, Green & Company.
Trowell, K. M. (1939a). From Negro sculpture to modern painting. Uganda Journal, 6(4), 169–175.
Trowell, K. M. (1939b). The Kampala art exhibition: A Uganda experiment. Oversea Education, 10(3), 131–135.
Trowell, K. M. (1947). Modern African art in East Africa. Man, 47, 1–7.
Trowell, K. M. (1949). Development of the art school. Memorandum, 1949. Makerere School of Art, 3 June–29 July 1949. Collection: Confidential (Office of the President), Box 67, Ref. 593. Uganda National Archive, Entebbe, Uganda.
Trowell, K. M. (1952). Art teaching in African schools: Picture-making. London: Longmans.
Trowell, K. M. (1957). African tapestry: A memoir. London: Faber & Faber.
Trowell, K. M. (1981). ‘School of Fine Art, Makerere University, Uganda’ Memorandum, Margaret Trowell Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, England, MSS. Afr. s. 1825/114.
Trowell, K. M., & Wachsmann, K. P. (1953). Tribal crafts of Uganda. London: Longmans.
Walther, D. J. (2002). Creating Germans abroad: Cultural policies and national identity in Namibia. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Wolukau-Wanambwa, E. (2014). Margaret Trowell’s school of art: A case study in colonial subject formation. In S. Stemmler (Ed.), Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung, Experiment, Wissen: Objektivität und Subjektivität in den Künsten und Wissenschaften (pp. 101–122). Berlin, Germany: Diaphanes Verlag.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wolukau-Wanambwa, E. (2018). Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65255-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65256-6
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)