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.
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- 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.
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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
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