NAIROBI, KENYA – Mukhtar Bashir Mudey, a Somali refugee and artist living in Kenya, says it wasn’t safe to practice his craft in his homeland.
“Art is dangerous in Somalia,” he says.
Mudey says al-Shabab, an armed group in Somalia, maintains that art is a sin and that artists will have to breathe life into every drawing on Judgment Day.
“They say that art is a form of creation – that is as if the artist is taking God’s place,” Mudey says.
But in Kenya, where Mudey fled to escape civil war in his homeland, he can practice his art, which would have been impossible back in Somalia. He says he may live in a refugee camp now, but he is able to create art and even make modest earnings from the artwork, wall hangings and business cards with designs that he sells in and around the Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya.
His work was even featured in April during the inaugural HADAF International Somali Cartoon Exhibition at the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.
Mudey, who began drawing in Somalia before the country’s civil war, says he loves drawing animals and plants. But he has never drawn a gun.
“I don’t like it,” he says as he walks around the gallery. “My mother is still in Mogadishu [Somalia’s capital], and I ran away from that war. It brings memories of what I left behind and the fear and uncertainty that my family lives with.”
He points out his work in the gallery with relative ease: a group of young girls reading under a tree; a mother standing in what seems like an endless hospital queue with a doctor at the end of the line.
“I wanted to show what the war has done to Somalia,” he says. “It has denied my people the basic human rights that our neighbors enjoy.”
Organizers say the goal of the exhibition was to serve as a reminder of the conflict in neighboring Somalia. The cartoons that won the contest here used humor to point out various hypocrisies in the war. At the same time, the participating cartoonists say that there are still challenges to sharing their work – such as threats or self-censorship to avoid conflict – but that new media helps them disseminate it. Other cartoonists took a different tack, focusing instead on the hardships endured by Somali refugees.
Somalia has not had a central government since the ouster of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre by warlords in 1991. For the last 30 years the country has been governed by a weak transitional federal government, which is backed by the African Union and the United Nations. The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab network has been leading a war against the government.
Al-Shabab has also banned all forms of art, including music and drawings, in the areas that it controls. Art is a way of life for the Somali people, who have a long history of oral literature and music, according to various sources. But the emergence of armed groups with strong fundamentalist ideals has made practicing those art forms dangerous.
Cartoonists Protest the War in Foreign Land
The echo against the white walls of the GoDown Arts Centre is eerie. Yet the center is a beehive of activity. From the exhibition hall, one can hear African drums in one corner and enjoy African songs and dances in another.
Under the theme “The search for peace in Somalia: Achievements and Challenges,” the exhibition brought together more than 800 submissions by 265 cartoonists living in 50 different countries around the world, according to the event website. The dull walls came to life as, one by one, framed cartoons took their place in the hall, transforming it into a miniature art gallery.
“We got about 11 cartoonists from Somalia and in the Diaspora, some living in Somalia and some in the West,” says Patrick Gathara, general secretary of the Association of East African Cartoonists, KATUNI, which organized the event.
Caricatures of gun-toting Somali pirates and mothers with babies straddling their backs and smoke billowing nearby dot the walls.
“The majority of the cartoons are dealing with the conflict, which is to be honest in Somalia is the overriding issue,” Gathara says. “But there are other issues like female genital mutilation.”
He says the exhibition aimed to inspire action about the conflict in Somalia.
“We wanted to get people talking about Somalia and what can be done to end the long-running conflict,” Gathara says. “It’s been two decades, and there is no solution yet.”
On the day of the exhibition launch, curious and enthusiastic art lovers mill around the cartoons. Some want to digest the art by themselves, while others peruse the gallery with the artists or friends.
“We are looking for [an] aspect of humor and of course graphic and drawing abilities, and we are also more importantly looking for a point of view,” Gathara says. “Has this person informed themselves about Somalia, and does he have a viewpoint that he is trying to put across?”
The three winning cartoons were satirical, highlighting the hypocrisies between condemning Western culture yet accepting its money; saluting $100 USD instead of the Somali flag; and banning music yet secretly listening to it.
Alphonce Omondi, a Kenyan cartoonist, whose work is published by The Star, a newspaper in Nairobi, won first place.
“I did not really expect to win, although I was hopeful,” says the lanky Omondi with a smile. “Art [for] me is a hobby, a way of expressing myself, and of course make a little money.”
He took home $3,000 USD for first place.
Amin Amir, a Somali cartoonist, won $1,500 USD for second place in the competition. Amir now plies his trade in Canada, where he lives as a refugee with his family.
Damien Glez, who is based in Burkina Faso, a small West African nation, won $750 USD for placing third.
Amid Censorship, Artists Hope Cartoons Spur Action, Force Solutions
But even though their work was honored here at the exhibit, the artists say they still face challenges in sharing it.
Amir says that, even in Canada, he still get threats about his work from groups in Somalia. He says this mostly happens when he draws cartoons that may be deemed controversial or depict the al-Shabab in a bad light.
In the rest of the East African region, visual artists are free to express themselves through art. Rarely will they be jailed for a piece of art, as their journalist counterparts might be. But Gathara says artists still must be careful.
But with the rise of new media and technology, even those cartoons still find space on the cartoonists’ blogs and websites.
Gathara, a mathematics graduate, has a daily cartoon in the Daily Nation, one of Kenya’s leading newspapers. The strip, titled “farcebook” after the social networking site facebook, tends to look at African politics from a satirical angle. Gathara says whatever doesn’t make it to print goes to his blog.
Social networking sites also helped draw artists and visitors from all over the globe to attend the first day of the event.
But not all of the art depicted humor.
In another corner of the hall, a photo exhibition, “A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia,” by Alixandra Fazzina, an award-winning British photojournalist, chronicles the lives of Somali migrants, or “tahrib,” on their journey out of Somalia.
Fazzina says the photos tell of the despair felt by many while trying to escape war in Somalia: hunger, disease and capsizing boats, with some even dying at sea. She says that many times she put her camera on shore to pull survivors out of the ocean.
Those attending the exhibition study the pictures with an almost palpable silence. Anne Awori, who is from Nairobi, walks slowly from photo to photo with a white handkerchief in hand.
“This is moving,” she says, stopping to dab her eyes. “It brings more than the despair of these refugees. It for me talks about what happens when greed takes over a society.”
The number of Somalis fleeing to Kenya and Yemen – the countries with the greatest number of Somali refugees – decreased from 2009 to 2010, but not because the situation in Somalia has been improving, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Rather, refugees cited more dangerous conditions and the difficulty of the journey.
“This exhibition tells you the plight of the individuals,” Fazzina says. “As I went on taking the picture, one thing was clear: Everyone is a human being like anybody else in the world.”
