Spent sword: Ngugi cuts to the heart of our collective destruction

With his solo ‘spent-sword’ sculpture exhibition at Wajukuu Artists Collective in Mukuru Lunga Lunga, Ngugi Waweru issues a stern warning to mortals.

His target audience is not just us Nairobians or Kenyans or even East Africans. He is appealing to all humanity at large.

“It’s all there, in the title to the show,” Ngugi tells the BD Life. “‘Binguni kumepasuka’ translates in English to ‘heaven has broken.’”

It’s a cryptic Kikuyu proverb, but apparently what it means is that God is nowhere to be found. His heavenly presence on earth shattered, much like the havoc we see in Ukraine and Palestine.

“I’m saying that it is only human beings who can fix the mess they’ve made with their decisions,” Ngugi says. “Now only we can save ourselves,” he adds.

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“But not just by prayers. What’s required is action. That’s why there is still hope.”

“So how do the spent butchers’ knives figure into this equation,” I ask.

Ngugi explains that even before he conceived of this exhibition or one he had in 2022 at the Circle Art Gallery with Shabu Mwangi, he had been collecting knives from butchers and mama mbogas who worked along the roadside, selling vegetables and fruits, and chopping them for customers passing by.

“I just like their shapes,” he says, recalling that he initially was a painter, following in the footsteps of his friend, Shabu who he says had gone to art school.

Otherwise, describing himself as ‘self-taught’, Ngugi picked up most of his art training by osmosis, mostly from friends who worked together at Wajukuu Art Centre that he and Shabu started back in 2004. 

He’s also learned in workshops like one that taught woodcut printmaking, which he practiced long enough to win awards at the annual Manjano Art competition.

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Ngugi has also gained a lot from art residencies he’s been awarded: one in Lamu, courtesy of TICAH, another in Venice where he was given time to create artworks which were then exhibited on the fringe of the most recent Venice Biennale.

Then, just before Venice, Ngugi and the team from Wajukuu had been invited to participate in the prestigious Documenta 15 project in Germany. There he and Shabu spent two months creating works which won them a prestigious award as well as placement of their art in a permanent collection in a German Art Institute.

“Since my return from Venice, I’ve been working exclusively on this show,” Ngugi says. The exhibition contains 10 mixed media sculptures, which mix the spent- blade knives with mabati (corrugated iron sheets), boda boda motorcycle chains, iron bars, and binding wires.

And while the title of his show sounds ominous, Ngugi creates several sculptures that specifically acknowledge a Higher Power which is not ‘broken’.

His ‘Eye of God’ gives one a sense of God’s omniscience, His all-seeing power.

But at the same time, his ‘Robot Uprising’ contains what looks like the top of a spray paint can, yet apparently is meant to symbolise a surveillance system used literally to keep an eye out for anyone attempting to disrupt the system with their independent artistic initiatives.

That conflicting tension is one feature of Ngugi’s show that makes it so fascinating. It also exposes his implicit political perspective and reveals covert contradictions that he invites us to interrogate.

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Finally, there are two sculptures in the show that have chalk-like scribbles on them. ‘Writing on The Wall, I and II’ might appear to be innocuous graffiti messages. But Ngugi has something else in mind.

“Do you remember in the Bible, there was a story about a king who saw the hand of God writing in an alien language the king didn’t understand,” Ngugi says. 

He continues that the king was seriously disturbed since he had seen the hand with his own eyes and wanted to find someone to translate the message. That someone was Daniel, who told the king his hedonistic lifestyle would be punished when his kingdom would fall and the king with it.

In effect, the artist’s scribbles are meant to corelate with the present-day need for humans to be rudely aroused out of their materialistic stupor and recognise there’s an urgent need to fix the mess they have caused, including the wars, famine, inequality, poverty, and need to remember humility, kindness, compassion, and love.

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