# SAM J. NTIRO
sensitive observer of the African scene

Sam J. Ntiro comes from the vigorous climate of Kilimanjaro in British East Africa. He is a Chagga and many of his paintings are vivid accounts of the energetic life of his tribe as they work and play on the fertile slopes of Africa's highest mountain.

While we may be aware of Mr. Ntiro's land through Ernest Hemingway's stories, we get a behind-the-scene understanding of the people's ways on Mount Kilimanjaro from the artist's warm intimate portrayal of the Chaggas. Sam Ntiro was born in Machane, about 6,000 feet above sea level, on April 20, 1923. He is the son of a Kilimanjaro coffee farmer and the eldest of eight children. In April of 1960 he arrived in this country with his wife, Sarah, on a travel grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York for ten weeks of art study.

With him he brought more than fifty paintings of his keen perception into the simple, homely ways of his own people, vibrant fresh landscapes, and vignettes of other tribal life around Kampala, Uganda where he has lived for the past sixteen years both as a student and a teacher of art at Makerere College.

## HE PAINTS AN AFRICAN CHRIST

Another phase of his collection of paintings concerns his Christian background. "It was the German missionaries who first came to the country in the eighteen seventies, and they established the Lutheran Church," he says. "The German administration followed. My Lutheran parents enrolled me in a small primary school run by my local church."

Mr. Ntiro has painted a number of episodes from the life of Christ and New Testament stories—always with African figures and in terms of the mores with which he is most familiar. His *Last Supper* takes place in a round Chagga hut, with Christ and the Disciples eating a Chagga meal of

banana and meat from the traditional Chagga bowls; and *Entry Into Jerusalem* is done with the Kilimanjaro hills and the familiar Chagga huts as the setting.

"My conviction, as a Christian, is that if Christianity is to penetrate into our hearts, then Christ must be one of us," he says. He has painted a thirty-two by ten foot mural for the Kakindo (Uganda) Anglican Church in five panels, and has brought over in his collection three of the cartoons in oil—*Entry Into Jerusalem*; *The Crucifixion* and the *Conversion of St. Paul*. His stylized African figures are so sincere and moving that one is not concerned with anachronism in his interpretation.

## LONDON CRITICS FOUND HIS WORK INTERESTING

Art critics have had but slight opportunity to appraise Mr. Ntiro's paintings, as he has exhibited only once before outside his own Africa. That was in London at the Piccadilly Gallery in 1955, where in a two-man show all but one of his thirty-two pictures were sold. Six of his works are owned in this country—two by Dr. William E. Stevenson, President of Oberlin College; two by Sir Andrew and Lady Cohen in their New York home—Sir Andrew is the British Representative of the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations; and one each by Miss Johnnie Christian, Arlington, Virginia, and Dr. Lloyd Fallers of Berkeley, California.

Sam Ntiro does not drop neatly into any of the usual niches of art expression or art development. He began painting after he was twenty-one years old, and until then had no particular drive toward a career in art—if he had even thought about such a thing. His accomplished technique does not follow realism, impressionism, expressionism, abstraction or any other particular school of painting. His subjects are often the colorful recollections of a primitive way of life—yet he is not a primitive painter. One London critic called his work a happy blend of Western and Central African art

Goats - Oil on Canvas

Mulago Village - Oil on Canvas