One man’s fight to preserve African art against all odds

The sound of thousands of wildebeest hooves hurtling down the Athi-Kapiti plains reverberates for miles on end. A cloud of soft, red dust hangs in the air, partially blocking out the rays of the African sun.  The animals pluck every visible blade of grass, transforming the lush green plains into a dirty brown carpet. Nearby, an old train known colloquially as the ‘Lunatic Express’ makes its way to the coastal city of Mombasa with tourists craning their necks to see the wildlife spectacle. That was Nairobi National Park 50 years ago.

A young American, full of vigour and ambition witnessed this scenario almost daily from his home at the edge of the park. Alan Donovan, a bureaucrat, had quit his job as a relief officer in Nigeria during the Biafran War in order to tour the African continent by road. After a brief stopover in Kenya, he intended to buy himself a boat in South Africa before returning to America.

I met Donovan, now 80, in the impressive house he built close to 30 years ago. A modern cargo train heading to Mombasa sped by, mocking the adjacent 100-year-old railway line that used to drop guests right at his doorstep. He gazed over the plains that he first saw 50 years ago, recollecting the sights and sounds of the park with nostalgia.

“These plains used to teem with wildebeests when I settled here, similar to what we see in the Mara during the Great Migration. The herds are now gone, perhaps forever,” he said wistfully.

Africa’s wildlife might be vanishing, but Donovan is more concerned about African culture and the arts, the very things that made him “stopover” in Kenya – for 50 years now. These two are on the verge of extinction if nothing is done to preserve what we have left. Throughout these years though, Donovan has been collecting and preserving art from nearly every country in Africa. It has been an arduous journey.

Donovan came to Kenya in March 1970 together with a bunch of other travel enthusiasts in a Volkswagen van. All he wanted was to visit a ‘virgin’ part of Kenya where modern civilization was a rumour before continuing with his African trip. Turkana became an easy pick due to what he had read in books. It was here that he started collecting Kenyan artefacts. And then he went back again and again in search of more. He even sold the van in order to buy more artefacts.

Using the cultural items from Turkana and Maasai, he set up a jewellery workshop called Nala (his name, Alan, spelt backwards). He jokingly muses that Disney Films, the creators of the movie Lion King, used this name, Nala, for one of the main lionesses in the set.

Donovan would not be in Kenya this long had he not met Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi, Kenya’s second Vice-President, who was also an ardent art collector.

“Murumbi attended one of my exhibitions and afterwards asked me if I could go back to Turkana to gather some more artefacts. The only issue was the assignment would keep me in Kenya for a year. Well, I agreed, and the rest, as they say, is history,” said Donovan.

While in Turkana, Donovan became engrossed at how the local community eked a living with very meagre resources.

“How could these women carve out the akarum, a milk storage jar from mere wood while other communities used the gourd?” he wondered.

Then there was the ekecholong, a wooden headrest carried by men whenever they walked. 

“Again this brought to the fore how skilled the community was in making practical items in a very harsh environment.”

Together with the abiro, the Turkana walking stick and the abarait, a sheathed wrist knife, these items became part of his early collections.

In the following decades, Donovan scoured the continent, collecting every cultural item worth keeping. With the help of Murumbi, Donovan opened the first Pan-African art gallery in Nairobi that they called The African Heritage. This gallery became a meeting point for artefact dealers from all over Africa.

“Even when we moved out of the city centre, the traders kept coming. We had unknowingly started what people today call the Maasai Market.”

In 1973, Donovan moved to a small house near the Nairobi Park owned by one of his employees.

“Her parents had built the house for her but she got married to a man who supposedly owned an island in the West Indies. I slept on the floor for a year with a coffee pot as my only companion,” he recollects.

It is in this area that he began to construct what is today the African Heritage House in 1989.  The design itself was borne from the large mud mosques of West Africa, notably the Grand Mosque in Djenné, Mali.

“I was mesmerized at how such huge structures with elaborate designs could be constructed out of mud. If they could do it back then, why not today?” he posed. 

The house is a mosaic of what makes Africa a beautiful continent and has become a sort of shrine for art lovers globally. In 2015, the house was declared a national monument.

Walking through the house is taking a step back in time, to see Africa through arts, culture and customs, and travel – from ‘nimba’ the great mask from Guinea, the smallest beads from Masailand, the Ghanaian Kente to the kingly Nigerian Agbada, the house has them all. In fact, art enthusiasts can sample this cultural journey by booking themselves a night or two here.

African heritage has survived because people like Donovan were courageous enough to defy all odds to pull together artefacts what would otherwise have been lost. Like the proverbial Phoenix, he literally rose from the ashes when his gallery in downtown Nairobi burnt down in 1976. In its place along Kenyatta Avenue now stands I&M Bank Building. He has lost priceless collections through floods and theft and stood his ground armed policemen on a mission to evict him from his house to make room for the new standard gauge railway.

In his twilight years, he has watched helplessly as parcels of land on adjacent properties being forcefully grabbed by private developers – land which could have been used as additional sites for the African arts and culture. What a journey to save our heritage!