Anselm Croze: Glassmaker and Dream Merchant

Anselm Croze presides over an enchanted kingdom: the hot glass division of Kitengela Glassworks. At Kitengela, Anselm combines his passion for the environment with his passion for glass art; he places his art in his environment with the same creative joy with which he weaves the environment into his art. Many Kenyan homes have some of Kitengela’s luminous hand-crafted glasses, vases, platters, and bowls in shades ranging from deepest blue and emerald green to delicate pastels the colour of illuminated water from the sea. All are created from 100% recycled, reclaimed, and salvaged materials. A lucky few are able to make the trek out to the busy hive of activity that is the source of the art.

Today Anselm holds up a rod of glass and moves it from side to side, looking at the play of refraction and radiance. “Look,” he says. “It’s light standing still. Frozen fire.” He can not see that his blue eyes too glow with pulsing luminosity, that they are alive with the glittering dreaming light common to prophets, visionaries and madmen. His fascination with making glass stems from its alchemical production: the magical fusion of science, art, engineering and form, of heat and light, water and fantasy. “Bush Glass,” he calls it.

Anselm speaks with fierce pride of the “Kenyan Jua Kali ethos,” and its force is strong within him. He likes “making things from stuff around”; he gets his inspiration for his art from more “stuff around”— planetary bodies and motions, and molecules, and mountains and hills and flowing landscapes. Indeed, he specifically likes old objects: things that are able to hold their use-value through many lives and many incarnations, things with history and innovation embedded into them. His recycled and heartbreakingly beautiful glass is like that: redolent with other lives, other contexts, past forms and future uses.

Anselm is planning no less than a revolution: an African hot-glass movement in which handcrafted glass from every region across the continent, complete with regional specializations and signature colours, will present itself to the world as another indicator of Africa’s global-level creativity, another way in which African cultural production continues to innovate, re-imagining and renewing itself.

The way to the workshop is over rutted roads with more craters than the moon and through wafting billows of dust. That certain features of the landscape are not geological formations takes a while to notice. The visitor’s eye wanders over the seductively wide horizons of the Kitengela plains and then zooms back to a strange mound in the middle of the openness. This large, deep-red brick dome surrounded by hardy scrubland and herds of incurious cattle and cavorting baboons is, improbably, Anselm Croze’s workshop. Around this mound, which looks like nothing so much as a fantastical out-sized egg mysteriously parked on the savannah, Anselm has created a mythical landscape populated by beguilingly oversized and unexpected forms. His sometimes disturbing artwork is out in the open, harmonizing surprisingly with the grass and rocky outgrowths and trees. His is not the only artwork on display, because he believes in artistic collaboration and engages in many joint projects with other artists. But his is certainly the animating spirit behind the exuberance and the rigour of the art.

There is, for instance, the corpse of a car upended on its bonnet. A few seconds after processing the improbability of an accident (there’s nothing to hit) that would cause a car to stand on its nose like that, the viewer notices a curiously immobile elephant rendered in wire and a fifteen- foot moran gazing imperturbably over the dusty grasslands. There are camels too—real ones, and others done in metal and shards of glass—along with suns and cacti constructed in glittering, glimmering shards of light and ensorcelled stone. Behind the cluster of buildings that houses the glassworks, astonished visitors will discover the Necklace Bridge—an absurdly fragile-looking contraption of wire and beads swaying precariously over the muddy brown waters at the bottom of a very deep gorge. The idea that this intensely beautiful weaving of beaded metal strands is sturdy enough to support a person’s weight above all of that deep nothingness is alarming.

Inside the dome, groups of men in protective overalls with old socks on their hands toil and sweat surrounded by roaring furnaces and bubbling glass. The men wield curious long-handled metal pipes with dexterity and controlled haste. These they sometimes plunge, twisting, into the hearts of the fires roaring around them before sitting to twirl and pad the glass into shape ,or dunking them in the buckets of cold water next to their workstations. The workshop sounds like a living thing, with water hissing, fires crackling, and the footsteps of the glassworkers syncopating as they wield their long pipes, tipped with glowing bulbs of molten glass, like fiery dreams waiting to be imagined into life. Work proceeds like a strange and dangerous ballet: The fires are very hot, the space is not very big, and the glass must be shaped before it cools—which happens very quickly with recycled glass. The men move with an eerie awareness of each other—their metal rods swinging through the dark interior like fireflies bobbing in the evening light. Anselm Croze weaves through this space uttering sharp “Now!” directives, stooping to take up a tool and correct a shape himself, murmuring, encouraging, experimenting, and innovating along with his skilled team. Every now and then, they break into resigned laughter when a technique goes horribly wrong. And then they try it again. And again, until they get it right and effortless, until they are almost dancing through their work.

Anselm Croze was born in Cumbria in northern England. He came to Kenya with his father, Harvey Croze, an environmental zoologist who worked in the Serengeti. Anselm remembers home-schooling in a tent in Tanzania; later, he was the one little mzungu kid amongst many black urchins in a small, one-room rural school, running around, getting into dirt and trouble. Later still, he drove a taxi around Ann Arbor, Michigan, because he had run out of money to pay his university fees in the U.S.A. He understands hardship quite well, and he understands the value of practical methods of showing solidarity. Kitengela Glassworks supports the Bosco Boys Home (where Anselm recruits many of his glassmaking trainees), as well as the local high school, with material and financial support. More importantly, Anselm Croze is intent on passing on his skills and his love of glass and making beauty to as many Kenyans as possible; given the abundant evidence in his Kitengela Hot Glass retail outlets, this is a skill that is economically beneficial as well as soul satisfying. For his environmental passion and his rigorous and joyful aesthetic production, for his capacity to make dreams tangible and touchable (and useful), for his relentless creativity and innovation in found objects and Kenyan material culture, GenerationKenya is proud to claim Anselm Croze amongst our panel of jurors.

Anselm Croze: glassmaster, dreamweaver and GenerationKenya juror.

Mugo Kibati: Forward Into Excellence

Mugo Kibati sits in the office of East African Cables’ Group Chief Executive Officer, and looks like a modern-day young Alexander, always moving forwards searching for new worlds to conquer. It is not the office itself that gives this impression, it is sparsely furnished and restrained and about a quarter of the normal size of corporate chief executive offices in Nairobi. It is Mugo Kibati himself, who listens with his whole body leaning forward, vibrating with intensity. He didn’t always have this skill, apparently; it was his wife who taught him that other people had opinions too, and sometimes, some of them even made sense.

Mugo Kibati has always been the smartest guy in the room ever since he was about six, and finally went to a school that ranked its students. It was easier to ask him to remember the times when he was not #1 in his class. The first time he ever got a class ranking at all, he came in at number two, and mostly because he had just joined a new school where the classes were in English, and not Kiswahili, the language he knew. Before that, he had only ever spoken English in the half-hour English class at his previous school. He didn’t know anybody who actually spoke it all day, every day. Then, years later, he went off as a Form One Newbie to Alliance High School, and came in at number five that first term. He’d just finished coming first in his province in the national exams the year before, so that was a rude shock. His mother, chuckling at his puzzlement, said to his father ‘the young man may finally be challenged, after all.’

Challenged he was; it was after all, Alliance High School, where the incoming class is full of people who were first in their primary schools, or in their provinces, or in the country. The shock of adjusting to this level of meta-excellence and the pride in having been able to ratchet up his performance to meet this new expectation explain a lot about Mugo Kibati’s relationship to his former, and formative, high school. Alliance High School is one of the three most significant forces in his life: the other two are his parents and his wife. From his father, he learned about the fundamental injustice of arbitrary social hierarchies. It was at a family gathering when Mugo was still a tiny tot, but wanted to give his opinion about something the grown-ups were discussing. An uncle was about to dismiss his participation on the grounds of Mugo being a small child and thus preferably both invisible and inaudible. His father stopped that burgeoning form of oppression in the very bud. He said that his son, Mugo, had the right to speak his mind in his own home, and anywhere else for that matter—and that what was important was the quality of the statement and not the age or position of the speaker. Mugo Kibati never forgot that.

Mugo Kibati wins awards with “Young” as the first word of their titles quite frequently. He is accustomed, in addition to being the best, also to being the youngest of whatever peer group he is excelling amongst, and all of Kenya knows by now that he is the gold medallist equivalent of corporate stewardship, as well as being the youngest of the corporate heavy-hitters. I asked him for an instance of his failure. He told me of the time he did not get into the Imperial College of London (the MIT of the UK) but later got into MIT itself, where he again excelled.

He met his wife Laila in the United States, where she impressed him by contradicting him often and fighting hard to win her intellectual points against him. Laila, another over-accomplished Kenyan, has a strong sense of social justice and had turned down the lucrative possibilities of private law practice in the U.S. to work with legal aid organisations. She argued passionately with Mugo, and won, so, of course, he fell in love with her and married her as soon as he could convince her that it was a good idea. That was a few arguments later. Few Kenyan men could ever sound so happy about losing major points—to a woman. Few Kenyan men of that level of accomplishment listen to other people’s points, on anything at all. Laila’s mind is a very big deal to Mugo Kibati, and he talks about her often: his intense large eyes open wider when he does.

Mugo was School Captain of Alliance when he was a student there, and now he chairs the Alumni Association and sits on the Board of Governors for his old high school. He is the youngest Board of Governors member they have ever had, of course. I ask him what this high-flying trajectory is in aid of—what drives the effort behind his own excellence? When he went to university he was the student chair of his faculty (his first election win), in the U.S. he worked as a Congressional Intern (for a Republican Senator); he is the youngest person ever appointed to the position he now holds and he has just won the Young Global Leader 2008 award. Why is Mugo Kibati running this high-performing high-stakes excellence race, seemingly mostly against time and against himself?

His answer is the reason that he is a GenerationKenya Juror. Mugo Kibati wants to build a society based entirely on merit—a meritocracy, now, in his lifetime and preferably next week. He has a burning passion to make ours a society in which the best rise, no matter their background, or gender, or economic conditions, or creed, or colour, or anything else. Mugo Kibati wants a society in which excellence is the only measure by which we allow ourselves to discriminate amongst ourselves. It is not so surprising, considering his own life, but what often goes unsaid in listing his many achievements is how strongly he feels about the need to inculcate moral courage and positive, active social engagement in our citizens. Knowledge, or intelligence, is not merely a passive process of taking in what swirls around you—for Mugo, it is an energetic, active process of perpetual finding-out, aggressive seeking of new skills, new understanding, new perspectives, new possibilities, new futures. He is a man in a hurry, to excel, and to find and to promote excellence in all he does. He is GenerationKenya to the core—he will know how to identify other Kenyans with his type of mind.

Mugo Kibati, GenerationKenya Juror. Forward Into Excellence

Editors note: Mugo Kibati resigned as group CEO of East African Cables in June 2008.

Mildred Awiti

Super Model. Role Model. Businesswoman. Civic Leader. Corporate Executive. Mother. Daughter. Friend. Mildred Awiti is, there is no other way to put it, Kenya-Fabulous. She is just as beautiful, now, as she was when she appeared on a 1983 VIVA magazine cover, sensuously proclaiming African Heritage’s Kenya-fusion hip appeal. Yet, many years later, Mildred Awiti, Kenya’s first and still-favourite super-model is much more than just a very pretty face connected to very long legs by a sylph-like torso. She is, in short, a woman of much substance.

In 1981 she told Nairobi’s Sunday Standard that fashion was a form of artistic self-expression and creativity to which all Kenyan women had a right; and that women, no matter how beautiful and model-worthy, needed to pursue their educational goals as far as they could. It is now 2008, and her core belief in this imperative for Kenyan women’s self-sufficiency, creativity, self-determination and dignity has not changed.

In fact she has expanded this creed into her work life. Mildred Awiti now trains Kenyans who, in a variety of capacities, represent Kenya in the international arena. Her job is to make sure that they know how to present themselves as appropriate emissaries of the Kenyan people.

“It’s the little things,” Mildred says of her training sessions, “that can make the difference. Anybody representing Kenya on the global stage, from boardrooms to classrooms to the performance stage and the track and field event, must know that for many people, he or she is their first encounter with Kenya. It is important how we behave in these contexts—the national reputation rests on it.” Ms. Awiti’s challenge is to ensure that this Kenyan reputation is protected and preserved. She trains executives, civil servants, athletes, journalists, models, diplomats, and any others likely to be seen by global eyes as “the image of Kenya.” She shows them how to carry and conduct themselves in ways consistent with global standards of courtesy, etiquette and interaction, and Kenyan inflections of hospitality, multiculturalism and our hard-working ethos. In one way or another, Mildred Awiti is still making Kenyans look good. The only difference is that now she has moved, from looking good by herself, to helping all the rest of us look good as well.

Even though her own talent as a model was discovered young, and she was already working as a professional model while still a teenager in the 1970s, Mildred Awiti not only completed her course of study at the Kenya High School, but also went on to study at Nairobi University, emerging with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Literature. She has further credentials from Cornell University, LINTAS International, Tack International and Development Dimensions International. In the years since her modelling days, she has worked as an executive in diverse corporate fields, from Human Resources to Marketing and Communications.

The moral authority she has acquired over her years as an unofficial global good-will ambassador for Kenya sits lightly on her shoulders, especially when she is at ease in the Nairobi home she shares with her two adopted children and one natural son, an exuberantly friendly dog, and the continuously shifting assortments of friends, neighbour’s children, relatives and acquaintances milling amongst the colourful flowers of her garden. She is so eager to promote others that she forgets to talk about herself, instead speaking excitedly of a woman who has started an HIV-orphans home, another who has emerged as a grassroots leader in an impoverished urban area, yet another who has started her own modelling agency, another who has devised Kenya’s most innovative software technology services, and most compellingly, of her own mother. The sentiment is clearly returned: Mildred Awiti’s mother has saved every photograph, every cover, every publicity shot that her beautiful daughter has ever been in, and yet Mildred’s looks were never the most important thing about her to her mother, and therefore were never the most important thing to Mildred herself.

On her appointment as a GenerationKenya Juror, Ms. Awiti is characteristically self-effacing. “It is a great honour to be associated with an initiative that promotes positive Kenyan values,” she says. “I look forward to participating in this process, and to learning from my fellow jurors. But they are all very distinguished and famous Kenyans—it is very intimidating!” She does not look in the least intimidated as she maps out her strategy to move Kenya to greater tolerance, understanding, mutual respect and civility—at home as well as abroad. Kenya-Fabulous.

Mildred Awiti: GenerationKenya Juror.

Nyaminwa

No one would ever call her pretty. She is too strong, too urgent, too passionate for that. No one would ever deny, however, that she is exceedingly, even disturbingly, beautiful.

Sitting under a maroon Java House umbrella, I watch as she talks. She listens as if attempting to mine a hidden heart of meaning, her eyes searching, probing, glued on your face. She does not look away from problems, and she does not back down, either.

Her name is Jane Anyango, and she is the eloquent leader of Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness. This means that she thought up and organized this growing and increasingly vocal collective—spoke it into being, fought it into shape, coddled it into cooperation, still inhales and exhales its breaths. Jane Anyango is a fighter, which is why she is a peace-builder in Kibera.

The women meet under a tree in a field to discuss issues of relevance to themselves and other Kibera women, like burned-down homes and missing husbands, gang rapes and hungry children. They also meet to laugh, and sing, and exchange news and gossip and strength. Jane Anyango speaks of them with affectionate respect: her heroes, her neighbours, her friends.

We are sitting in Adams Arcade, a no-man’s-land shopping strip claimed by both impoverished Kibera and comfortable Woodley, and sometimes even upper-caste Karengata. I look around and remember when a bakery here sold the world’s best queen cakes. Now the arcade is pulling the shreds of its dignity around it, bedraggled as they are, pretending not to notice the upstart glitter and flash of Nairobi’s contentiously jump-started economy all around.

Adams Arcade will always be circa 1976 and fading. But Jane Anyango is glowing with the pressing urgency of now. The problems women in Kibera have, now. The distribution of relief resources, now. The cessation of violence and destruction, now. The empowerment of women, now.

We had planned to meet in Kibera near Jane’s small secretarial bureau and her two-room home, shared with two of her children and her husband, Barnaba. Her two eldest, Bob and Anne Clair, are away at boarding school. She is an exacting mother, Jane says, because she wants her children to profit from her mistakes, build upon her experiences. She has packed a lot of the latter into her 37 years—but, as she reminds us, her 18th birthday was spent in her matrimonial home.

She had not planned on getting married so young. When she interrupted a trip from Nyanza to visit her sister in Embu, Nairobi relatives influenced her to spend time with a man who later became her husband. Back then, she had found herself pregnant, with a field of narrowing options and a suitcase, standing in the dark outside the home of the man whose child she carried while his girlfriend cooked and cleaned inside.

Jane had changed our meeting place, and sitting now at Adams, I ask why she is herself, what accounts for her existence in the world as she is now. Her answer is full of girlhood and growing up and the pain of women’s shared knowing. Jane had a sister, nyaminwa,* Anne, who died in 1999. Fully preventable human error and a drug overdose in hospital left a family in mourning and dazed improvization. Anne’s husband, wrecked by his loss, had a stroke and soon followed her into that not-so-good night. Later, Anne’s daughter Juliet, short-changed at birth by more medical malpractice, died aged 14, even though Jane tried every means in her power to get help for her physical challenges.

As a bright Form Two student, Jane had been attacked by a man on the long walk home. She left school after fourth form with a fourth-division hardly-pass. Not long ago in Jane’s neighborhood, a 39-year-old man had been caught defiling an 11-year-old. Amidst police wisecracks, the little girl’s wide-eyed incomprehension, the paedophile’s unrepentant boastfulness, his wife’s resignation, and the Kenyan legal system’s ponderous callousness, the case had come to nought.

And then, in January 2008, during Kenya’s post-election orgy of violence, the police shot dead a 15-year-old girl as they hunted door to door for the young men who tore up the railway tracks through Kibera—and Jane Anyango had had enough. At their first press conference shortly thereafter, Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness had pointedly appealed, woman-to-woman, to Lucy (Kibaki) and Ida (Odinga) to please make their men see some sense. They also suggested that the Kibaki and Raila offspring consider the fates of youths their own age in the slums and talk to their fathers about it.

It should have been enough to make any woman bitter, but Jane had a father who loved her. Her eyes lose focus as she recalls him. “I was Daddy’s girl, even though I was the fourth-born girl. He was so proud of me! Because I did well in school,” she explains, insistent that I understand. It was Jane’s father who made sure she attended a computer-training course, even though she had protested leaving her growing family. In the years since, she has had cause to be grateful for his insistence on his girls’ self-sufficiency. Jane has worked in factories, as an office clerk and secretary, and now as bureau owner, in between her growing duties as the reasonable but firebrand feminist from Kibera. Women from Karen seek her support now, and she has been on radio shows and in the news, but Jane Anyango has her priorities straight. “The women in Kibera know what we want,” she explains calmly. “It would be good if someone listened to us for once. We want peace and fairness, and a chance to show what we can do.”

Much of Kibera is in ruins now, blackened and charred and ash-blown. Toi market is a keening wall of tattered stalls, and Olympic surely has seen better days. Jane Anyango strides through it all like a phoenix, and the universe suspends judgment on Kenya, for a while.

*sister, Dholuo (c. 2008)

Wambui Mwangi is a writer and a scholar and lives in Nairobi and Toronto and is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers