Kamante Gatura, 1912-1985
Biography

Kamante Gatura was born in 1912 in Kenya, of Kikuyu background, and grew up on farmland near Nairobi owned by the Danish writer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), author of Out of Africa. As a boy he suffered a severely infected leg, which Blixen arranged to have treated; after his recovery he became her cook and remained close to her for the rest of her time in Kenya, appearing throughout her memoir as one of its most vividly drawn figures.

Self-taught, Gatura worked mainly in ink, crayon and coloured pencil on paper, producing detailed, patterned drawings — most often of African animals, predator-and-prey scenes, and folk tales remembered from the Karen Coffee Farm School — created largely in the 1970s and 1980s. His work later appeared in Longing for Darkness: Kamante’s Tales from Out of Africa, a book combining his drawings with Dinesen’s stories and photographs by Peter Beard.

He died in 1985. In 2009 the Kohler Foundation acquired a collection of his African animal-themed drawings, and his work continues to be shown and collected as an early and distinctive example of Kenyan self-taught art.

source: Indigo Arts Gallery; Longing for Darkness: Kamante's Tales from Out of Africa (Dinesen/Beard); Kohler Foundation