CHEFF MWAI

Born in 1931 in Nkuene-Meru, South Imenti, Kenya.

He went to school for three months in 1948. In 1953 he went into the forest to join the Mau Mau fighters. He was enrolled as a conscript but was soon discovered to be an able maker of guns. General Baimungi promoted him to ‘engineer captain’ and, by the end of the conflict in 1963, he had made hundreds of pistols and guns as well as an similar number of wooden panels he had etched and painted during his time in the forest.

Cheff Nwai’s artistic sense did not desert him once he had left the forest and he began to work with large trunks of wood on which he depicted the Mau Mau fighters fighting the ‘Johnnies’ on the slopes of Mount Kenya.

In 1993 he became a member of the ‘Malindi Artist’s Proof’; in 1994 he exhibited at the Casino gallery in Malindi and in the Nairobi National Museum. In 1995 he participated in the Johannesburg Biennial and then in the show Seven Stories About African Art at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

From 1996 until 1997 he was among the artists in the travelling show Sarenco and the Malindi Collection (Fürth, Verona, Ventabren). In 1997 he was once again in Italy for the exhibition La Tua Africa held in the Monte di Pietà, Messina.

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