The African Heritage Gallery in Nairobi, Kenya, displayed the best and most original African textile and material creations for decades until 2003. Its global tours showcased Africa’s inventiveness. Now, creator Alan Donovan is preparing for another expedition into Africa’s overlooked yet spectacular design realm. Versi reports.
The Rise and Fall of African Heritage was covered by New African magazine years ago. After a successful run, a famous Kenyan gallery closed after showcasing African culture, textiles, and fashions at festivals worldwide with its models, musicians, acrobats, stilt walkers, chefs, hairdressers, and others.
Kenya’s African Heritage Festival made its last major tour in 1999-2000, performing at 23 Kenyan hotels to celebrate the African Millennium.
African Ceremonies were central to the shows by adventurous photographers Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith, who autographed hundreds of books on the tour. African Heritage had previously performed its African Renaissance show in South Africa for 4,000 First Telecoms Conference in Africa attendees.
The last European tour by African Heritage featured a luxury bus and a caravan of lorries carrying plants, lighting and sound equipment, musical instruments, costumes and fashions, and hand-painted murals of the Kenya coast, mountains, and game parks to transform every venue into ‘Kenya.’ Lufthansa and Hotel Intercontinental sponsored the tour.
The tour was so successful and spurred interest in African culture and fashion that the AU requested founder Alan Donovan to lecture on his ‘recipe’ for the thrilling package.
Eight years after the African Millennium Tour, Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher released African Twilight, another double-volume album. This book covers fading African cultures, rituals, and traditions not covered in their first 16 books. They did something no photographer can accomplish again because most of these rituals and ceremonies are extinct or vanishing, and the double volume’s narrative and photos will be the only record for future generations.
Alan Donovan returned from virtual retirement to rebuild the African Heritage Festival, inspired by the work and his long friendship with the duo.
Donovan has assembled a crew to recreate African Heritage’s glory days, which will air next month.
Bygone time
The African Heritage Show, inspired by a study on Africa’s vanishing cultural treasures, recalls a time before cheap imports stifled Africa’s creativity in textiles, ornaments, jewelry, and dress and deportment.
Luckily, Kenyan designer Makena Mwiraria’s warehouse/workshop in Nairobi holds most of the African Heritage tours’ over 100 remarkable outfits. Alan hired local tailors, embroiderers, bead makers, and cleaners to revitalize the garments.
Donovan remembers it best as he traveled the continent to present Africa Adorned in 1984. Kenyan journalist Margaretta wa Gacheru described the Hotel Intercontinental show: “There was the blend of feathers and fetishes and fabulous frocks made out of mainly hand stitched, hand-woven or spun Pan African fabrics from Madagascar and Mali, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, and the incredible hand embroidery from Ethiopia.”
It also popularized ‘Mr. Kenya’ Mickey Ragos and ‘Miss Africa’ Khadija Adam. Adam walked straight from that presentation to Yves St. Laurent’s catwalks and started a long line of African models that dominated European and American fashion.
Due to enormous imports from China and secondhand clothing from the US, many of Africa’s most beautiful fabrics are disappearing or no longer weaved or worn, making it hard to top that show, says Donovan. Because of the laborious effort required on these beautiful fabrics, it is one of Africa’s greatest global contributions.
Africa-wide dream
A year after Donavan arrived in Kenya, he held his first exhibition of Northern Kenyan antiques, starting the African Heritage tale. Kenya’s first Foreign Minister and Second Vice-President, Joseph Murumbi, attended the event. The two dreamed of a Pan African Centre in Nairobi to share artists, works, and artifacts from across the continent with locals and tourists. African Heritage was successful from the start.
This was Alan’s first US tour displaying African art, crafts, textiles, and jewelry. The tour was popular, including shows at Nieman Marcus, Black Expo in Chicago, the Egg and the Eye in Los Angeles, and other venues.
African costume and fashion shows were part of the tour. The mayor was the guest of honor at a street fashion show in New York that closed an entire city block and featured African designs in store windows.
Unfortunately, not all Nairobi fashion pieces arrived on time, so Donovan hired a Lincoln City Opera sewist to make elaborate costumes. He recalls opening his baggage and pulling out Nigeria’s indigo-dyed Adire cloth, Ethiopia’s ornately embroidered Shema cloth, Mali’s mud cloth, Ghana’s hand-woven Kente cloth, and Madagascar’s luxurious raw silk.
They created a little New York Street Festival collection with models wrapped in the fabrics with huge amber beads from Mali or strings of ostrich eggshell beads from Kenya because Alan didn’t want to cut into the exquisite materials.
The display continued to Denver and Chicago, where Donovan met Reverend Jesse Jackson, with the other Nairobi fashion pieces arriving in time. Daily shows were held in the massive Chicago amphitheater hosting the Black Expo. The concert went to California.
This began a magnificent period for African Heritage, which, under Donovan’s supervision, developed hundreds of designs, many of which will be showcased at his African Heritage House’s African Twilight event on 3 March. During the festivities, he will award Kenyan designer Sally Karago an African Heritage Lifetime Achievement Award.
