TEDECIA BROMFIELD
This conversation with Kenyan-born, Jamaica-based artist Mazola Wa Mwashighadi took place in his studio, surrounded by his sculptures, paintings, and tools on January 18, 2025. Known for transforming discarded materials into deeply philosophical works, Mazola spoke to me about nature, identity, colonialism, spirituality, and what it means to live a textured life. Unfortunately on December 5, 2025, Mazola lost his life in violent circumstances.
Tedecia Bromfield: Tell me about your early life, where you were born, and what it was like growing up in Kenya.
Mazola Wa Mwashighadi: I was born in a village in what is now Taita-Taveta County in Kenya, sandwiched between Tsavo East and Tsavo West National Parks. That’s where you hear the stories of the “man-eating lions of Tsavo” from the time they were building the Kenya–Uganda railway.
I went to primary school in the village, then to high school in Mombasa, which is predominantly Muslim. I grew up in a Christian household, but I never felt like a “good Christian” in the conventional sense. My parents realized early that I was different. The rest of my family are born-again Christians; I joke that it’s because they killed the child in themselves.
In Kenya, most people speak English and Swahili, and each tribe has its own language. My mother tongue is Kidawida. We were forced to speak English in school. If you spoke in vernacular, you had to wear a plug around your neck saying, “I am a vernacular speaker,” and later you would be punished.
But nobody teaches a child their first language formally. You just learn, by listening and mimicking. I think learning in general should be more like that: inspiring, not forced. As a teacher, I came to see that most people don’t fail because they’re not bright; they fail because learning is enforced, not inspired.
TB: You mentioned being a teacher. How did that shape you as an artist?
MWM: I’m a trained primary school teacher. I went to teachers’ college in the mid-80s, graduated in 1987, and taught until about 1989. After that, I left teaching and went to study art in Nairobi.
At teachers’ college, we studied child psychology and art. That’s when I experienced what they call an artistic revival, that moment where the child-artist returns. It was the first time I sat in a class where someone was actually teaching me art.
As a teacher, I was forced to teach craft. From carpentry to handiwork, I learnt all kinds of practical things. I liked the painting part, but the craft side was where I learned a lot of what you see now in my joinery and construction. I didn’t realize at the time that I was teaching and learning at the same time.
When my former students meet me and say, “Thank you, sir, you were such a good teacher,” I smile because I know they were teaching me too.
In my work, you’ll find science, biology, and philosophy, all mixed together. To me, all subjects are really one subject. Being creative and thinking outside the box allowed me to keep learning long after school.
TB: When did you move from Kenya to Jamaica, and why?
MWM: I came to Jamaica in 1997 through a Commonwealth Fellowship in art and craft at Edna Manley College. It was supposed to be up to nine months. You study, you work, you write reports.
I remember the night of 31st December 1997. A friend of mine, a colleague at Edna, invited me to church for New Year’s Eve. After the service, I went back to my room, Room 84, and that night I had a very vivid dream.
In the dream, it felt like things were leaving my body, almost like a cleansing. In Africa, we talk about witchcraft, spiritual forces; here, you say Obeah. Whatever it was, I could feel something shifting.
From the next day, my work changed. My paintings changed. My life changed. I realized that the “fellowship” was not just about art; it was the universe reshaping me into who I was supposed to be.
Sometimes you are comfortable in life, and suddenly things switch. Life is alive. It challenges you because it sees you are capable of more. Nobody likes pain, but without those shifts, you wouldn’t grow.
TB: When you first started showing work in Jamaica, how did people here respond to it?
MWM: There was a writer here, Andrew Hope. He liked my sculptures very much, but he said my paintings were “so European.”
Part of it was expectation: He comes from Africa, his sculptures must be strong, “authentic,” African. What he didn’t know was that those were my first sculptures. I was trained as a painter. So, my sculptures naturally carried colour and embedded elements. I’m a painter–sculptor, not one or the other.
When I came to Jamaica, I was doing paintings with collage and wires, and I started putting found objects onto the surface. Another artist told me, “You are heading to sculpture. When a painter starts embedding stuff, they are looking for three-dimensionality.”
So the Jamaican response at first was mixed:
“We love the sculptures. The paintings are too European.”
But for me, that reaction said more about the frameworks people were using than about the work itself. What I noticed in Jamaica was that I was often seen through an African lens first, and only after that as an individual artist. Part of my journey here was gently refusing that narrow lens.
TB: So, you had a sort of dissonance with how your work was being perceived and how you wanted it to be received. You’ve mentioned to me in the past that you have reckoned with feeling displaced, feeling misunderstood, and feeling discarded. Have you always felt this way, and how do you deal about this today?
MWM: From primary school, I was teased because of the size of my head. There was a man in our area called Mr. Mlati who had a bus that transported people from our village to Mombasa. Because of my long forehead, people said my head was shaped like Mr. Mlati’s bus.
Of course, I felt it. As a child, you don’t yet have the mental strength to brush it off. Later, I decided to turn it around. I asked myself: “How many people does the bus carry?” Many. So, if my head is like that bus, maybe I have a brain big enough for all these people. So why not use it?
On a macro level, I also think about slavery, colonialism, yes, those were great tragedies. But to me, the deeper tragedy is the putting down of indigenous cultures. That happened to us in Kenya, too.
If you speak very good English, you are praised. Some people don’t even speak good Swahili. They’re interviewed and asked, “Do you want to speak Kiswahili or English?” and they choose English. That tells you something.
For me, I see myself as a sort of socio-cultural activist. I’m looking at the social fabric. I don’t approach it from a place of victimhood, maybe because I didn’t personally go through certain parts of that history. I can understand why others speak from that place, but I also think that sometimes the focus on victimhood is a ploy to keep us off the major art seat.
We’re encouraged to always do work about black bodies and trauma. But where will that work be shown? The big markets are still controlled by the big countries, even though things are changing.
So, when I use discarded materials, I also see it as a kind of revolution. I’m telling them: We have learned your language, but this is our language. It’s a rebellion. With found objects, it’s very hard for your work to look like anybody else’s. You claim your own visual language and identity.
TB: Yes, you use a lot of found objects in your work. When I look at your pieces, I see a lot of found materials. You don’t seem to think of anything as waste.
MWM: For me, life is ongoing. That’s the first thing.
I have my own philosophy about found objects. I’ve been using them for a long time. It’s like when you’re speaking: you choose words, which are like found things, and then you put them together to make a sentence, your story.
So when I use found objects, it’s not mainly about saying, “Oh, I’m cleaning the environment,” or putting a tag on myself like an environmental artist for promotion. No. I’m dealing with life, with regeneration.
Life is a continuous circle. Something was used, then discarded. People throw it away. The question is: who and what are we discarding in life? Sometimes those things, those people, turn out to be something completely different, something powerful.
That’s why many people who feel marginalized, discarded by society, can see themselves in the work. They realize they don’t have to be thrown away. One of my current working pieces is titled “Trees Grow Back.” It came from reflecting on the recent hurricane Beryl, but also our own personal hurricanes and storms in life.
When you look at the trees, they bend. Some of them are torn, almost uprooted. But as long as some roots are still there, they grow back. Trees grow towards the light. So, I ask: how about us? Are we growing towards the light? That’s the question inside the work.
TB: You’ve shown at the National Gallery, Olympia Gallery, Redbones, the Bank of Jamaica catalogue, to name a few. How did those more formal spaces in Jamaica engage with you?
MWM: Institutions like the National Gallery of Jamaica, and spaces like Olympia Gallery, did open their doors to me. They exhibited my work and included it in their exhibitions and catalogues. Some people discovered me there first.
Some critics and curators really understood what I was doing with found objects and identity. Others were more cautious, trying to fit the work into what they already knew about “African art” or “Jamaican art.”
But over time, I think people came to see that I wasn’t trying to be either one in a pure way. I wasn’t trying to be the African artist doing “tribal” pieces, or the Jamaican artist doing only Caribbean themes.
I was simply living here, working here, bringing Kenya, Jamaica, indigenous philosophies, Christianity, and Islam all into one life. And the work reflected that.
So, the perception in Jamaica slowly shifted from:
“He’s the African guy who makes strong sculptures,” to “He’s Mazola, with his own language.”
