Sam Joseph Ntiro

Private collection, UK, acquired in Tanzania

Acquired from the above by the current owner

Trained at Makerere University as well as the Slade School of Fine Art, Sam Joseph Ntiro was a Tanzanian artist, educator and diplomat. A venerated figure amongst his countrymen, Ntiro was the first East African artist to hold solo exhibitions abroad, and the first African painter to hold a solo exhibition in a New York gallery, at the Merton Simpson Gallery in 1961, and in 1960 he became the first modern African artist to have a work purchased by MoMA in New York, and possibly by any public institution in the United States. He was appointed High Commissioner to the United Kingdom between 1961 and 1964, as well as serving as Commissioner for Culture in the Tanzanian Civil Service in 1967.

Ntiro was a quintessential postcolonial modernist in his engagement with themes of liberation, pan-Africanism, and the complexities of post-colonial identity. As a result of his involvement with the highest echelons of the Tanzanian government, Ntiro's oeuvre echoes the prevailing sociopolitical dogma of the East African state at the advent of the postcolonial era. His works espouse the dignity and value of nonhierarchic community labour, a clear allusion to Julius Nyerere’s socialist concept of Ujamaa, a Swahili word loosely translating to ‘fraternity’. Ujamaa rejected individuality in favour of community cooperation and equitable distribution of wealth. Whether his figures are depicted in the act of harvesting cotton or felling trees, Ntiro’s figures are rendered with very little facial detail, and figures to the foreground of the composition are usually depicted with their back to the viewer. Considered from the holistic vantage point of his involvement with the state, Ntiro’s works may be characterised as the manifestation of Tanzania’s postcolonial self-image in the realm of visual culture.