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Eastern Africa, 1900 a.d.–present

Encompasses present-day Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, northern Zambia, northern Malawi, and northern Mozambique

Lidded Basket [Rwanda; Tutsi people] Figure (Grave Marker) [Kenya; Giryama people] Textile Tent Divider [Sudan; Beja peoples] Magdalene Odundo: Ceramic Vessel Sandals [Tanzania, Swahili coast]


See also Central Africa, Guinea Coast, Southern Africa, and Western and Central Sudan.

By the late nineteenth century, Britain, Germany, and Portugal end Arabic control of the Sudan, Swahili Coast, and East African interior. The Horn of Africa similarly falls under European rule when Italy invades the Kingdom of Ethiopia in 1935. Traditional forms of art created for ritual and utilitarian purposes, including masks and figures, as well as personal items such as snuff containers are widely collected by museum-sponsored ethnographic expeditions during the first decades of the twentieth century. Western art schools are founded in East Africa, and African artists begin to experiment with newly learned techniques and materials introduced from the West. Artists such as Ibrahim el-Salahi of Sudan and Sam Ntiro of Tanzania continue their art education outside of Africa and participate in international creative movements. In British and Portuguese East Africa (later Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Mozambique), colonial policies of indirect rule encourage the formation of a local African political class educated by African and Western university systems. Young African intellectuals including Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, and Eduardo Mondlane emerge as leaders of national liberation movements that achieve independence for their countries. Eastern African artists, who have longstanding traditions of producing art for foreign clients, continue to do so in the twentieth century by developing sculptural genres sold to international consumers. A region rich in architectural and urban history, East Africa is the site of developments in both these fields. Italian modernism, in the form of Art Deco architecture, takes hold in the region of the Horn while Tanzania builds a new capital based on the tenets of Ujamaa, its national political code.

• 1902 Gordon Memorial College is founded in Khartoum, Sudan, and offers art classes.

• 1906–7 The Museum für Völkerkunde, Leipzig, sponsors a collecting expedition to the Rovuma river valley region of German East Africa (present-day southern Tanzania) led by German ethnologist Karl Weule. He returns with an extensive and important collection of masks, figures, and utilitarian items from East African peoples such as the Makonde, Makua, and Yao.

• 1918 German East Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanganyika) is divided between Britain and Belgium after Germany's defeat in World War I.

• 1935 Italy invades the Kingdom of Ethiopia.

• 1937 The Fine Arts School is founded at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, and Margaret Trowell is appointed its director. She develops a curriculum that cultivates and preserves indigenous African styles and aesthetic values while introducing new media and methods of art production such as silkscreen printing and easel painting. Promising students, such as Tanzanian painter Sam Ntiro (1923–1993), are sent to study at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The work of her students is displayed at the Imperial Institute, London, in 1939.

• 1940 Black Africans from French and English colonies are conscripted into the war against Nazi Germany.

• 1950s–60s Western-educated Sudanese artists Ibrahim el-Salahi (born 1930) and Ahmad Muhammad Shibrain (born 1931) establish what becomes known as the Khartoum School. Inspired in part by the pictographic compositions of Paul Klee and others interested in symbolic forms of visual communication, they utilize Arabic calligraphy as the foundation for their art.

• 1954 The Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), led by Julius Nyerere, is formed as a mass political party representing the interests of farmers' unions and cooperatives.

• 1956 Sudan gains independence from Britain.

• 1959 Under the patronage of Mohammed Peera, a Dar es Salaam merchant, Makonde artist Samaki Likankoa begins to produce nnandenga sculptures, also known as shetani. Sinuous, abstracted forms representing subjects and ideas drawn from Makonde oral traditions, the works are sculpted from African blackwood. The new sculptural genre draws interest from European and American expatriates living in East Africa, and works created by Likankoa and other artists are exhibited in museum shows and catalogues devoted to modern African art.

• 1960 Somalia gains independence from Italy and Britain.

• 1960s–90s Elimo Njau (born 1932), a graduate of the Fine Arts Program at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, establishes the Paa ya Paa ("The Antelope Rises") Cultural Center in Nairobi, Kenya. Dedicated to nurturing the arts in East Africa, the center hosts visiting artists and students.

• 1961 Tanganyika (later Tanzania) gains independence from Britain and Julius Nyerere is elected its first president.

• 1962 Uganda becomes an independent state and member of the Commonwealth; former Belgian colonies Rwanda and Burundi also achieve independence.

• 1963 Kenya gains independence from Britain; Jomo Kenyatta is elected prime minister.

• 1963 FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) commences its armed struggle against the Portuguese in Mozambique.

• 1963 Following a revolution in Zanzibar that overthrows the sultanate, the island unites with Tanganyika to form Tanzania.

• 1964 Malawi gains independence from Britain; Hastings Kamuzu Banda is elected head of state.

• 1967 Tanzania's president Julius Nyerere proclaims the Arusha Declaration, calling for a policy of self-reliance based on the principles of Ujamaa, a form of African socialism rooted in indigenous social and economic structures.

• 1970 Malawi relocates its capital from Zomba to Lilongwe.

• 1971 In a military coup, Idi Amin deposes Ugandan president Milton Obote and expels all Asians from the country in the following year. The Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) ousts Amin from power in 1979.

• 1973 Tanzania relocates its capital from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma at the center of the country. The move is meant to help stimulate the economy of the interior and to bring the national government closer to the people it serves, a basic tenet of the Ujamaa policy instituted under the administration of President Julius Nyerere. Committed to building a city in which all inhabitants enjoy equally the benefits of economic opportunity and governmental representation, the city is designed so that residents have access to arable land, transportation networks are pedestrian-friendly, and neighborhoods are comprised of a mixture of commercial, governmental, and residential spaces.

• 1974 Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is overthrown by a military coup and replaced by the Derge, a Marxist junta. Opportunities for artists are limited to the creation of state-sponsored propaganda, generally in a style of socialist realism akin to that promoted in the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors. The Derge's antagonism toward artistic expression results in the emigration of several Ethiopian artists to the West and the destruction of examples of artifacts associated with Ethiopia's Christian imperial heritage. Many artists, such as Skunder Boghossian (1937–2003) and Wosene Kosrof (born 1950), take teaching positions and fellowships at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

• 1975 Mozambique gains independence from Portugal.

• 1977 Djibouti gains independence from France.

• 1978 Lalibela, the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century rock-hewn religious complex and pilgrimage site of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity named for the Zagwe king Lalibela, is designated a UNESCO world heritage site.

• 1980 UNESCO declares Aksum, the capital of the Aksumite kingdom (ca. 300 B.C.–600 A.D.), a world heritage site.

• 1989 Magiciens de la terre, one of the first major museum exhibitions dedicated to modern and contemporary art from Africa, opens at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

• 1991 The exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art opens at the Center for African Art, New York.

• 1993 Eritrea, formerly a territory within Ethiopia, becomes an independent state.

• 1993 The reign of the Kabakas of Buganda, the East African kingdom that is now Uganda, is restored under His Majesty Ssabasajja Kabaka Rodney Muwenda Mutebi II, reinvigorating traditions of cultural leadership and royal patronage.

• 1993 Receiving widespread international distribution, Sankofa, a film by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima (born 1946), traces the history of Ghanaian slavery. Sankofa is an Akan word that refers to the proverb, "We must go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward; so we understand why and how we came to be who we are today."

• 1995 Africa '95, a festival of African art in England, includes the work of several contemporary artists in exhibitions such as Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Self Evident at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

• 1996 The Guggenheim Museum, New York, hosts a landmark exhibition of photography from throughout the African continent entitled In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present.

• 1999 Julius Nyerere, national liberation leader and former president of Tanzania (1964–85), dies.