Sam Joseph Ntiro was born in Ndereny Tanzania, in 1923. Ntiro undertook his art training under the guidance of the founder of Makerere University, Margaret Trowell, an alumna of the Slade School of Art, University of London and, in 1952, he arrived in London, England, to study painting at the Slade, which marked the beginning of his pioneering work as an African Modernist painter. Sam Joseph Ntiro died in Tanzania in 1993.
Painter Sam Joseph Ntiro was born in the Tanzanian village of Ndereny, in the Machame area of the Hai District, in 1923. Ntiro's early childhood was surrounded by the radiant, lush, and tranquil scenery of Eastern Africa and the magnificent snow-capped vistas of Africa's tallest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro. His primary education was at Nkuu Primary School in Ndereny, followed by secondary education at the highly respected Old Moshi Secondary School in the Marangu area. His education was under British colonial administration, who had taken control of the country after Germany's defeat in World War I, c.1919. Tanzania had remained a German colony from 1884 until 1914 (Fatima, 2026, n.p.). The German colonists had ruled through violent exploitation, brutal force and suppression of the native population, culminating with the genocide of c.300,000 Tanzanians during the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905–1907; Sylla, Fischer, Kaltenbrunner and Sathi, 2024, p. 575). Ntiro's education under indirect British rule, with local African leadership, enabled him to pursue an academic curriculum and to become a multilingual speaker, able to communicate in the local dialects, English, and other European languages. He was a bright and creative student and, in 1944, Ntiro left Tanzania to enrol at the prestigious Makerere University's School of Fine Arts (MTSIFA) in Uganda, which, notably, was the 'first higher education visual arts institution in East Africa' (Pissarra, 2015, p. 25). Ntiro undertook his art training under the guidance of the founder of Makerere University, Margaret Trowell, an alumna of the Slade School of Art, University of London, which became affiliated with the Ugandan institution. After graduating in 1947 and taking up art teaching, he began seeking opportunities to further develop his artistic skills overseas in England.
In 1952, Ntiro arrived in London, England, to study painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, which marked the beginning of his path into African Modernism and the establishment of his position as a historically important, East African artist and an advocate for unspoken voices, via his artistic method of storytelling. Ntiro portayed the collective society of Tanzanian villagers in charming works, such as Banana Harvest (n.d,) in which he applied muted, earth tones, clothing villagers in the same palette as the African terrain, in browns, blues and white highlights, which ripple through the landscape. The male and female figures work in harmony with the thinnest shoots emerging from the banana trunk, the forms fully surrendering to the harvesters. Ntiro depicts the abundance of the plantation, with the leaves of the tall banana trees appearing like an ocean of flags above the terraced settlements. Ntiro's narrative is one of a Tanzanian forbearance and collaboration, also highlighted in Felling Trees (c.1950-60s) and Chagga Beer Making (1957), his consistent vision capturing the people, the land and the task at hand, as both an ecological movement and an amalgamation. Despite the brutality of the collective colonial trauma inflicted on the people and the land, Ntiro's modernism distinguishes itself through his subjective style, which displays the communities' social dimensions in labour and struggles, and maintains their presence as a cohesive group.
While at the Slade, Nitro's work was in demand and, with other artists, he featured in the Young Contemporaries exhibition (1954). The following year, Ntiro graduated from the Slade, becoming the first East African artist to have a solo exhibition in London, held at the Piccadilly Gallery, Cork Street. He then returned to Tanzania and assumed a lecturer's post at the MTSIFA. In 1958, he married activist and academic, Evangeline Sarah Nyendwoha, who became the first East Central African woman to graduate from Oxford University in 1954 and one of the very few women to study there in the 1950s.
In 1961, Ntiro became a Professor at MTSIFA and, that same year, was appointed High Commissioner for England, returning to London with his wife. His arrival in London coincided with an exhibition of East African Artists at the Commonwealth Institute, London, Tanganyika 1961 Independence Exhibition. Ntiro would become a recognised voice for the East African diaspora on English television and radio, appearing on the BBC programme 'Conversation on the Cinema', with fellow panellists, Indian novelist Attia Hosain and English writer and journalist, Richie Calder. (Evening News, 1955, p. 5) He subsequently had an audience with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and gave presentations around England. He maintained a long and distinguished career in politics and in academia, as a pioneer of East African Modernism. Sam Joseph Ntiro died in Tanzania in 1993. In the UK public domain, his work is represented in the Government UK collection, Lakeland Arts, and the University of Cambridge, among others.
Joy Onyejiako.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Sam Joseph Ntiro]
Publications related to [Sam Joseph Ntiro] in the Ben Uri Library