The Essence: Anne Mwiti invents whole new alphabet

Anne Ntinyari Mwiti is not a linguist. Neither is she a cultural anthropologist, nor even a novelist like JRR Tolkein who, like her, invented his own unique language for his particular purposes.

In her case, it was an issue of merging her multicultural identities for the sake of communication among the Maasai, the Meru, and the Ethiopians, all of whom she shares blood lines with.

To achieve that merging, she’s created a kind of alphabet or semi-abstract set of 35 symbolic images, each of which she associates with the essence (and language) of her being. It’s that ‘alphabet’ that is currently on display at Alliance Francaise in a show entitled The Essence.

In addition to all this, what Anne is, apart from being a newly minted Doctor in Fine Art, from the Academy of Arts based in Szczecin, Poland, is a globe-trotter. As a fine art lecturer from Kenyatta University, she has participated in several programmes organised and funded by the European Union (EU).

The first one also involved Pwani University in Mombasa as well as universities in Poland and Italy and three museums from all three countries as well. It was also through that same programme that she obtained her doctorate in December 2023.

The second EU-supported programme that Dr Anne will embark on shortly is one which will involve the same three countries as well as schools and museums in Portugal and Greece.

Fortunately, both of these programmes have allowed her to travel back and forth from Kenya to any one of the other states depending on which course she’s currently involved in. “I’m able to hold online classes in painting and drawing for my Kenyan students, but students from the other schools can also listen in as well,” Anne told the BDLife.

“I had always dreamed of having work that would enable me to travel because it’s so important to see things from a broader perspective, and a larger context,” she added.

But as much as she’s enjoyed going abroad, Anne has been busy since receiving her advanced degree, looking inward into her psyche. It is there that she has sought the inspiration to intuit the ideas, images, and symbolic language that best reflects her own identity and the legacy that she has to share and communicate with all her people.

That is a large order to fulfill, but it began by looking into her background and bloodlines. Through interviews with family members, she discovered she has a multicultural legacy including not only Meru people with whom she grew up, but also Maasai and Ethiopian. The issue for her then became how to include all of those bloodlines in her sense of identity.

That is how she came to feel the best way was to create a new vocabulary that could incorporate all three cultures. In essence, it would be like creating her own alphabet or ‘hieroglyphics’.

It is those symbolic images that she has hung on display at Alliance Francaise until the end of May. “I’m not done,” she said since she’s only created the first 35, each one having a different English name, anything from Happiness, Success, and Joy to Serenity, Invulnerability, Freedom, and Health. (Egyptian hieroglyphics number more than 7,000).

“I plan to replace the English terms with proverbs, riddles, rhymes, and children’s lullabies starting with the Meru ones that my mother remembers very well,” she added. But she cannot get into that until she completes this phase of her “alphabetic” production.

For now, her show presents her abstract images on three different materials. All of the initial sketches are in ink, painted in broad sweeping brush strokes on watercolour paper. These are where the images first arrive fresh from the deep regions of her psyche. Then she repaints them in acrylics on wood, and finally, she has a few drawn and stitched on burlap cloth.

From the prices on her works, it would seem that Anne values the burlap more than canvas and watercolour paper.

It relates to her upbringing, and the fact that her family grew coffee, the harvested beans of which would be packed in burlap sacks and then taken to market. The burlap represents success, fruition and the fulfillment of those goals through hard work and a family working together.