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The African Heritage House in Mlolongo. PHOTO | FILE
NATION MEDIA GROUP
By Margaretta wa Gacheru
Posted Thursday, January 29 2015 at 18:07
Posted Thursday, January 29 2015 at 18:07
In Summary
- Having exhausted all possible channels that might have led to a change of heart, Donovan had feared the worst —that his glorious house (jam-packed with artistic gems from across Africa) was doomed.
- Donovan is glad the battle to save his historic house has finally come to an end. He’s especially grateful since it now means the legacy left by both himself and the Murumbis’ will eventually be left to the Kenyan and African people.
Alan Donovan didn’t even know he had ‘won the war’
for his African Heritage House until three days after it had been
gazetted as a ‘monument’ by the Culture and Sports Cabinet Secretary
Hussein Wario on January 23.
This was after he got a congratulatory call early Monday
morning from Felix Kipkoech, one of the Nairobi Gallery tour guides he
had trained in his African Heritage art history course at Strathmore
University.
“After I heard from Felix, the calls and e-mails
started flooding in,” said the AHH director who previously was a
co-founder/director of the now defunct African Heritage Pan African
Gallery with the former Vice President of Kenya, the late Joseph
Murumbi.
“I’m still reeling from the news,” said Donovan,
who had been told by government officials that the Ministry of Culture
was never going to save his house from demolition.
Having exhausted all possible channels that might
have led to a change of heart, Donovan had feared the worst —that his
glorious house (jam-packed with artistic gems from across Africa) was
doomed.
He’d spoken to countless government people to ask
for aid and a reprieve from the well-publicised plan that the Chinese
Roads and Bridges Company was going ahead to construct the high-speed
rail system which had been charted to plow straight through his AH
House.
But it seemed he’d never talked to the right
people, not even when he had officials come to his house, get impressed
with African artifacts, textiles and fine art and even give assurances
that the house would be saved. Yet nothing had come of it.
There was no follow-up, even after he’d shared a
blueprint featuring three or four alternative paths for the railway.
Apparently, he was told, the AHH was obstructing the most direct path
that the fast-track rail could take from Mombasa to Nairobi.
Donovan even teamed up with a Kenyan
anthropologist, Dr Chap Kisumba, a senior lecturer based at the American
University in Washington, DC. They had designed a proposal for the
House to become a regional research centre where scholars could come
from all over the world to study African arts and culture.
He had hoped the idea would appeal to people in power as it would enhance Kenya’s intellectual standing in the world.
But all this seemed to fall on deaf ears. What’s
more, after two Chinese men from the construction company showed up at
his front door, accompanied by Kenyan policemen, his blood pressure rose
and he was hospitalised.
So it’s no wonder that Donovan says he is still
“stunned” by the news that he “won the war” for his House, as one Kenyan
AHH fan put it.
Yet there it is in black and white in the Kenya Gazette Volume CXVII—No. 7.
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