(waves crashing) - Africa, one of the fastest growing parts of the world with the youngest population, where six in every 10 people are under 25.

With hundreds of different ethnicities, and some 2,000 languages, Africa is the most culturally diverse place on Earth.

I'm Afua Hirsch, I've been lucky enough to work across Africa as a journalist.

Now I'm exploring how young Africans are re-imagining the past through art, music, and culture in three very different countries: Ethiopia, Senegal, and Kenya.

This is an Africa we don't usually see.

Africa on its own terms.

(upbeat music) These African countries are reasserting their identities, gaining new recognition for their role as cultural powerhouses.

I'm interested in how that's happened and how the struggles for liberation in the past have helped shape today's African renaissance.

(gentle music) In this episode, Kenya, a country created barely a century ago.

(singing in a foreign language) - Where we are standing here was a bad place for Kenyan nation.

- [Afua] Where the British spun an idealized stereotype while carving out a brutal empire.

- [Tayiana] And in the works camp the detainees would make bricks.

- So they were being forced to build their own prison?

- Exactly.

- [Afua] Where independence created new heroes and icons and an exciting collision of cultures, finding creative ways to respond to the past.

- As an artist, I think the time for painting beautiful flowers is over.

- Kenya has come to symbolize the idea of Africa for so many people, but there is so much more to culture here, so many divergent traditions united by a unique political history, and by a complicated relationship with the land itself.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Here's a vision that we in the West tend to think of as quintessentially Africa.

(upbeat music) In northern Kenya's great Rift Valley the Samburu, an ethnic minority, who are a branch of the cattle herding Maasai people, use their bodies as a vivid artistic canvas.

(upbeat music) The Samburu are semi-nomadic and so their art is portable, a projection of identity and status that moves through the landscape.

Animal blood, tree sap, clays, ash, the very materials and dyes the Samburu use in their body art are rooted in an almost symbiotic relationship with their cattle and the land.

(group singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) (Barasin speaking in a foreign language) (Barasin continues speaking in a foreign language) (Barasin continues speaking in a foreign language) (group singing in a foreign language) - The Samburu are always passing through Kenya's imposing landscape, they see themselves as tenants here.

But others saw the romantic vastness and wanted to be owners.

(waves crashing) (waves continue crashing) For centuries the Kenyan coast witnessed the arrival of adventurers, explorers, missionaries, and slavers, all vying for power.

But nobody actually tried to plant a flag.

It was the arrival of the British, at the height of their imperial project, who would change all that overnight.

(gentle music) The year was 1885, the European heads of state had gathered at the Berlin Conference to put some order on the so-called scramble for Africa.

Secretly, and without consulting any Africans, they divided up this vast continent into spheres of influence.

With the stroke of a pen, the East Africa Protectorate threw together indigenous cultures, farming peoples like the Kikuyu, Kamba and Giriama, fishing people like the Luo, and semi-nomads such as the Maasai and Samburu, in a new country commonly known as Kenya, in the British sphere.

(gentle music) (train whistle blaring) The first big British project, a 600 mile railway snaking in land from the coast to open up central Africa to trade, to transport colonial officials, troops and resources.

(gentle music) (train whistle blaring) This was more than just a railway, this was a piece of strategic power play.

So audacious, so costly, that at the time it hardly seemed possible.

More than any other single event, this railway established British control over the land and created the state of Kenya, setting this country on a path from which there'd be no turning back.

(gentle music) (train whistle blaring) (gentle music) Work began in 1896, but disaster immediately struck.

Dozens of the Indian workers brought over to build the railway were eaten by lions.

British MPs, outraged by the costs and excesses, nicknamed the project the Lunatic Line.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Four workers died for each mile of railway that was constructed.

It was a hugely costly project, one which mostly British people didn't have to make the sacrifice for.

(gentle music) Sir Charles Eliot, the commissioner who presided over the project quipped, "It is not uncommon for a country to create a railway, but it is uncommon for a railway to create a country."

But not everyone was thrilled by the creation of the new country.

Some Kenyans found ingenious ways to unite and resist the encroaching power.

(group singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) - [Afua] This is the Kifudu dance, being performed today to keep alive the memory of Mekatilili Wa Menza, a resistance fighter against British rule.

Mekatilili inspired contemporary artists, and her people, to this day.

Mekatilili was from the Giriama people who live predominantly along Kenya's coast.

(group singing in a foreign language) - [Afua] A widow, she had lost brothers to the Arab slave trade and was suspicious when in 1913 the British tried to recruit Giriama men into work in plantations, or the army.

- One day there was a public meeting where we are standing here.

The British administrative officer then, Arthur Champion, came here with his translator, he was called Wanje wa Mwadorikola.

- [Afua] And when you say here you mean right here on this spot?

- Just where we are standing.

Yeah, on this spot were standing.

Arthur Champion said, "I want your boys to join the British Army."

And he told Wanje wa Mwadorikola, the interpreter, "Can you tell your boss to take one of those siblings of that hen?"

He walked to there and took one of those chicks.

And you can imagine the mother hen reacted very furiously.

And he took his pistol and killed the mother hen.

Mekatilili also understood what that meant, and she slapped Arthur Champion to the ground.

- [Afua] She slapped- - Yes, physically.

Physically slapped him.

And Arthur Champion went down.

- And this is a man who's armed with a gun?

- Yes.

So what did they do?

One of them just pulled the trigger and killed one of the children.

When he did that, the war started.

- [Afua] Mekatilili traveled across the country to galvanize a resistance, gathering people by performing the funeral Kifudu dance.

(group singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) - [Joseph] So after the dance, Mekatilili would then preach to them.

(group singing in a foreign language) - Say, "We have a disaster here.

People have come here, they're taking our land, they are taking our children, we don't want them here."

(woman singing in a foreign language) - [Joseph] Where we are standing here was a bad place for Kenyan nation.

(woman singing in a foreign language) - Mekatilili has become a folk hero, a Giriama David against the British Goliath.

Without money or weapons, with her people dispersed, she took the thing that united them, their culture, and weaponized it for her cause.

The British responded by twice exiling Mekatilili, confiscating Giriama lands, killing around 150 people, and burning 5,000 homes.

Slowly but surely, they tightened their grip on their new possession.

And what a possession it was.

To the British, a space more than twice the size of their homeland with wild savanna and mountains of eerie beauty, packed with exotic wildlife.

They saw the opportunity for a white settler economy.

Their idea was to use the newly finished Lunatic Line railway to encourage British farming with the central mountain plains of Kenya, the area with the most fertile land, coolest climate, and with a plentiful supply of Africans who could be turned into farm hands.

The area became known as the White Highlands.

The white settlers were invariably drawn from Britain's aristocracy and landed gentry, people who felt they knew a thing or two about running large estates, and who had the money to invest in them.

And they also brought with them intense ideas about British culture and civilization.

Ideas that took on a new dimension in this landscape.

But thousands of miles away from the rigid norms of Edwardian Britain they regarded this as a place that was kind of an Eden, uninhabited and wild, the perfect setting for adventure and freedom.

This white, romantic vision of Kenya has had enormous resonance and staying power.

It's been projected across the world of literature, film and television.

And by one book in particular.

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

The equator runs across these highlands, 100 miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over 6,000 feet."

In 1937, a Danish Baroness called Karen Blixen published a memoir about her life on her family's coffee farm near Nairobi.

She called it, "Out of Africa."

The book documents the attitudes of the upper crust of colonial Kenya, who became known as the Happy Valley set, the tabloid fodder of the interwar years.

It also traces a love affair based on the real life fling Karen had with the Englishman, Denys Finch Hatton.

"The geographical position and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world.

The views were immensely wide.

Everything you saw made for greatness, and freedom, and unequaled nobility."

That book has done so much to promote an image of Kenya as a blank landscape, a primordial canvas onto which the white nobility, privileged people, come to fulfill adventure and romance.

And the role of Africans in this narrative is minimal, they simply existed as accessories to that central white adventure.

(upbeat music) Safari culture had been ushered in by the Lunatic Line.

Among early pith helmeted hunters, with their tall stories and trophies, was American President, Teddy Roosevelt, in 1910.

But it was after the 1940s, and the establishment of Kenya's vast National Parks, that safaris promise of adventure and sighting big game fueled the large scale tourism.

And the tourism, in turn, transformed Kenyan art.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) A typical Nairobi craft market, this is where you find the most popular Kenyan art, vibrant celebrations of the country's wilderness and safari animals.

Being in this craft market in Nairobi is a little bit like being inside the mind of a tourist idea of what African culture is.

Even though the people who work here work so hard, and there is great skill, I can't help but feeling that they're often giving tourists what they want.

Things that feed into their preconceptions of images of giraffes, zebras, wooden carvings that don't have any actual recognizable tradition but kind of conform to that vague idea of a mask.

And then tourists come here and buy that stuff and feel like their worldview is being vindicated.

(gentle music) - You know this?

This is a giraffe.

(drill buzzing) - The expert wood carvers here are largely from the Kamba people, who make up a 10th of Kenya's population.

The Kamba art movement began in the early 20th century, and invented what some call the colonial modernist style that has been eagerly embraced by the tourist market.

Hello.

Hello, how are you?

- I'm fine.

It will make animals.

Wood animals.

Here in Kenya we are nation of (indistinct) giraffe.

So they see a big giraffe.

After there they go and see a big elephant.

After there there is rhino and cheetah.

That's the most tourist things which they like it.

We can make anything, but because of our mind we are put it there, "Tourism likes animals."

- You're from an ethnic group that has a tradition of carving?

- Yeah.

- Can you tell me about that, and how did you come to be so good at making things from wood?

- Mm, that's something which I know, because that is my grand, my grand, my grand, my grandfather.

When we were colonized, he tries to go somewhere when he was naked.

No clothes.

So he tries to find his head, "What am I going to clothe my body?

What am I going to make?

I make a shirt, from wood."

- From wood?

- Yeah.

- [Afua] A wooden shirt?

- Yeah.

Just to make like this one.

- [Afua] Okay.

- He close here, and he make another thing to close here.

- [Afua] That sounds very uncomfortable.

- And also he was so that he can move, because of the colonizer people.

- Because Europeans came he didn't want to be naked anymore?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Highly skilled and popular, these Kamba carvers make money from tourists and art about the land at the same time.

(gentle music) To the east, near Kenya's coast, wood carvings are literally rooted into the land, for a deeper purpose.

(gentle music) The Giriama people's villages are based around sacred forests called kaya.

They believe they're filled with the spirits of their ancestors, marked by carved posts that look like human statues called kigango.

Kigango are designed to represent the dead, commissioned by the family after a relative dies they're interred into the ground during the funeral ceremonies to make sure the deceased is welcomed into the ancestral world.

It's a marriage between art and spirituality, planted in the landscape itself.

The kigango you can see taking shape behind here is more than just a headstone or a representation, it's the living embodiment of the spirit of an ancestor who has died.

And as long as the kigango remains in the ground here, it anchors that spirit to their home.

(saw rasping) (stone scraping) (saw rasping) The kigango's nearly finished now and the villagers are using red ochre to paint the body and charcoal to mark the eyes and the eyebrows on the face.

Really just putting those finishing, human touches so that it looks like the person that it is.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - [Emmanuel] It's a law of traditional of 100 years ago.

Culture.

- [Afua] Is the spirit of your ancestor in the kigango?

- Yeah.

- [Afua] What is the purpose of the kigango?

- To give a respectful of him.

And it's a sort of magnet to pull things, to bring good things to you.

You do it, kigango for him, and he release good things to approach you.

- When you made the kigango, did good things happen?

- When I put that kigango, after six months I managed to build this house.

Because my work, (indistinct) treatment, it was paying well while.

- [Afua] So it brought you prosperity?

- Yeah.

- [Afua] So it really changed your life?

- It changed.

- Sometimes these traditions have brought the wrong kind of attention.

Unfortunately, for the Giriama, over decades thieves and unscrupulous dealers have targeted kigangos, uprooting them to be sold to Kenya's booming tourist market.

Only now are some kigango being successfully repatriated from the private collections from public museums where they've ended up all over the world.

If somebody came and took this kigango away to sell it, what do you think would happen to the person?

- If a person is difficult to come and steal, very, very, very simple.

He has to come here just root, as a (indistinct), you carry through here and you are in for it.

You won't escape.

You won't escape.

You'll die, or become mad.

- [Afua] Do you think this kigango will be here for a long time?

- It will pass through and it will remain here for centuries.

Even your granddaughter come and sit here, if we're still alive.

(gentle music) - There's been a real trade in kigangos over the past century or so, and I can see why people value them.

But when you understand what they mean in this culture, they're so much more than an interesting piece of art.

They're inhabited by the spirit of an ancestor and their purpose is to anchor that spirit to their home here.

So the idea of taking them away and trading them for money is a violation of everything that they represent.

(gentle music) Back in the 1950s, Kenyan resistance to the violations of colonialism was mounting.

(gentle music) The Kikuyu people were most affected by the White Highlands Project, and after World War II, as a new wave of anti-colonialism swept across Africa, their frustration boiled over.

The Mau Mau was a secret society of Kikuyu who took an oath to attack European settlers.

In 1952, the British authorities declared a state of emergency.

Years of bitter guerrilla war followed.

Hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu were detained or curfewed.

Tayiana Chao is part of a younger generation of Kenya historians documenting the internment sites that still survive.

- So the buildings we see here are... They were used as cells to keep detainees.

You can see barbed wire on the roof.

- [Afua] Gosh.

- You'll notice in some of the buildings you have a carving on the bricks that says MWC, but that means Mweru Works Camp.

And in the works camp the detainees would make bricks that would either be sold or used to build the structures.

- Gosh.

- So... - So they were being forced to build their own prison.

- Exactly.

So you notice that the room we're in has windows, but when this was a cell there was no light coming in.

So the school has basically carved out the windows from the brick itself.

- How many Mau Mau do you think would've been living in a space like this?

- From our research sources and our conversations with veterans we estimate maybe 60 people.

- [Afua] 60?

- 60.

- In this space?

- In this tiny space.

(birds twittering) This is a torture chamber.

- [Afua] Torture chamber for the camp?

- Basically you'd be kept here alone, with very little food and very little water for a period of, a number of days.

I don't know if you can see now, but they would put water, they would fill the room with water and you couldn't sit or sleep, so you'd just have to stand.

- Do people still feel critical of Mau Mau?

'Cause there was a level of violence involved.

- Everyone selectively chooses what they want to remember and what they don't want to remember.

And you have very many factions that say that Mau Mau was, they were savages and they killed people.

You have some that say they fought for independence.

You have some that say that they gave us Kenya as we know it today.

- People who were part of Mau Mau, who fought alongside them, or who suffered because they were deemed Mau Mau, were the sacrifices they made respected and remembered once Kenya gained independence?

- A lot of them left detention just to find out that their land had been taken, their ancestral land.

So they didn't have any land.

They had to buy back land from the chiefs, or the loyalists, who were put in place by the colonial government.

Their families had separated, some of their parents or their siblings had died.

So they came out of detention I think both physically and mentally in a very deprived state which continued on to independence.

So it was either you abandoned Mau Mau or you just went the other way.

Yeah.

- The Mau Mau insurgency was the beginning of the end for British rule in Kenya.

(upbeat music) Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu who'd been imprisoned by the British on trumped up charges of being a Mau Mau leader, led Kenya to independence in 1963.

Articulate, charismatic, and larger than life, Kenyatta managed to turn this most British of colonies into a successful, independent African nation.

Nothing better expressed Kenyatta's infectiously optimistic vision than new architecture.

A major contribution to that modernist wave was this building in central Nairobi.

It was built by the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, who, in a not uncharacteristic case of showboating, named it after himself, the Jomo Kenyatta International Conference Center, built as a headquarters for his political party.

With its cylindrical tower rising above Nairobi, at 32 stories it was by far the tallest structure in East Africa, right up until the late 1990s.

Inside it has a magnificent auditorium, shaped like a traditional dwelling.

(gentle music) The design was by a Norwegian, Karl Henrik Nostvik, but it's a building particularly suited to the tropical Kenyan climate.

A bold use of concrete and airy open galleries and terraces.

Without the windows and insulation he used in Scandinavia in African buildings like this modernism was set free.

I feel like there are so many stereotypes and cliches about African cities, and this building is just one of so many examples, albeit a very impressive one, of how Africans, decades ago, were already thinking to big, ambitious, modernist terms about the future, and using architecture like this to realize that vision.

(gentle music) As the city grew after independence workers from across the continent brought with them different styles and ways of playing music.

(group singing in a foreign language) - [Afua] Benga fused these styles.

(group singing in a foreign language) - [Afua] A hybrid of rumba from the Congo, and the folk songs of the Luo people from Western Kenya, in the 1960s and 70s it quickly became the unifying soundtrack of the city.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - It's a very big band, so when we do practice, everybody contributes.

Like you come with a song and then everybody contributes.

- So what's your role?

- My role?

I sing.

- And is there usually one singer, or more than one singer in a Benga band?

- [Otieno] We are many singers.

(group singing in a foreign language) - [Afua] So how are the vocals in Benga?

- Very sweet.

(Afua laughing) (upbeat music) It teaches people about living with one another in peace, you know, and it teaches about day-to-day life, and love.

Mostly.

- Very important.

- Yes.

(group singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) (Afua applauding) - Is it something to do with the city, and the way people go to work, and they wanna relax, that helped Benga thrive?

- It is.

It is, because if you see around the people who are here, we have doctors here, we have lecturers here, and then after they come from work they want to chill their minds so they come here.

When we play music they go home, they feel better.

(upbeat music) You can come here and you're very stressful, then when you play like one, two, three songs, you go home and you're happy and smiling.

(upbeat music) - [Afua] Benga embodies the energy and excitement of the decade after independence.

Saturday night at this pub in Western Nairobi is Benga night.

- These people believe Benga died a long time ago.

Our fathers and grandfathers, we used to do Benga.

But tonight if you go around Nairobi, you'll find every club is playing live Benga.

- It's Saturday night, so... - It's Benga, yeah.

- [Afua] You're not gonna go anywhere.

- No, no, we are not going anywhere soon.

We are there to stay.

(group singing in a foreign language) (group continues singing in a foreign language) - [Otieno] Thank you.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - The excitement for the future embodied in Benga spilled out onto Nairobi's streets and found expression in a very distinctive form.

Like London's red buses, or New York's yellow taxis, Nairobi's mini buses have become an icon of the city's visual culture.

They're known as matatu, Swahili for three, after the original three pence fair of the 1960s.

Matatus are the way most of Nairobi's 4.5 million people get around.

Congestion is a challenge in the city, many commuters spend hours in matatus every day.

Given that Nairobians spend so much time waiting for or sitting in matatu, perhaps it's no surprise that they've eventually become part of this city's identity.

Unofficial Nairobi mascots.

They're brash, chaotic, noisy, but they also have free wifi.

They're entrepreneurial and full of life.

(upbeat music) Today, matatus are an unlikely outlet for creativity.

If you think about it, matatus are really Nairobi's most visible version of street art.

It's just that in this case the canvas is always on the move, transporting its ideas and images round and round.

(file scraping) Dennis Muraguri is one of Kenya's leading contemporary artists.

He depicts the chaotic beauty of Nairobi's street life through mixed media prints and paintings.

I can see your obsession with matatus, they're everywhere in your workshop, even on your clothes.

What is the obsession with matatus?

- I just grew up loving matatus, and I grew up next to a bus park.

They are more than just a vehicle that takes you from point A to B. They are kind of concept boxes.

So you'll find matatus with... They have... They try to outdo each other with some ridiculous paint jobs and plasma screens, loud music performances by the operators.

- You could say that the matatu experience encapsulates a lot of the challenges of life here, sitting in traffic, not being able to guarantee your safety, a level of chaos and noise.

- Yeah.

- So you're deliberately countering all of that negativity by actually actively celebrating the good parts.

- [Dennis] Yeah.

Matatu without passengers and operators, it's just a shell.

It becomes alive when the people come into it.

That's the most beautiful thing about them.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - As economic migrants arrived from around the country, Nairobi's growth created new challenges.

(upbeat music) Today as many as 2.5 million people live in slums like this across Nairobi, almost two thirds of the city's total population on just tiny fraction of the land.

(upbeat music) So right now I feel like I'm giving you your obligatory slum scene.

And to be quite honest, I'm frustrated with the fact that depictions of places like this, that don't really get to the bottom of what life here is like, are still such a prevalent way of depicting African countries like Kenya.

This is a difficult place to live, there are challenges here, there's poverty, but it's so much more complicated than that.

There is so much more going on here.

There is such an order to life here that you can't really understand just by looking at tin shacks or rubbish dumps.

And one of the things that's going on in areas like this is a really interesting creative scene, that's often not what you would expect.

(gentle music) (woman singing in a foreign language) (woman continues singing in a foreign language) - [Afua] Classical ballet has become a source of self expression for children living in Kibera, the largest urban slum in Africa.

Home, it's believed, to over a million people.

Joseph Kanyenje is one of their teachers.

(gentle music) - Point your feet.

(Joseph speaking in a foreign language) - [Afua] Were you surprised that people in Kibera take so well to ballet?

- At first.

At first.

I had a perception in my head where I was like, "Oh, you're coming to work, you're going to work in Kibera."

I was like, "Oh, God."

But then, when I saw how they're moving I was like, "Oh, there's no difference from here and all the other places that I've hade an interaction with the children."

My perception was changed immediately.

- It is quite a noisy, chaotic area, but it's as if in this room you've created a very orderly ballet studio.

- I'm surprised how the girls... The girls are the ones actually who calms me down, because for me I can't... I can't deal with the noise.

But the girls just like... - [Afua] They're not phased.

(gentle music) - Do they face hardship?

Of course they do, each has their own hardship.

But you never see it.

They're always happy.

They're always coming to school, and to see them chatting around.

You see them when you ask them, "How do you..." "Kibera is a nice place."

It is a nice place.

It really is.

(gentle music) - [Afua] This ballet is a reminder that the narrative of Africans in destitution and in need of handouts is outdated and unhelpful.

There's a real resilience in the face of adversity here.

(upbeat music) Exploring even further beyond the cliche we find the very material of the slum inspiring a whole new art movement.

(upbeat music) Meshack Oiro is one of a new generation of artists producing recycled art.

A sculptor, he works to upcycle the junk the slums produce and turn it into something positive.

I have to say it's a little bit hard to see, at the moment this pile of rubbish it's kind of covered in flies, it's quite grimy.

I can't immediately imagine its potential.

- As you know, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

So I see beauty in there.

- And what gave you the idea to do it?

- As a young artist coming up with the money to buy materials and not being sure of the market, it was quite challenging.

So that's why I turned to recycling.

- [Afua] Is there an ideological dimension to using recycled material, as well?

Are you making a bigger point about the environment?

- Yeah, definitely, because like I'm upcycling what has already been thrown away and trashed.

So I'm trying to give it another life.

- [Afua] How do you pick one chain from another?

They're slightly different colors, lengths.

- Different chains make different pieces.

There are pieces where I want really smaller chains, like this one.

They're small and you can see they have like some beauty in them.

This particular one, I work with when I'm doing maybe a face, or a tiny piece.

And then the other pieces that I have to use fat chains like this- - That's a lot chunkier.

- Yeah, a lot chunkier.

So this particular one I can use when I'm making maybe the body and I need it to cover lots of parts.

I will easily use this one when I'm like making quite a humongous piece.

- Okay.

- Yeah, because mostly I need to cover all the blank spaces around.

You see this kind of piece?

It's aluminum, but also the aesthetic in it is quite beautiful.

- I really can't wait to see what you're gonna do with all this stuff.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Intriguingly, despite the innovation with materials, Meshack reworks a familiar and abiding Kenyan theme, the call of the wild.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - [Meshack] They say charity begins at home, so my first audience where I would like the message to go to are my fellow countrymen.

And then out there, because out there is just a plus now, but this is our doorstep, so if it's well here, then I'm happy.

(gentle music) - Meshack is one of hundreds of artists in Africa's burgeoning recycling movement.

Using their startling inventiveness to repurpose found material, and create both powerful art and an ecological rebuke.

African recycled art now has a global reach.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Today Kenya finds itself in an exciting moment of transition.

(upbeat music) With a dynamic young population responding with huge creativity to the challenges of urban life, Nairobi buzzes with energy and expression.

(upbeat music) Michael Soi is the leading artist here, documenting Kenya's journey.

His bold, colorful style holds up a satirical mirror to Kenyan society and politics and has brought him worldwide attention.

This is your studio?

- [Michael] This is my studio.

- You have a really distinctive style, very accessible, it really hits you, and your messages are there to see.

- What I try to do is make it as simple as possible to a point where if you stand there and don't get it, then there's something wrong with you.

Make it as simple as possible.

- [Afua] I mean tell me about this one.

This is a... - This is a piece I did last year after the election.

There's a lot of Kenyans who were killed by policemen because people contested the results of the election.

All the people who were killed all came from the same region.

- [Afua] So you've depicted bullet holes, bleeding- - Yes, the bullet holes, and then the lines that you see are actually names of the people who died.

- Wow.

- So this is a name of this person who was killed in western Kenya, out of the slums in Kibera.

- Michael is painting a series he calls "China Loves Africa," questioning the growth of Chinese power in this region, and asking again, "Who owns the land?"

In Kenya the Chinese loaned $3.6 billion for a new railway line running alongside the old Lunatic Line as part of its Belt and Road initiative.

(train whistle blaring) Many, like Michael, worry about the debt trap in which Kenya now finds itself.

I haven't seen that many artists in African countries where China is now so heavily involved.

- Yes.

- Critiquing it in their painting.

- [Michael] First of all, it is not a critic.

- Really?

- A lot of people think that I am criticizing, but it is not a critic.

The question now that everybody needs to ask themselves, "How did China find itself in Africa?"

China was invited to come into Africa.

By who?

By the Africans themselves.

If I talk about this particular piece, now all these men, you will realize some of them are very fat, you understand?

- [Afua] But you've also infantalized them, and you've put them in their underpants.

- Yes.

- They look dependent now.

- The reason why I make them fat is because the people who are benefiting from the generosity, or generosity, of China are not the ordinary people, it's the politicians.

When you hear of the railway, people connected in government will go and buy the land from the peasant farmers for nothing, for next to nothing, like $100 per acre.

And when the rail was proposed, they now sold the land back to government for like a hundred times worth what they bought it for.

The people who are suffering are the people, are the citizens, who are going to like, you know, be paying some of these loans.

If you have a 10-year-old kid right now, by the time they're 20, 25, they'll still be servicing the loans that we got to build the railroad to Mombasa.

Me, I will not blame China.

China is doing what it feels is its own interest.

- Is this potentially though the new imperialism, it's more subtle?

It's potentially even more long-lasting, and definitely omnipresent.

- No, I think the British came with the Bible first and managed to convince everybody, and then the guerrillas with the guns came later.

The Chinese are coming with money, you know.

And, you know, when you have a continent that consistently thinks that we are poor, we are poor, we are poor, we are poor, and come and offer money, then trust me, you will get into whatever corner of the country you want.

As an artist, I think the time for painting beautiful flowers is over.

You know?

I try to do a lot of work that revolves around social issues, things that affect the normal Kenyan on a day-to-day basis.

So I am documenting certain moments, maybe probably for posterity.

A kid sitting in a classroom in 40, 50 years time from now can get a book, look at it and kind of like get an impression of what Nairobi was like back then.

(upbeat music) - [Afua] Kenya has attracted outsiders too often for the wrong reasons.

(upbeat music) Brutal imperial schemes have dispossessed the people while contorting their story into a cliche that shape perceptions not just of this country, but of the whole African continent.

(upbeat music) Yet here I found a population and dynamic art scene, channeling a creative renaissance and frankly embodying hope amid the legacies of a dark history.

A new vision for the future, that breaks through old cliches.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)