In the winter of 2019, I spent three weeks at a cooperative workshop in Nyakarambi, watching women press ridges of cow dung mixed with ash into wooden panels. The ridges — precise, geometric, deliberate — formed diamonds, chevrons, and spirals in a language that predates every European avant-garde movement by more than a century.
Ridges Before Manifestos
Prince Kakira of the Gisaka kingdom is credited with originating imigongo in the early eighteenth century. The technique passed through generations of women who decorated the interior walls of marriage huts with relief panels, each pattern carrying specific meaning — the diamond for protection, the spiral for continuity, the chevron for the path between families.
What strikes me about these panels is how thoroughly they anticipated the formal vocabulary of geometric abstraction. The three-color palette achieves maximum contrast with minimum means, and the tessellated compositions resolve into patterns that feel inevitable rather than decorative.