Leonard Walungama Kateete
I was born on the 23rd of March 1951 to a peasant family in Kayabwe-Mawokota, in the countryside of the Buganda kingdom, part of the present-day Republic of Uganda.
Though armed with little education, Deziderio Walungama and Anna Nambi, my parents, managed to take me and my two older brothers through high school. Being the last born, I didn’t have much opportunity to be with my brothers all the time, so I found myself being taken to stay with my grandma, who took me to different homes of her relatives. It was in one of these stay-away days that I met Gregory (Girigoli), a local carpenter who was always busy making beds and chairs with forged tools from a local smith. The gentleman ignited the creative mind in me, which resulted in my becoming an artist.
I started by making my own bed at 7 years of age. After an artistic experience during a religious procession, I came home and started making colored designs on the ground with charcoal and brick powder from fired clay bricks.
In Junior 1, misbehaving in class got me an opportunity to get powder paints I found in a school store I was tasked to clean as punishment. I secretly collected all the available colors, two brushes and sugar paper, which I took home that evening. This marked the beginning of my painting experience, with no artistic guidance.
I joined Namilyango College, where I got my first art lessons as a school educational activity. Figure drawing and portraiture were my favorites. There used to be a yearly floating exhibition, and as a school we took part twice. The school won second prize and third the following year. In 1978 I took part in a secondary schools and colleges art competition, and I won 1st prize.
In 1971, after high school, while staying with a priest who was a chaplain at a teacher training college, I had an opportunity to study my face using a mirror with pencil drawing. After a week I was able to paint my portrait using a mirror. The self-portrait painting was lost after I had moved to Kenya in 1980.
I did Fine Art and Art Education at Makerere University, 1973/77 and 1978/79.
Though I never had the opportunity to make a portrait painting of Madiba from life, one was painted from a Newsweek magazine and a skin study of a groundsman at the school where I was teaching art in 1990. Tears of Freedom, my most viewed art piece, was viewed by guests from around the world and appeared on nearly all the world TV news stations that visited the Mandela family house museum in Soweto, South Africa.
I have done a lot of art using different art materials. Painting: oils, watercolor, powder and acrylic. Sculpture: wood, clay, plaster, fiberglass, marble and granite. Mosaic: banana bark, ceramic and glass. Stained glass. A lot of my art is on the walls of Catholic churches in the three East African countries, as well as in churches in Germany, England and Indiana, USA.
It wasn’t until 2023 that I decided to look at my face in a mirror and paint a self-portrait. This was after I had painted many portraits of people from around Eastern Africa. I painted my subjects from real-life studies in their countryside compounds. The first part was funded by the Nation Group in 1995/96, a collection with the National Museums of Kenya, and later by Mr. Russell, the trust founder of the Kateete Pan-African Art Foundation, from 2022 to date. I did portraits of the late Presidents of Kenya for the military and heroes museum in 2022.