Section1: Technical
Then HIVOS gave us something like 13,000 guilders which was approximately half of the cost of the workshop. And they did it blindly. I remember being amazed that they were willing to send us money without any prior meeting. Later, I finally met the guy who was the Programme Officer at the time and saying to him,“ You sent us money and you never came to check?” And he said,” Oh I did check”. When I asked who would have been
10 able to vouch for us, he told me he’ d spoken to a woman called Els van der Plas who said she’ d met me. So because of those shared sandwiches in Amsterdam, they had the confidence that we did exist, we were for real, were genuine; they sent us the money and we had the workshop.
HIVOS giving us half the money meant we really had to hustle for the other half. That hustling was one reason the workshop was such a success. We had to tap so many friends; we had to guarantee so much media coverage; we had to pull in so many favours to raise the rest of the money that by the time we actually had the workshop there wasn’ t anybody we knew that wasn’ t in some way involved in it. When we had the Open Day, hundreds of people showed up, and when we did the exhibition, it was packed to the windows- you couldn’ t have fitted another person in there.
That launched us and suddenly Kuona was never the same again. I remember my pitch to the journalists on that occasion was:“ Kenyan artists are getting to be so good that all of these international guys want to come and meet them. So you may not yourselves understand what these Kenyan artists are doing but the fact that all these international artists are jetting in from all over the world just tells us how ignorant we were; so you’ d better inform yourself of what is going on here, that it is important and interesting. The world is starting to notice so you’ d better notice too.” That was the argument I used to get the media to pay attention to our first workshop.
Danda: How did you get Oserian to support you. It was at Elsamere? Rob: It was at Elsamere. I remember ringing the one person I knew in Naivasha and asking who we should be trying to get help from.