Remembering Wahome Mutahi and the making of our art gala
Wahome Mutahi, popularly known as ‘Whispers’, after a column of the same name, wrote for the Daily Nation newspaper from 1982 to 2003 and offered an artistic spoof on the vicissitudes of Kenyan national life.
In early 2003, as he underwent what was supposed to be a routine, minor medical operation at the Thika District Hospital, in Kiambu, Mutahi fell into a coma, from which he would never recover.
He died on July 22, 2003, at the Kenyatta National Hospital after an agonising 137 days in a coma.
The late Wahome Mutahi's legacy is immortalised through a family-led initiative, the Wahome Mutahi Memorial Trust, that furthers his work.
On August 25, 2011, as the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ raged on in the Middle East, Mohammed Ali Farzat, one of the Arab world's most widely acclaimed cartoonists, was reportedly headed off as he left the iconic Umayyad Square, in the Syrian capital Damascus, by members of a pro-government militia who pinioned his arms onto the bonnet of his car and smote them with mallets as a "warning" for depicting the country's president, Bashar al-Assad, as "desperate for flight after defenestration".
The attack on Farzat, also head of the Arab Cartoonists Association, recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Peace (2011) and named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine (2012), drew worldwide condemnation and sparked an outpouring of solidarity from fellow cartoonists in the Arab world and internationally.
