Wambui: I'll sustain Bob's jazz legacy

The late Safaricom Chief Executive Officer Bob Collymore is remembered as a lover of jazz.

Those who knew him say Collymore was a fine Saxophone player, whose favourite song was Louis Armstrong’s It is A Wonderful World.

It is because of this that he initiated the Safaricom Jazz Festival, which was graced by some of the biggest Jazz artists in the world.

To commemorate his death, his widow, Wambui Kamiru, has initiated the Bob Collymore International Jazz Festival that was held on July 1, which is the day he rested.

“It is an amazing thing to pay tribute in this way, to gather to play music and continue the legacy he started. Bob was a great believer in the arts and I am excited to be working with a team that lived with him and shared his passion,” said Wambui, who is the festival’s CEO. 

“One of the things that I dream about is that one day this jazz festival allows us to travel the world in that, this month we are in one city, the next month we get to visit another country and so on,” she added. 

In February last year, Wambui also held an art exhibition to process the loss of her husband.

She said the art installation, All My Venus Days, which was first exhibited at Tira Studio off Ngong Road in Nairobi, is a philosophical approach to human immortality and impermanence. It is a reflection on what is important and demands that the audience reflect on the same.

“This new work will explore immortality and impermanence from a philosophical approach,” Wambui wrote at the time.

Shared grief

According to her, she started working on the installation before the outbreak of Covid-19, adding the work became more important during the global pandemic because grief became universal as every person at least knew of someone who had succumbed to the disease and, for her personally, the loss of her husband. 

The installation was done in a room that contained white shirts with writings on them, halfway-drawn curtains, some drawings that hung on the walls among other artworks.

During an interview with the History Makers show host Charles Otieno, she stated that the installation was inspired by the work of another artist who was documenting time.

In the same spirit, she captured moments shared with loved ones which later turned into memories. The shelves in the environments represent a moment when the loved ones are no more and so their belongings need to be packed up.

Artistically, Wambui focused on how humans are forced to consume grief on a wall as well as normalising too much that people forget to concentrate on the impact it could have. 

It also very much talks about how she felt when taking care of her sick husband and how she viewed life after her husband was no more.

“So, the art was a capture of a space that I knew would change because eventually you will have to pack up those things and empty the shelves. Many of the other art pieces in that place were captures of moments,” she narrates.

As she emptied her beloved husband’s shelves, the installation acted as the centre of her expression of the grief she was going through. It documented her process of grief and what it felt to lose such an important person in her life. In addition, the artwork also showcased ways in which one can try to remember the loved ones that we lost and for the artist, art is a method she uses to express what she feels and thinks.

Venus happens to have more days than earth and she gave the artwork that name symbolizing the moments that seem stretched even though they are just normal days. All My Venus Days, although the most recent, is not the only exhibition that Wambui has worked on. Most of her other previous works major on decoloniality and womanhood.

Decoloniality is the process in which Africa as a continent is gaining its identity and not on the basis of colonialism but in regards to who Africans were before colonialism.

“In the next year 2024, I will be looking at items that have got language that is lost simply because is sits in a museum box. I am very interested in history because my background is in history.”