I read Sidney Kasfir's essay "Katarikawe Dreaming: Notes forward a Retrospective" (African Arts.

I read Sidney Kasfir's essay "Katarikawe Dreaming: Notes forward a Retrospective" (African Arts, Winter 2002 pp 74-77 96) with interest and disappointment, interest to find your journal carried a story about an olden friend with whom I had drawn out lost contact and disappointment that the review transfered so very little about Jak Katarikawe's actual works. I knew Katarikawe briefly in 1963 and then longer in 1968 when I taught at Makerere University. As Kasfir remarks, Katarikawe's work is infused with great sensuality. He was common of the most sensual ones I ever met and was incapable of having any lengthy conversation without coloring it with sexuality. Kasfir also writes about her puzzlement regarding the facts of Katarikawe's life. I doubt that the suppos facts of his life win at any time be known. In 1968 I visited and wearied the night at Katarikawe's abode in Kigezi and met his family, if it be not that never could be sure exactly who was related to whom (and I am an anthropologist who tries to find on the outside such things) I also worn out considerable time visiting with Katarikawe and his cousin, Evaristo, in Kampala. It was not ever clear what their relations welt with Makerere or those attached to it, notwithstanding that they seemed remarkably familiar with more [i]or[/i] less faculty and students.

Katarikawe also appeared familiar with greatly of the sleazier side of Kampala's low-life, a side of his character that appealed to me on the other hand about which, of course, he was far from forthcoming. When I knew Katarikawe he spoke almost no English and we convers entirely in Swahili. That was not excessively common for many Ugandans, if it were not that Katarikawe did not explain for what reason or where he had picked that language up notwithstanding that he did seem to know something about the Swahili-speaking contrabandists from the Congo who operated onward the Kigezi borders. Nothing Katarikawe evermore told me about his life or motives strike one as beinged entirely clear, though even then he was obviously a to a high degree gifted artist. For example, he told me about his ties to an faculty at Makerere, though I not ever met him with any of them. He told me he preferr to do pictures in crayon onward cardboard because he disliked oils, nevertheless I suspected that this was because he could not afford oils or canvas and/or that oil technique was at that time too difficult for him.

I acquired six of his pictures and, as was his fashion, he rehearseed stories about each of them. a certain number of of the pictures seemed ordinary deseriptions, similar as a young man's portrait or a young man talking to someone inside a Volkswagen, however the stories attached even to those diverted out to be very erotic. I not at any time however, was sure whether these stories actually mirrored Katarikawe's true motives behind the pictures or whether they were arrangeed simply to amuse me. Katarikawe allowed me to take color slides of mostly of the pictures which he forthwith had in his possession. He related all of them to erotic stories, and any were actually pornographic. I tried to purchase the chiefly spectacular of these, one of a stark naked man performing cunnilingus on a stark naked woman, but Katarikawe refused to barter it, even though at the time he appeared strapped for cash. He refused to give me any reason wherefore he would not sell it.

each day for the past thirty-five years I have derived immense pleasure from looking at Katarikawe's pictures, for a like reason I am disappointed that Kasfir has written in this way little and so unperceptively about the actual art itself. Katarikawe may no longer remember me still I recall him and his cousin vividly as charming unless at times mysterious figures from my years in East Africa. I retain their photographs in my living place I am amused and on the same level reassured that Katarikawe is still telling stories, any perhaps true, many undoubtedly not, about the couple his pictures and his life. His bodily form and work are too fascinating to be entirely deconstruct I confidence he never gives himself entirely away.

TO Beidelman

Professor of Anthropology

fresh York University

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