Draft:Alan Donovan

Alan Donovan

Alan Donovan
Born	Alan Donovan (1938-08-11)11 August 1938
Died	5 December 2021(2021-12-05) (aged 83) Mlolongo, Kenya
Occupation	Art collector designer

Biography

Alan Donovan (born August 11, 1938 - December 5 2021) is an American co-founder of African Heritage, the first Pan African Gallery in Africa, and the African Heritage House based on the precolonial mud architecture of Africa, which has been designated a national monument of Kenya. He arrived in Africa on July 4, 1967, as a relief officer with the US Department during the Nigerian Biafra War. He resigned his post in 1969, bought a Volkswagen bus in Paris, traversed the Sahara Desert to Nigeria, and then drove across the Congo to Kenya, arriving in Nairobi in March 1970.

He was enamoured with the creativity of the nomadic people of the Northern Frontier district of Kenya, where he spent several months with them. The Turkana people had beautiful designs such as the "Akarum," a wooden milk container based on a gourd prototype but carved of the wood of the Acacia tree. The container has curved sides and an elegant slender top used as a goblet. He decided to sell his VW bus and make a collection of artefacts from these vanishing cultures, who soon would be lost to globalisation. His first exhibition was in October 1970, a collection of art and material culture from the Turkana and other peoples of Northern Kenya. The exhibition created the opportunity to meet Joseph Murumbi, the former Vice President of Kenya, and Africa's most notable private collector. In 1972, the first Pan African Gallery on the continent was opened in partnership with Murumbi and his wife Sheila.

He died December 5, 2021 at the age if 83

African Heritage Festival

He staged the first Pan African Festivals in Nairobi, including one from the island nation of Madagascar, for which he imported the Madagascar National Folkloric Troupe, Miss Madagascar, several artists, and a huge exhibition of Malagasy textiles, crafts, artworks, and musical instruments. Famous movie stars Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine were special guests, and former Miss World Persis Khambatta modelled fashions created of Malagasy fabrics, including the Lamba Mena, the fabled raw silk of the country used to honour ancestors. The second festival, which coincided with the first Pan African Trade Fair held in Nairobi in 1972, featured arts and crafts from all the states and regions of Nigeria with Nigerian dancers and performers and featured the first fashion show held in Nairobi with all African models, all African textiles, and African adornment. Alan travelled through several African countries every year seeking out artists and craftspeople and acquiring textiles, art, and jewellery for the African Heritage Galleries in Kenya and abroad. He opened his first jewellery workshops in Nairobi in 1971, which became the largest exporter of non-precious jewellery from the African continent for over three decades. The jewellery featured several lines and was exported to museums, aquariums, zoo shops, DisneyWorld, and leading department stores and galleries. During his time in the mid-1980s as the principal designer for the Banana Republic stores in the US, he set up "global" jewellery workshops in India and Bali.

In 1976, he established the annual African Heritage Nights and Kenya's African Heritage Festival with a cast of models, musicians, dancers, acrobats, and chefs that travelled the world under the auspices of the Kenyan Ministry of Tourism, the World Bank, the Hotel Intercontinental, the Hilton Hotel, Sabena Airlines, Kenya Airways, and many others. He formed the African Heritage Band with leading Kenyan musician Job Seda, aka Ayub Ogada.

Alan Donovan organised a huge street festival for the 100th Anniversary celebrations for the city of Nairobi in 1997 and travelling Millennium Shows to herald the new century with 27 Kenya Hotels, the World Bank, and many other sponsors. For the African Renaissance Show in South Africa for 4000 international delegates, there was no hotel big enough for this show and such a large audience, so the South African Government bought an old warehouse and built catwalks and stages to African Heritage specifications with kitchens, toilets, parking lots, and facades.

His biggest show in the US was for 60,000 guests of the San Diego Zoo during a two-night extravaganza where models emerged from a forest and strutted over a bridge the zoo had built over a lagoon filled with flamingoes. The National Drum Ensemble of Ghana provided a stately cadence on one side of the bridge and the strains of a modern jazz quartet held forth on the other side as models wandered through candle it tables of the zoo. Kenyan food was cooked in semi-railer kitchens in Los Angeles and trucked down to the zoo.

Africa Heritage also produced the largest roadshow to come out of Kenya during a six weeks tour of 11 European cities in 1995.

Many renown models and musicians emerged from Kenya's African Heritage Festival, including Africa's most famous models, Iman and Khadija Adams. Iman continues as a force in the fashion world up to today. The late Ayub Ogada, who founded the African Heritage Band with Alan Donovan, performed all over the world with his Luo 8 stringed harp, the Nyatiti. He provided music for many major films, including The Constant Gardener.

In 2017 he celebrated his arrival in Africa. He staged a 50-year retrospective for the Oshogbo artists from Nigeria whose works he had displayed for 50 years[both in Kenya and abroad. Then in 2019, 600 guests arrived by steam train at the African Heritage House headed by the Kenyan Minister of Sports, Heritage, and Culture , Amina Mohammed. The occasion launched the magnificent double-olume opus, African Twilight, by his long-life colleagues Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher. This duo has published 17 books and acquired the world's largest repository of photos of the vanishing ceremonies and rituals of Africa. Alan Donovan has launched all of their major books in Kenya, the US and Europe since he first met them and introduced them to each other at African Heritage in the early 1970s. During the event, Alan Donovan was installed as a chief of the Yoruba by visiting chiefs Nike Seven Seven Okundaye and Muraina Oyelami and given the title of Babalaje of Ido Osun.

Awards

He has received numerous  honours and award,s including one from the Nigerian Government for promoting the artists of Kenya and Nigeria, an award as the founder of Kenya fashion, and a lifetime achievement award in 201] for the collection and preservation of African cultural heritage. He received an award from the Pan African Broadcasting Heritage and Achievement Awards based in South Africa for “Thirty years ofvVisionarylLeadership in theaArts in Afric.". African Heritage was given an award as the best gallery in Afric,a and Kenya's African Heritage Festival was noted as the best cultural show on the continent.

Books

Alan Donovan has written numerous books and articles. Most notable are his memoirs in My Journey through African Heritage, hand-bound in a genuine royal backcloth cover from Uganda, in 2004, and A Path Not Taken, a collection of transcripts and notes and articles by, for, and about Joseph Murumbi. During the recent pandemic, he has penned two books, An American in Africa: 50 Years Exploring African Heritage and the Legacy of Racism in America, with African World Press, and Black Beauty through the Ages, which has profiles of nearly 200 women from 4500 BC to the present day, which is to be published by Rizzoli NYC in 2022.