German-born Nani Croze is one of the pioneers of the stained glass industry in Kenya. She has also been instrumental in the curation and promotion of local art at a time when the art scene was nearly non-existent. Her passion has led to the creation of jobs and education opportunities for under-privileged children. Nani Croze’s life story is a cultural and historical odyssey that began on 16 September 1943. Born in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea in the former Prussia amid the turmoil of World War II, she spent her formative years in chaos and uncertainty. She
was 22 when her only sister was born.
There was, however, an interesting equilibrium imparted by her family’s heritage in the arts. Like her parents, Croze found beauty in life – a paradox, given the ruin and brutish reality they lived in. Her grandmother was the first female arts student in Kaliningrad, while her father Helmut Andreas Paul Grieshaber was a renowned German artist, renowned across Europe. Better known as HAP Grieshaber, he was considered as Entartete Kunst, a term the Nazi regime used to refer to art that was modern and classified as Semitic.
Her mother, Riccarda, was also an artist. When Croze was two, she, her mother – who had tuberculosis, and her diabetic godmother, escaped to her grandfather in southern Berlin. The allied forces were coming down and the Russians were invading. “It was a hair-raising journey in the back of a cattle truck, in the back of a train,” she recounts.
Europe was in ruins and in the grips of poverty and hardship. Croze recalls her friends coming over to ask for food and her mother pointing to a bucket with a ladle. “She would say she didn’t have food, but had water, which they would take to keep their tummies full.” The family had to make do with what they had. They survived on potato peels from neighbours’ bins, which they boiled with watery milk.
On arrival in Germany, Croze’s mother, together with her uncle, opened an art school, Bernstein Schule, in an old monastery in southern Germany. She credits her art heritage to her parents’ influence. “My mother was by far the better artist,” she discloses. However, her mother had to use a man’s name to stage exhibitions because it was easier for male artists to sell and exhibit their work. This was the beginning of Croze’s exposure to the arts that have defined her life.
The artist began her education in Berlin. Her family later moved to the south, close to Bavaria, where her elementary schooling was greatly challenged because the southern dialect was completely different from that of the north. She later joined a British boarding school. “I was sent to England to get a proper education and to straighten me out,” Croze says in a mocking English accent. She recalls being a rebellious 11-year-old during the Beatles craze, and listening to Elvis Presley in her room. She quickly adds that she also loves Italian classical composer Vivaldi. “Mozart is okay and Bach is fine.”
“Once you have tasted glass, you can’t get enough of it. You have got to do more; it is so interesting and so challenging in many ways” She finished her schooling in Lausanne, Switzerland, and wound up with a degree in English literature from Exeter University in Southern England. Croze did not know what to do with her life when she returned to Germany. Her mother, who had just published a book: My Life with Little Animals, gave Croze a signed copy to take to Nobel laureate professor Konrad Lorenz in Munich where the physiologist was running a series of lectures.
“I wanted to become a behaviourist,” says Croze. While passing on her mother’s book to the Professor, she made her desires known. “My mother wants to give you this book, and can I become a goose-girl with you?” Lorenz asked her to see him at his office at the Mont Blanc Institute the following day. Croze, who started raising goslings shortly after, says: “I have never stopped keeping geese since; they are wonderful. I don’t know why people are scared of them.” She rears a flock of geese on her farm in Kitengela, where she shares her home with dozens of different animals, including various breeds of dogs, an Egyptian vulture, camels, dairy cattle, and free-range pigs.
However, she discloses, “My real love is glass, animals and the environment.” It was during Lorenz’s mentorship while studying animal behaviour through geese that Croze met her first husband Harvey Croze. The American had been studying at Amherst and had moved to Oxford to study crows for his PhD in Zoology. By coincidence, the American’s lecturer and mentor Nikolaas ‘Niko’ Tinbergen was a friend of Croze’s mentor, Lorenz. He met Croze when he chauffeured his mentor to meet Lorenz.
They courted for a few months and were wed in Germany in 1964. The newlyweds returned to Oxford and settled down to a youthful, blissful life in their new home on an estuary of the Thames. “It was a real gypsy life. It was wonderful,” Croze recollects. Her eldest son, Anselm, was born on the dunes of Ravenglass. In 1968, the couple received a letter assigning them to study elephants at the Serengeti Game Reserve in Tanzania. Croze was ecstatic; she had always wanted to visit Africa. The assignment lasted four years, during which Croze gave birth to their second and third children. Getting a job as a woman in the 1960s was tough. She recalls attending an interview with renowned archaeologist Louis Leakey, but failed to secure the position of an assistant.
All along, Croze managed to do what she does best. She painted and sold her work to scientists and their families in the Serengeti. “It was such a good time,” Croze remarks, noting that children react differently to their parents’ lifestyle. “I think mine enjoyed it,” she says.
With an adventurous streak, the Crozes decided to drive to Europe at the end of their tour of duty in the Serengeti. They stopped in Kenya to fix a car problem. This stop paved the way for the couple’s eventual stay in Kenya. “I always wanted Africa; I do need Africa. I am completely African, Kenyan for that matter,” says Croze, who believes that Kenya, as the cradle of humankind, naturally draws her in. A friend in Tigoni invited the family to stay. The Crozes moved to Kitengela eight years later, where they bought land. That was the genesis of the world-renowned
Kitengela Glass – a magical artistic glass museum of recycled art that employs 80 Kenyans. “It was never planned,” Croze says.
Kitengela Glass is best described in a February 2012 Business Daily article by art journalist Margaretta wa Gacheru: “It is more like a glass museum, all of which has been constructed into a labyrinth of manyatta-styled structures surrounded by walls made out of recycled glass bottles and aluminium cans, broken crockery, and beer or soda bottle tops transformed into mosaic tile walkways and jungle paths.” Croze’s world came tumbling down in 1982 when her husband of 18 years sought a divorce. The divorce posed a huge challenge for her. Croze says she did not realise
why or how it happened. “It (divorce) makes us grow up, especially for us who got married early,” Croze observes. At the time of the divorce, Croze was not making enough money as a muralist to live off and take care of the children.
It took her a few years to get back on her feet and reconcile with the loss. After a while, she decided that it was the best thing that could have happened to her. She pulled herself together and realised that she could do things just as well on her own. She found a new lease of life with her painting and artwork. With time, she fell in love again. Her second husband is Eric Krystall. “I fail here and there all the time; there isn’t a (work-life) balance,” she says. Croze
believes it is important to take responsibility for your actions and faults. “Women are more than hunter-gatherers; we are all-rounded.”
Croze spoke to her architect, George Vamos, who advised her to take up stained glass craft. The 1980s saw an increase in the number of church buildings across Kenya, all in need of stained glass. This brought in a steady revenue stream. She took a three-week course in London and later worked as an apprentice there, returning to Kenya a year later. She began creating stained glass for churches that found importing glass expensive and unsustainable. It was then that she decided to recycle locally available glass. She sought the help of a Finnish friend familiar with the glass-blowing technology. This resulted in the construction of her own rudimentary glass-blowing furnace.
“Once you have tasted glass, you can’t get enough of it. You have got to do more; it is so interesting and so challenging in many ways,” Croze says. Croze has created an amazing array of glass-inspired furniture, crockery, statues and architecture across Kenya and East Africa. She has also produced dozens of murals including the famous 11 walls – long mural at the UNEP headquarters in Gigiri. She draws her inspiration from the art she experiences and recalls being inspired by the artwork of Russian women in the 1980s when she attended a 10-day conference. She
saw two women seated with a huge rock of granite. By the end of her visit, the women had created a grandiose, granite statue of Lenin. Hanging billboards hand painted by women in Moscow also motivated her. These inspired her Maendeleo House statue in Nairobi.
For Croze, each piece work she creates is unique. “I don’t have a proudest accomplishment thus far,” she says. In the 1980s, while working at Gallery Watatu, the high levels of ignorance and dismissal of East African Art stunned Croze. “They’d say, ‘Kenya? East Africa? No! We have West African art and that’s what we like’,” she recalls. She has been involved in the curation and promotion of Kenyan art. In what initially began as a family planning calendar created from artistically inspired interpretations, eight years later in 2011, the first edition of the Artist’s Diary was released for sale.
The diary is a calendar, journal and art catalogue that curates extraordinary Kenyan and Kenyan-based artists’ work. For example, the 2014 collection showcased great art from over 150 artists. Croze’s artwork is recognised far and wide. In 2014, Kitengela Glass artwork, together with that of other Kenyan artists as well as cultural creations, were
showcased at the Smithsonian Institution’s Folklife Festival. The annual three-day event celebrates music, dance and culture from traditions across the globe. It showcased Kenya on the White House lawn with the famous glass hut by
Kitengela Glass on display. Croze sees a bright future for Kenyan art as more people now recognise and buy locally produced art pieces, with galleries beginning to sell art worth 2 million shillings a day.
To give back to society, Croze opened the second Steiner school in sub-Saharan Africa, which offers free education to 300 disadvantaged Maasai and refugee children in Kitengela. “The Waldorf Steiner education actually shows you physical, emotional and cerebral growth. Children need different things and grow in different ways,” Croze says. “It
makes you a free person, which is important; it makes you think your own way.” When Croze was very depressed and suicidal in her teens, she realised that “ the only way to get over thinking that you are unhappy is to look after somebody; an animal, or a plant… somebody needs you badly.” This, she believes, could explain why women live longer than men.
WORDS OF WISDOM
“Every day of work is a day of making an impact on others’ lives.”
“To get over unhappiness, look after somebody, an animal or a plant to care about.”
“Sometimes the worst things that can happen to us are the best things that can happen to us.”
“Plant trees!”
“I would like to tell every young person, woman or man, ‘Plant trees!’” Croze worked closely with Wangari Maathai and John Keen to preserve the environment and ecosystems of the Nairobi National Park and Karura Forest. She is a founder and member of Friends of City Park, and is committed to preserving Kenya’s natural green spaces for posterity.
Croze sees her life as leisure; she makes a living doing what she loves the most; she helps others and adds colour to life with her art while preserving it. All the work she produces at Kitengela Glass is 100 per cent recycled, such as
handbags made from newspapers, chandeliers from used glass, crockery and murals. The blown glass is made using recycled fuels from petrol stations and factories. Croze is always on the go. “I don’t need leisure. You can always sleep when you’re dead,” she quips.
Occasionally when she feels the need to relax, she retreats to her Eco Tower in Watamu at the coast. In addition to her art, she makes dairy products such as butter and cheese when she is not sketching or managing her workshop.