A Kenyan-born artist who had made his home in Jamaica for nearly three decades has been killed in a brazen armed robbery, prompting an outpouring of sorrow from creative communities on both sides of the Atlantic and renewed fears over violence in the Caribbean tourist haven where he lived.
Mazola wa Mwashighadi, 61, was shot in the early hours of Friday at a hotel in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth parish, on Jamaica’s south coast. Police said the attack unfolded around 12:20am in the Billy’s Bay area, where gunmen targeted the property in what appeared to be a robbery gone wrong. He was rushed to Mandeville Hospital but succumbed to his wounds shortly after arrival.
Jamaican authorities swiftly imposed a curfew in the vicinity and launched a manhunt for the perpetrators, vowing to bring them to justice. “This was a peaceful, loving community… The whole place is really in mourning right now,” said local hotelier Jason Henzell, who described Mwashighadi as a beloved fixture in Treasure Beach’s art and tourism scenes.
The artist had been planning a gallery to showcase his work and was deeply embedded in the area, having displayed pieces at the annual Easter art fair.
Born Patrick Mazola in Kenya’s Taita-Taveta district in 1964, he trained as a teacher before studying fine art in Nairobi, earning a diploma from the Creative Arts Centre. A 1997 Commonwealth fellowship took him to Jamaica’s Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, where he specialised in sculpture – and chose to stay.
Mwashighadi’s multidisciplinary practice wove together wood, metal and found objects – “junk and scrap” repurposed as symbols of healing and renewal in the Black diaspora. His abstract, ritualistic works grappled with identity, spirituality, environmental degradation, politics and the Kenyan heritage he carried abroad. “The Earth is our collective mother… We must cast away our flagged identities,” he wrote in a 2019 exhibition statement at Jamaica’s National Gallery.
Tributes flooded in from Nairobi to Kingston. Kenyan friend Muyesi Bemwinzi wrote: “Badly shaken by the killing of my brother and true friend… Rest easy till we meet again.” Tabitha wa Thuku, an artist who had hoped to collaborate, reflected: “We are spirits living in some form… The day he applied for the Commonwealth award, his killer was either being born or had just been born in Mazola’s favourite nation, Jamaica.”
Jamaican peer Andy Jefferson called it “absolutely devastating… Such a talented, peaceful, humble and wise soul who certainly never deserved this violent demise.” Henzell echoed the sentiment, noting the loss to plans for an artistic revival in the hurricane-battered region.
