A Multifaceted Journey of Art, Nature, and Healing
If you met him at an art exhibition, you might walk away thinking you’d just encountered a painter with an uncommon reverence for wildlife and culture. Meet him at a farmer’s expo, and you’d swear you’d found a bamboo evangelist on a green mission to save Uganda’s forests. Stumble upon him at a wellness retreat, and you might mistake him for a herbalist, reciting testimonies of healing through leaves and roots. That’s Taga Nuwagaba’s patchwork of purpose and passion, and he is all of those things.
“I keep changing like a chameleon,” he says with a chuckle, his eyes creasing in a way that makes you feel he’s at peace with his shape-shifting life. “People who have bought my art know one version of me. Those who’ve healed through my herbal remedies know another. Then there are those who only know me through bamboo—my farming and environmental work.” And yet, for all the roles he inhabits, one truth remains: Taga is a custodian of heritage, health, and hope.
Step into his modest studio, and the air itself seems to carry history. On one side, large sheets of watercolour paper rest against the wall, their surfaces alive with leopards mid-prowl, buffalo locked in quiet power, and monkeys swinging in sunlit foliage. You can almost hear the rustle of leaves, the low rumble of hoofbeats. The colours are rich but never gaudy—earth browns, the deep greens of banana groves, the ochre of clay soil. In some pieces, the fur on an animal looks so real you want to reach out and feel the softness.
“I mix my pigments myself,” he says, gesturing to jars filled with powders the colour of turmeric, ash, and ripe mango. “I want them to feel like the land itself.” Against another wall, a faded map of Buganda’s clans hangs beside a shelf of books on African spirituality. Two apprentices sit cross-legged on a mat, grinding pigment and listening to Taga speak softly about proportion and meaning.
“Painting is not just about likeness,” he tells them. “It’s about the life inside what you paint.” His most defining artistic work, Totems of Buganda, is both a visual and cultural landmark. In a series of large, meticulously rendered watercolours, he documents the 54 clans of the Buganda Kingdom, each represented by a symbolic animal.
“I didn’t just want to paint animals,” he says, voice steady with conviction. “I wanted to paint the identity of a people. Totems are living history, living identity. They are not decorations; they are our mirrors.” The project consumed years of his life—research trips to remote villages, hours with clan elders, careful listening to stories and rituals that have never been written down.
In his paintings, the Ngo (leopard) crouches in ancestral grace, eyes glinting with generational pride. The Nkima (monkey) swings through its branches not in play, but in tradition. The Mbogo (buffalo) stands powerful, as if guarding memory itself. “If our elders go without passing these stories, it’s not just culture we lose—it’s self-awareness,” he says.
Roots in Observation
Long before the world knew his name, a boy in rural Uganda sat quietly at the edges of village life, watching. He noticed how elders folded their hands when they spoke, how mats were woven, how a woman balanced a clay pot on her head without touching it. He recalls: “I was fascinated. Even as a child, I wanted to preserve what I saw. I didn’t know then that I was training my eyes for art.”
At Makerere University’s Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, he learned the techniques, realism, anatomy, composition, but it was his intention that made him different. “Many painted for beauty. I painted for memory,” he says. Over the years, the intention deepened into what could be called cultural realism—a style that doesn’t just capture life, but honours it.
His canvases hold kings and cattle herders, grandmothers with wisdom-lined faces, dancers mid-spin. They are not scenes to be glanced at, they are encounters. If his studio smells faintly of watercolour paper and ground pigment, his farm smells alive—green, wet, breathing. The bamboo grows tall, their stems rising like cathedral columns. When he grips one in his hands, the surface is cool and smooth, the skin tight over the fibre like a drum.
“People cut trees because they need timber,” he explains, running his palm along the curve of a culm. “But if bamboo can give us timber without cutting a tree, why shouldn’t we go there?” His farm is more than a field of green—it’s a laboratory of possibilities. He crafts furniture, sculptures, cellulose, and exports bamboo to the Netherlands. From the same stems, he produces soap rich in silica, collagen-rebuilding supplements, facial mists, even herbal tonics.
“It grows fast. It heals the land. It gives us what we need without destroying what we have,” he says. “That’s the future I want to see.”
Herbal Medicine and Survival
If bamboo began as a choice, herbal medicine began as survival. Years ago, a severe back injury left him bedridden for nine months. “Everyone else had failed. I was about to be flown to South Africa for surgery.” Then came an old woman with a concoction of leaves and bark. “She healed me,” he says simply, still sounding faintly astonished. “That was the turning point. I wanted to know—what is it in this medicine that the Western world could not discern?”
That question became a calling. He followed healers, asked questions, learned the properties of roots and leaves. Today, his home herbarium is a quiet pharmacy—remedies for prostate, stomach upsets, eye irritations. In glass jars, dried herbs release a faint, earthy perfume. His children have grown up knowing which leaf to pluck for a fever, which bark to brew for a cough. “At home, my children treat themselves. When we are abroad and something happens, they know what to do. That’s beautiful.”
For Taga, whether it’s painting, farming, or healing, the principle is the same: Belief plus focus equals growth. “Whatever you focus on enlarges,” he says. “Look at a fig tree—it comes from a seed the size of a grain. That’s potential. If you water it, it grows into what it was meant to be.” He shares this philosophy with young people in his mentorship programmes. “You must focus,” he tells them. “Peter walked on water until he doubted himself. That’s what happens to dreams—if you don’t believe, they sink.” He’s not talking in metaphors for effect; he’s speaking from experience.
There were years he couldn’t afford canvas, when paintings sold for food, when Uganda’s art buyers didn’t seem to want what he had to offer. “But I stayed the course, because someone had to paint the past into the future.”
Cultural Preservation and the Future
Globalisation has many gifts—but also a quiet erosion. In Uganda, languages fade, rites of passage are replaced by hashtags, folk songs give way to imported beats. “Culture is not backward,” Taga says. “It’s the spine. If we forget our totems, our dances, our stories, we lose more than tradition—we lose self-awareness.” He refuses to produce watered-down versions of Uganda for foreign exhibitions. If he paints a dance, it features the right drum and the right calabash. If he paints a wedding, it includes the kneeling ritual and the bark cloth.
“People abroad love it because it’s true. Not because it’s exotic, but because it teaches.” There is still one dream he is chasing—a Cultural Heritage Institute. “I imagine a place where a painter can learn about totems, a digital designer can learn bark cloth textures, and a fashion student can trace indigenous motifs. It would be a home for our heritage.” He already has the land and architectural designs. What’s missing is the funding. But he is undeterred. “If I have to start with a tent and a mat, so be it. We cannot wait for foreigners to preserve what is ours.”
Away from the exhibitions and the farms, Taga lives modestly. He spends long hours in nature or among elders, listening, absorbing. He rarely courts publicity. “Fame is not legacy,” he says. “Impact is.” His life, in many ways, has been a long testament to resilience—shifting forms like the chameleon he likens himself to, yet always grounded in a purpose greater than his own. In his world, art becomes activism, farming transforms into healing, and belief stands as the true currency of growth.
To call him simply an artist, or farmer, or healer is to name only one colour of his spectrum. He is each hue—and the light behind them. Yes, he keeps changing like a chameleon. But his heart, like his bamboo, has always stayed green and natural.