Eventually, a compromise was reached with the commissioning of a traditional statue depicting three servicemen with a flag to stand at the entrance to the memorial.
Traditional statue-in-a-square public art can seem increasingly beside the point or, at best, lost in the shuffle, but that's not stopping it from proliferating in often alarming forms, both in and out of those strange precincts called sculpture parks.
"This is where they were," said Ms. Mwakiru, 86, pointing out where her husband erected two traditional wooden statues, known as vigango by the local Mijikenda people, around 1983.
We know at the start what's at stake as we watch a line of traditional carved statues shot to pieces.
In recent years, the artist has moved away from performance and worked on Buddhist sculptures, bringing new ideas and styles to traditional Buddhist statues, while also working with incense ash, which he collects from temples and molds into paintings and sculptures.
Chances are it won't be through traditional busts and statues.
Even so, nomads high in the mountains struggle on with their traditional ways, and Lenin statues dominate cityscapes.
Iconic and verbal representations of various familiar traditional kinds dolls, hobby horses, statues, paintings, novels are inanimate props, artifacts whose whole raison d'être is to help generate fictional content in make-believe games of various familiar recurrent kinds.
