A ROCKET HAS LANDED ON ZIMBABWE'S SOIL
...and just when I thought there was no such thing as a UFO. This one carried home Arthur Mutambara who could not have landed any other way; its a dangerous journey by road and flight passenger lists are watched closely by the spooks. He is going to fight the Mugabe regime `tooth, nail and claw'. No guns I am glad to note. Not even the `axes and spears' that the gentle Enoch Dumbutshena had the temerity to mention fourteen or so years back. This one is a natural fighter, taking his cue from the sage who gave us `nature, red in tooth and claw'. The image is scary but thrilling. A REAL professor this one. We have had so many charlatans awarding themselves the title. But this new excitement of the opposition taking off with a rocket scientist - aeronautics is close enough - is dizzying.
To shift to another allusion: he came with an earthquake, didn't he? Mozambique last week experienced a huge one - 7.5 on the Richter scale and its tremors were felt as far off as Harare and Bulawayo. Even in Johannesburg. Mr Mbeki must have felt it. Tell the people that when a man of Arthur's calibre lands on Zimbabwe's soil and says he's going to help kick out the tyrant, and the earth moves, its magic. That's the sort of thing they need to believe in since all else, especially `quiet diplomacy' has failed. Only a leader proclaiming himself `the Anti-Senate leader of the Pro-Senate faction' could utter such powerful incantations. And all this in the midst of Mugabe's 82nd birthday celebrations which nobody in the opposition wanted to attend. Maybe they hadn't heard about it?
And there's more mystery. Some would call it synchronicity. What about coincidence? The MDC Pro-Senate faction has just got its 18bn worth of funding for its parliamentarians. Patrick Chinamasa, the responsible Minister, says he hasn't heard about the split: lucky he went blind and deaf for a short while when that decision was being debated in the corridors of power. It gets better: a new bill is on the way, nicknamed `crosstitution' (who was the genius who thought that one up?). MDC Members of Parliament will, under this law, be allowed to keep their seats, whatever their factional or political preference. With a little more luck, some `loyal' ZANU (PF) MPs might perhaps think about crossing to the MDC if it means the money keeps coming in. Nobody can afford to lose a job in a Zimbabwe with 70-80% unemployment.
Sad though it is that Budiriro MP for the MDC, Gilbert Shoko, has passed away at this moment of joy, his spirit will surely smile upon Arthur and his re-invigorated band of knights and damsels as they take up the fight again at a by election.
Zimbabweans, keep your eyes on the stars! Watch out as you make your flight to the moon for the spirits of Kaguvi and Nehanda hovering out there.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
Monday, February 27, 2006
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
MY STORY OF ZIMBABWE'S PACHIPAMWE ARTISTS
HOW PACHIPAMWE, REALLY BEGAN
by original organizer, Diana Mitchell
* Pachipamwe (Shona) means `where we are all together’
Sculptor, Tapfuma Gutsa recently featured in The Zimbabwean. This remarkable man rose rapidly after he first came to public’s attention in 1987 to become one of Zimbabwe’s most gifted, original, prolific and successful artists. Now living in Austria, he will be re-united with many of his fellow Zimbabweans and welcomed with enthusiasm, I am sure, when he accompanies a forthcoming exhibition of his work to the UK in March/April this year. I shall strive mightily to attend it.
The author of his brief biography in TZ is correct in respect of Tapfuma’s attendance at that first, 1988 Pachipamwe artists’ workshop, but Tapfuma did not organize that event. I did, and almost single handedly at that - and only because I was persuaded to do so by Mrs Pat Pearce. Derek Huggins took on the next workshop at Cyrene in Bulawayo in 1989 and I was arm-twisted again, with Roger Nichols, to organize another workshop at Barrowdale Farm, Marondera in 1990. Tapfuma and his wife took up the task in a subsequent Pachipamwe workshop held in the Midlands, where they were living at the time.
I am not an artist, but my talents were for organizing and promoting fellow Zimbabweans when called upon do so. The true story of how Pachipamwe began is known by many Zimbabwe artists who were there at the Culture Centre where we `workshopped’ in Macheke in 1988.
It was Pat Pearce, famous in her own right as an artist and inarguably the woman who first recognised the innate talent of Zimbabwe’s sculptors when she met the late, celebrated Joram Mariga, in the sixties. He was at the time an agricultural demonstrator in the Eastern Highlands where they both lived. He was carving in sandstone, plentiful in the area, and it was directly through her contacts and influence that Zimbabwe’s sculptors were brought into world prominence. Two men are next in importance in this history: Frank McEwan, the director of the National Gallery in Salisbury in the sixties and Tom Blomefield, an entrepreneurial, former tobacco farmer who set his farm workers to carving out of stone. McEwan promoted Mariga and many of the country’s early, most famous sculptors including the late, great Henry Munyaradzi who had been a labourer at Blomefield’s Tengenenge farm until international sanctions (after UDI in 1965) temporarily knocked the bottom out of Rhodesia’s tobacco industry. The magnificent deposits of beautiful stone near Bonda Mission and at Tengenenge in the Tengwe Block in close proximity to the mineral rich hills of the Great Dyke, by countless artists and their patrons made a huge contribution to the progress of Zimbabwe’s stone sculptors.
A key event - Tapfuma’s installation of a burning edifice, exhibited in Harare’s public gardens behind the National Gallery in 1987 was seen by Pat Pearce. After that, Tapfuma, encouraged by his own and many talented family members’ success at sculpting, never looked back. The thread of the Pachipamwe story goes back through a British businessman friend of Mrs Pearce and of internationally famed sculptor Anthony Caro. Here, it was Caro who conceived of and Loder who helped to promote the idea of the `Triangle’ workshops where artists are closeted together (rather like celebrity Big Brother) for two weeks, to influence and inspire each other’s work.
Pat Pearce predicted that Tapfuma was a rising star among Zimbabwe’s already recognized sculptors and insisted that I invite this charismatic, dreadlocked young artist to the first Pachipamwe workshop. Mrs Pearce was right about Tapfuma. Where artistic excellence was concerned, she always was.
Surprised to find myself moving among artists at this time, I continued for many years to help Tom Blomefield whenever his Tengenenge sculpture enterprise faltered. Mostly it prospered, but that is a story deserving of a long chapter in a well researched book on art in Zimbabwe before the country was ruined, that I would rather read than write.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
by original organizer, Diana Mitchell
* Pachipamwe (Shona) means `where we are all together’
Sculptor, Tapfuma Gutsa recently featured in The Zimbabwean. This remarkable man rose rapidly after he first came to public’s attention in 1987 to become one of Zimbabwe’s most gifted, original, prolific and successful artists. Now living in Austria, he will be re-united with many of his fellow Zimbabweans and welcomed with enthusiasm, I am sure, when he accompanies a forthcoming exhibition of his work to the UK in March/April this year. I shall strive mightily to attend it.
The author of his brief biography in TZ is correct in respect of Tapfuma’s attendance at that first, 1988 Pachipamwe artists’ workshop, but Tapfuma did not organize that event. I did, and almost single handedly at that - and only because I was persuaded to do so by Mrs Pat Pearce. Derek Huggins took on the next workshop at Cyrene in Bulawayo in 1989 and I was arm-twisted again, with Roger Nichols, to organize another workshop at Barrowdale Farm, Marondera in 1990. Tapfuma and his wife took up the task in a subsequent Pachipamwe workshop held in the Midlands, where they were living at the time.
I am not an artist, but my talents were for organizing and promoting fellow Zimbabweans when called upon do so. The true story of how Pachipamwe began is known by many Zimbabwe artists who were there at the Culture Centre where we `workshopped’ in Macheke in 1988.
It was Pat Pearce, famous in her own right as an artist and inarguably the woman who first recognised the innate talent of Zimbabwe’s sculptors when she met the late, celebrated Joram Mariga, in the sixties. He was at the time an agricultural demonstrator in the Eastern Highlands where they both lived. He was carving in sandstone, plentiful in the area, and it was directly through her contacts and influence that Zimbabwe’s sculptors were brought into world prominence. Two men are next in importance in this history: Frank McEwan, the director of the National Gallery in Salisbury in the sixties and Tom Blomefield, an entrepreneurial, former tobacco farmer who set his farm workers to carving out of stone. McEwan promoted Mariga and many of the country’s early, most famous sculptors including the late, great Henry Munyaradzi who had been a labourer at Blomefield’s Tengenenge farm until international sanctions (after UDI in 1965) temporarily knocked the bottom out of Rhodesia’s tobacco industry. The magnificent deposits of beautiful stone near Bonda Mission and at Tengenenge in the Tengwe Block in close proximity to the mineral rich hills of the Great Dyke, by countless artists and their patrons made a huge contribution to the progress of Zimbabwe’s stone sculptors.
A key event - Tapfuma’s installation of a burning edifice, exhibited in Harare’s public gardens behind the National Gallery in 1987 was seen by Pat Pearce. After that, Tapfuma, encouraged by his own and many talented family members’ success at sculpting, never looked back. The thread of the Pachipamwe story goes back through a British businessman friend of Mrs Pearce and of internationally famed sculptor Anthony Caro. Here, it was Caro who conceived of and Loder who helped to promote the idea of the `Triangle’ workshops where artists are closeted together (rather like celebrity Big Brother) for two weeks, to influence and inspire each other’s work.
Pat Pearce predicted that Tapfuma was a rising star among Zimbabwe’s already recognized sculptors and insisted that I invite this charismatic, dreadlocked young artist to the first Pachipamwe workshop. Mrs Pearce was right about Tapfuma. Where artistic excellence was concerned, she always was.
Surprised to find myself moving among artists at this time, I continued for many years to help Tom Blomefield whenever his Tengenenge sculpture enterprise faltered. Mostly it prospered, but that is a story deserving of a long chapter in a well researched book on art in Zimbabwe before the country was ruined, that I would rather read than write.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
DID IAN SMITH'S SON AVERT A COUP IN 1980?
Alec Douglas Smith died tragically young, recently. In an obituary (Independent Feb 2, 2006) Rebecca Saintonge states: `He was not the sort of person you'd think had been instrumental in averting a military coup.But this is what he did, and, in so doing, helped change the course of his country's history'.
I know little about Alec Smith, other than of his remarkable conversion from rebel son of the man who led my country into a disastrous rebellion against the Crown - or rather, against the British government in November 1965 - to friend of `moderate' African nationalists. But I know a fair amount about Ian Douglas Smith and a great deal about the character of African nationalism and -ists during that turbulent period of Rhodesia's history. I knew, personally, most of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's men (and a few women) including the Bishop himself and especially the Rev. Arthur Kanodereka who is the central figure in Saintonge's story. I shall do more research because thus far I have revised Alec Smith's `Now I call Him Brother' and re-read the relevant sections in Ken Flower's `Serving Secretly' - and, of course, Ian Smith's `The Great Betrayal' but it is not in these books that historians will necessarily arrive at the whole truth of the matter. Not that I doubt the claim that it was Alec who got the peacemaker, Arthur to meet his (Alec's) powerful father and thus created a bond of mutual understanding between the two men. But I seriously doubt whether it was Arthur and Alec alone who influenced the course of events leading to the averting of a potentially catastrophic coup. In any case, Arthur was assassinated long before the question of a coup was remotely considered, shot by night on a lonely roadsideby unknown assailants. This was possibly by agents bent on destroying the short, successful progress that his boss, Bishop Muzorewa, was making in his alliance with Smith. That alliance I know for sure, was forged yearsl before the events flowing from the Lancaster House peace agreement were under way. I know exactly how the RF regime `came around' to dealing with the ANC. I was there, I repeat - moving among the Bishop's ANC leaders including the Bishop himself. (Ask him: he may remember a meeting for the Bishop with Sir Henry McDowell, arranged by the Centre Party leaders, including myself). We were all agreed that dialogue was the only way to stop the war. Muzorewa poked his forefinger directly at my sternum "I see that we (the ANC) are preaching to the converted (McDowell and the 'liberals' of the CP)" he said. "go and get the people in power (your RF friends) to talk to us". I was nowhere near Ian Smith at any time, having personally and politically waged a twelve year campaign in opposition to his politics but I beat a path to the office of Senator Sam Whaley, a powerful member of Smith's party. He knew that I moved among nationalist leaders (see my 1997 Who's Who of African Nationalist leaders) and gave me a polite but defiant hearing. Then I tried Hilary Squires, my former friend and fellow student at the University of Cape Town who had joined the RF (he is currently in the SA News for presiding over the Shaik case) He was defensive of Smith but would have been sure to carry the message of the Bishop's willingness to negotiate with the RF.
So you see, I have a good memory of this and other events leading up to the Rhodesian Front's capitulation to the demands for African majority rule. As for the conditions prevailing when Governor Lord Soames was briefly in charge in Salisbury during the infinitely delicate moment of the final preparations for the handover of power to the African majority, I doubt they were conducive for the intervention of Ian Smith (and his General, Peter Walls) at that moment when there was a real danger of a coup (see Ken Flower's final chapter). But I was there (see my Foxtrot blog above) in Enkeldoorn, on the way to an Assembly point, hearing in that famous village pub, talk about the mutterings of the Rhodesian army who would have liked to stage a coup..... but more later.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
I know little about Alec Smith, other than of his remarkable conversion from rebel son of the man who led my country into a disastrous rebellion against the Crown - or rather, against the British government in November 1965 - to friend of `moderate' African nationalists. But I know a fair amount about Ian Douglas Smith and a great deal about the character of African nationalism and -ists during that turbulent period of Rhodesia's history. I knew, personally, most of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's men (and a few women) including the Bishop himself and especially the Rev. Arthur Kanodereka who is the central figure in Saintonge's story. I shall do more research because thus far I have revised Alec Smith's `Now I call Him Brother' and re-read the relevant sections in Ken Flower's `Serving Secretly' - and, of course, Ian Smith's `The Great Betrayal' but it is not in these books that historians will necessarily arrive at the whole truth of the matter. Not that I doubt the claim that it was Alec who got the peacemaker, Arthur to meet his (Alec's) powerful father and thus created a bond of mutual understanding between the two men. But I seriously doubt whether it was Arthur and Alec alone who influenced the course of events leading to the averting of a potentially catastrophic coup. In any case, Arthur was assassinated long before the question of a coup was remotely considered, shot by night on a lonely roadsideby unknown assailants. This was possibly by agents bent on destroying the short, successful progress that his boss, Bishop Muzorewa, was making in his alliance with Smith. That alliance I know for sure, was forged yearsl before the events flowing from the Lancaster House peace agreement were under way. I know exactly how the RF regime `came around' to dealing with the ANC. I was there, I repeat - moving among the Bishop's ANC leaders including the Bishop himself. (Ask him: he may remember a meeting for the Bishop with Sir Henry McDowell, arranged by the Centre Party leaders, including myself). We were all agreed that dialogue was the only way to stop the war. Muzorewa poked his forefinger directly at my sternum "I see that we (the ANC) are preaching to the converted (McDowell and the 'liberals' of the CP)" he said. "go and get the people in power (your RF friends) to talk to us". I was nowhere near Ian Smith at any time, having personally and politically waged a twelve year campaign in opposition to his politics but I beat a path to the office of Senator Sam Whaley, a powerful member of Smith's party. He knew that I moved among nationalist leaders (see my 1997 Who's Who of African Nationalist leaders) and gave me a polite but defiant hearing. Then I tried Hilary Squires, my former friend and fellow student at the University of Cape Town who had joined the RF (he is currently in the SA News for presiding over the Shaik case) He was defensive of Smith but would have been sure to carry the message of the Bishop's willingness to negotiate with the RF.
So you see, I have a good memory of this and other events leading up to the Rhodesian Front's capitulation to the demands for African majority rule. As for the conditions prevailing when Governor Lord Soames was briefly in charge in Salisbury during the infinitely delicate moment of the final preparations for the handover of power to the African majority, I doubt they were conducive for the intervention of Ian Smith (and his General, Peter Walls) at that moment when there was a real danger of a coup (see Ken Flower's final chapter). But I was there (see my Foxtrot blog above) in Enkeldoorn, on the way to an Assembly point, hearing in that famous village pub, talk about the mutterings of the Rhodesian army who would have liked to stage a coup..... but more later.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)