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