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Daily Maverick
04-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
Focusing on our formal colonial past obscures the inconvenient present (Part 1)
The corporate takeover of South African universities is the living legacy of Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate/politician. This ought to be a prime focus of students who describe themselves as radical, instead of dividing themselves on 'racial' lines. Part 1 in a two-part series. This year is the 10th anniversary of the student rebellion in South Africa and the explosion of the new concepts in popular discussion of colonialism and decolonisation. Forming a related group of ideas are decolonising the mind; a homogenous Africa, along with a similarly homogeneous Global South; and settler colonialism. Other than settler colonialism, which is for another time, this two-part series seeks to show why each of them is problematic. Decolonising the mind is arguably the most obfuscating, while also the most open to question. 1 Colonialism Colonialism is commonly understood as one country establishing and maintaining political and economic control over another territory and its people. Leading dictionaries, encyclopaedias and even the UN agree on this. The Oxford English Dictionary (2014) offers: 'The policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country… and exploiting it economically.' The Encyclopedia Britannica's version is more succinct: 'The control by one country over another area and its people.' For the UN's General Assembly, Resolution 1514, of 1960, colonialism is 'The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation.' 2 Decolonisation It might surprise knowing that this term has conservative, anti-decolonisation origins, having been coined by the British and French 20th century administrations confronted by nationalist movements and anticolonial liberation struggles sweeping across Asia and Africa. The strategic aim of these colonial administrations was the orderly and prolonged transfer of political control to already established native elites who would minimise changes to the existing colonial architecture. In the 21st century, the term — now widely expanded — is still evoked by the elites in the former colonies. In many ways, sections of the broad left support versions of this conservative understanding of decolonisation, as Pranay Somayajula, a Washington DC-based writer, demonstrates. I shall be drawing on him in some of what follows. In many ways, this expanded use of decolonisation reflects the influence of 'coloniality', a school of thought that emerged in the 1990s in Latin America. Coloniality, in its critique of modernity, emphasises colonialism's importance in shaping modernity. Indeed, decolonial theorists often combine 'modernity' and 'coloniality' as a single term: modernity/coloniality. As two leading exponents of coloniality, Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, write: The 'horizon' of decoloniality is not limited to 'the political independence of nation-states' or 'the confrontation with capitalism and the West,' but rather with 'the habits that modernity/coloniality implanted in all of us; with how modernity/coloniality has worked and continues to work to negate, disavow, distort and deny knowledges, subjectivities, world senses, and life visions'. Framing decolonisation in this way transforms it into a need for psychological liberation, a process of unlearning colonial ideology and reclaiming identity, dignity, and agency. The need to 'delink' from these Eurocentric systems of knowledge and power is, for them, a task whose goal is 'no longer to 'take hold of the state' but to engage in epistemic and subjective reconstitution' [On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)] Such disavowals of modernity make it appealing to conservativism, in all its manifestations. Before suggesting what lies behind this development of decoloniality, which embraces all the major, current forms of Identity worldwide — be they racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, language or nation — held by the formerly colonised non-white people, it is important to recognise that Identity, regardless of which particular one, is a social construct. It follows from the rejection of biological essentialism as being without any scientific basis that there is nothing for the supposedly inferior people to prove. This applies to Identity, irrespective of which one different people choose. The challenge is to ensure that the prejudices of the most jaundiced of jingoists are not internalised. There is thus no need to invent cultural histories or celebrate the achievements by, specifically, members of former colonised people. Yet, it is precisely this need to disprove all the dogmas that is daily on display. Hindu nationalism is a prime example of this from Asia. Pranay Somayajula reminds us that, in their calls for a return to an imagined Hindu civilisational glory, a 'golden age', current Hindu leaders frequently invoke the language of overcoming a 'colonised mindset' and reviving so-called 'Indic consciousness' — the array of 'indigenous' philosophies, cosmologies, and epistemologies supposedly suppressed by centuries of Islamic and British colonisation alike. In its most exaggerated form, this atavism can be observed in the viral memes claiming that ancient Indians invented everything from aircraft to nuclear weapons to the internet. This need to invent their own culture or achievements resulted in Afro-Americans inventing their own Christmas, Kwanzaa, in 1966, with twenty-first century estimates of the number of Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa being between 500,000 and 2,000,000. Expressing the same need, African nationalists claimed — some still do — that the Pyramids and the Sphinx were built by black Africans, not Egyptian Arabs, with the Sphinx having been deliberately bombed in order to remove a characteristically African nose. Some black Africans, including those of African descent worldwide, of the Christian faith argue that Jesus was black. Moving on to South Africa, decolonisation hit us, from seemingly nowhere, when a few students at the University of Cape Town threw shit at a statue of Cecil John Rhodes in March 2015. Since then, it has blown across the whole of South Africa to be inhaled as fresh air. Conferences on the subject are big business; there's even a Decolonisation Foundation. To be anything less than exhilarated by the whirlwind is to run the risk of being roughly attacked as racist or reactionary. The gale has especially shaken universities: their need for a thoroughly decolonised makeover, including what is taught and by whom, is the new orthodoxy. During the student rebellion of 2015-17, those who shouted the loudest often made fools of themselves. The proposed rejection of science as a non-African, white Eurocentric imposition was reported across the world. Less well known but in the same league were the medical students who rejected a practical on ankle injuries because the lecturer, attempting to make it real life, had linked the injury to football and football was deemed to be an alien, non-African colonial import. In a similar vein was — and is — the automatic rejection of reading lists on technical subjects purely because the authors are from Europe or the US. Subjects such as architecture have been disavowed for being non-African. Expressions of this same drive for constantly disproving white prejudice was recognised, along with its implicit rebuke, by Mamphela Ramphele, a noted academic, besides being Steve Biko's one-time partner, who said 'we have largely bought into the lie that black people do not have the capacity to excel'. Exposing the lie is manifested in things such as: The need for street names to show that black people are capable of having their own heroes. The rejection of the Homo Naledi fossils because black people have not evolved from baboons. The national celebration following the first black South African to have climbed Mount Everest, a feat which, according to then president Thabo Mbeki, made all South Africans 'stick out our chests in justifiable pride and wonder'. The ANC Women's League's celebration (without any irony) that President Jacob Zuma had used a 'wholly black-owned' bank to pay his Public Prosecutor-ordered, maleficence-laden Nkandla bill. The league's secretary-general noted that the president's 'confidence in supporting black-owned businesses is humbling'. This bank subsequently turned out to be the notorious VBS! The celebration of 'Ubuntu' as a uniquely black South African contribution to world philosophy and ethics. The then minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs, Thoko Didiza, who in 2000 announced that the government wanted to build 'a core of successful black farmers in this country. We want to move away from a perception that only white farmers can make it commercially, and that subsistence farming is only for Africans'. For then president Jacob Zuma it was a case of: 'Let us solve African problems the African way, not the white man's way. Let us not be influenced by other cultures…' The need for black people to be rich to prove black ability and the consequent — and often unconscionable — conspicuous consumption to display black achievement. Thabo Mbeki, the urbane, cosmopolitan, British university-educated intellectual, surprised many by his evident internalisation of the most extreme views of supposedly biologically determined black behaviour. His denial of Aids stands testimony to his fear that the worst of white racism is accurate. Consider the following, for instance, from 11 August 2000: 'The white politician (a reference to Tony Leon who had attacked his Aids denialism) makes bold to speak openly of his disdain and contempt for African solutions to the challenges that face the peoples of our continent. According to him… these solutions, because they are African, could not but consist of pagan, savage, superstitious and unscientific responses typical of the African people, described by the white politician as resorting 'to snake-oil cures and quackery'… This racism has defined us who are African and black as primitive, pagan, slaves to the most irrational superstitions and inherently prone to brute violence.' Or, after referring to medical schools where black people were 'reminded of their role as germ carriers', Mbeki said: 'Thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards (evidently referring to trade union leaders and Aids activists) to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its (sic) passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease… Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.' The gruesome reality of Aids rules out any irony in Mbeki's comments. Let me further make explicit and unequivocal that, notwithstanding the above, colonialism was both real and a primary determinant in shaping our history and socioeconomic architecture. In addition, the rediscovery of colonialism is essential to the final burial of the idea that apartheid — the racial organisation and structure of South Africa — began only in 1948, when the Calvinist Afrikaners, unlike the nice, liberal English, took over the running of South Africa. 3 The colonisation supposedly in need of decolonising the mind The left in South Africa, Europe and the US were/are leading advocates of a decolonisation centred on universities and what is taught there. With South Africa this time being the unusual vanguard, meant Britain and the US — particularly since the Black Lives Matter uprisings of summer 2020 — catching up with the demands made by South African students five years earlier. 'Among the most visible targets' of this catching up, Pranay Somayajula notes, 'were intellectual and cultural institutions — universities, museums, archives, and the like — which came under pressure to 'decolonise' through gestures such as land acknowledgments, renaming buildings, repatriating looted artifacts, and reworking curricula to more adequately 'centre' black and indigenous voices.' This forced European institutions to reckon with their complicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, North American institutions to reckon with their complicity in settler-colonial violence against the continent's indigenous peoples, and institutions to reckon with their complicity in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Somayajula's conclusion is that this focus 'on the institutions that function as pillars of Western knowledge production constitutes in many ways an indictment of Western epistemology itself… Implicit in this critique of dominant forms of knowledge production is a call to uplift in their place the indigenous ways of knowing and being that have been suppressed by the same processes of colonial violence and dispossession in which these institutions were (and are) complicit.' South Africa's student rebellion of 2015-17 provides a case study of what this means in practice. The student who threw the poo at Rhodes' statue that sparked the rebellion came dressed as a mine worker. The Marikana Massacre of 2012 is a stark reminder that the problem is not colonialism, or Rhodes' dead legacy, but the awful power of his very-much-alive mining descendants, for whom colonialism is rightly history. The exclusive focusing on the colonial insult symbolised by Rhodes' statue leaves this living legacy untouched. Shouting for the removal of other 'white colonial' names — like in 'Jameson' Hall — makes it very easy for the university authorities to agree. It is easy for them to do so for it serves as a distractive anachronism. Focusing on our formal colonial past obscures the inconvenient present and its truth that UCT is heavily reliant on the various post-colonial forms of Rhodes' legacy for its current funding; a reliance reflected in so many of the corporate names that now festoon supposed 'academic' buildings. Indeed, the entire corporate takeover of all universities, not just UCT, is the living legacy of Rhodes, the mining magnate/politician. This ought to be a prime focus of students who describe themselves as radical. Instead, they divided themselves on so-called 'racial' lines and, as a final mocking irony, did so using the 'races' Rhodes did so much to institutionalise as part of his divide-and-rule legacy. His contribution to the forced creation of an African working class with a ready and self-replenishing supply of dirt-cheap labour for his gold mines is a prominent feature of his legacy. The supposedly 'black students' demanding the removal of the offending statue bring warmth to the coffins containing the heroes of the apartheid pantheon, beginning with Dr Hendrik Verwoerd. These apartheid architects argued that the four 'races' of apartheid South Africa reflected a natural order in which each 'race' had to live separate from the others because of their natural differences and in-born wishes. 'Coloureds' and 'Indians' are not black, according to the students who accused the formerly white universities of still being predominately 'white'. Students were not welcome at some of the student gatherings because of their 'whiteness', even though they fully supported the 'black' campaign to remove Rhodes from UCT as part of the decolonisation campaign that swept the country. Rhodes, too, would have greatly enjoyed this spectacle of how students allowed the 'races' he helped manufacture to divide themselves, even while campaigning against his 'colonial' legacy of dispossession and subjugation. Colour-coding access to scarce resources is the main hallmark of the new, post-apartheid, non-racial South Africa. We'll be returning to this issue in due course. The right wing has also been prolific in its understanding of what decolonising means. The well-known academic, Professor William Gumede, of Wits University, provides one such example in his 2022 Daily Maverick article, ' African economic transformation demands a radical shock to failed post-colonial system '. His article begins: 'Several types of collective mindset changes drove the astonishing industrial transformation of the East Asian developmental states from similar poverty levels to their African and developing country peers, to levels of development similar to or better than those of their former colonial occupiers.' And ends: 'If… South Africa and other African and developing countries want to mimic the extraordinary and radical economic transformation of the East Asian tiger economies, (they) will have to undergo drastic individual and collective mindset changes, and overhaul old institutions, behaviours and customs. Without such a shock to thinking patterns, they will stay locked in mass underdevelopment, poverty and instability.' A single word defines his remedy: entrepreneurship. It is this, he contends, that has transformed all four of the countries he mentions: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. What he singularly fails to mention is that the first three countries all owe their good fortune to the privileges the US allowed them as an integral part of the post-World War 2 challenge posed by both the Soviet Union and the then China. Highly selective perception is required to see Singapore as a success story, as detailed in 'Singapore — little to sing about despite Greg Mills' call for encores', my January 2024 response to a Daily Maverick article by Greg Mills. (This response is the only one never published by the Daily Maverick but is available on request.) Franz Fanon now enters the story with his seminal book, first published in 1952, Black Skin, White Masks. Many worldwide have long attributed the need to decolonise the mind to this book. Yet 'decolonise' does not appear in the book, not even once. It is, indeed, part of his book, The Wretched of the Earth. This difference is not an academic quibble. It alerts us to the confusions caused by the misuse of colonialism and why that matters. Considerably.
Mail & Guardian
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Mail & Guardian
The unfinished business of Rhodes Must Fall, Sarah Baartman and Jameson
#RhodesMustFall protest. Ten years ago, on the slopes of Table Mountain, known long ago as Hoerikwaggo, the mountain rising from the sea, the #RhodesMustFall student movement at the University of Cape Town achieved its first aim: the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed, but echoes of fissures remain. On 9 April, the university held an official commemoration attended by the vice-chancellor, a deputy-VC, a dean, a chair and select There are several Rhodes Must Falls in #RhodesMustFall. We can hear multiple voices in Rhodes Must Fall, that are diverse and discursive, colliding and competing, that contest and oppose each other, even and especially within the same movement and same place. Under the differences was this movement's ability to critically engage across differences and act with clarity, cohesion, precision and tenacity . A diaspora of MustFalls flowed from this place on the mountain. The movement created a language for addressing tangible and intangible, cultural and material, individual and structural, symbolic and embodied, ideological and curricula issues that people faced in many other places and forms. #RhodesMustFall was not only about the statue, it was also about imperialism. And a removal is not only an end, it is also a beginning. It's been a decade since #RhodesMustFall emerged from here. What work remains? How do we remember the past and make better futures? What do South Africans do with public memory? What does the university do with the public memory of Rhodes Must Fall? How does the University of Cape Town treat it? Look at some ways we've done so before. Bury it, deny it? Discard it like body parts left on the side of the road to rot, like the dead dogs left on the sides of Joburg's highways? Or put it in an ossuary and tack it onto a coffee shop like the Prestwich Memorial in Cape Town, which holds thousands of bones in brown boxes, the remains of people who were enslaved and mass-buried in District 1, taken from the earth and put on shelves? Or just … forget it? Forgetting is not an action one can 'do', it happens if conditions are met for a memory to be forgotten, for it to lose its charge, for it to heal. It can happen when what haunts us is dealt with. Forgetting is different from erasure and silence. Erasure is a speech act of writing over one text with another; painting over ink with Tipp-Ex, rubbing out pencil markings, deleting information on a computer. Erasing does not remove what was there before but rather re-addresses resources; it marks the resource-storage-address as free so that new data can be written over the old data. Silence is like erasure — an act of covering up something; striking through text and writing over, often called 'blank space'. In both cases, traces remain of what was there before. While South Africans try to (or are gaslit to) forget certain things, erasure by way of strategic silence in official statements, media releases and so forth, abounds. These missing and misleading pieces of information shape memory and history, and often haunt us. Perhaps what South Africans do after years upon years of deafening, haunting silence is better. They build a monument, a memorial, have a press event, an exhibition or move some graves from here to there. Or put photographs on the internet of some skeletons held by the university. Or remove a name off a building and put up a new one for use — only to not do so in other places. I am talking about the building that is the face of the university and where students have their graduation ceremonies. Jameson Memorial Hall was renamed Sarah Baartman Hall in December 2018, with the old name coming down and the new name going up in August and September of 2019, with no public announcement or ceremony at the time. It took two more years for there to be a ceremony for this renaming — in 2021. It was one of three Khoi cleansing ceremonies: one at the Rustenburg Remains site, a slave memorial; one where the Rhodes statue once stood at UCT on Table Mountain; and one at Sarah Baartman Hall. But there are still places where the old name lives. It seems Sarah Baartman is not allowed to grace the library. Why delete the old name in some places and not others? Is this how to deal with public memory? Surely deletion must be from all devices, formats, databases, libraries and servers? In whose interest is it to erase new public memories; at whose cost? So that is South African public memory. It confuses. And this confusion works against the work of re/pairing our histories, and futures. Her name was summoned. Her memory. That bears ethical responsibilities. Sarah Baartman is a historical, biographical person who has been 'made into' a public figure in our national memory. A diaspora of voices also flows from her. Is this the way to treat her, and them? The university is now a hybrid institution. The dynamics of hybrid institutions, governance, accountability and dissent are important for us to consider at this 10th anniversary of the MustFall moments, alongside an embodied, increasingly digital planet. Perhaps many people no longer use the library, perhaps no one noticed this contradiction, perhaps people don't mind. I do. I mind. One needs to ask, what is at stake? Truth, memory, dignity, rolling back the story, and the accountability of institutions to its publics. Histories and memories and bodies are written over. Silence. Erasure. Deletion. Sarah Baartman remains missing, somewhere. Vikram IK Pancham is a public artist, researcher and educator, and a PhD candidate at the African Studies Centre at Leiden University and the Centre of African Studies at Edinburgh University.
Los Angeles Times
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Zimbabwe stone carvers seek a revival as an Oxford exhibition confronts British colonial past
CHITUNGWIZA, Zimbabwe — A pair of white hands blinding a Black face. A smiling colonizer with a Bible, crushing the skull of a screaming native with his boot. Chained men in gold mines, and a pregnant woman. These stone sculptures from Zimbabwe will take center stage at an upcoming exhibition at Oxford University in England, aiming to 'contextualize' the legacy of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes with depictions of religious deception, forced labor and sexual abuse. Rhodes conquered large parts of southern Africa in the late 19th century. He made a fortune in gold and diamond mining and grabbed land from the local population. His grave lies under a slab of stone atop a hill in Zimbabwe. Oxford's Oriel College, where the exhibition will be held in September, is a symbolic setting. A statue of Rhodes stands there despite protests against it since 2015. Rhodes, who died in 1902, was an Oriel student who left 100,000 pounds to the school — about $13.5 million by today's standards. His influence endures through a scholarship for students from southern African countries. For Zimbabwean stone carvers at Chitungwiza Arts Center near the capital, Harare, the exhibition is more than an opportunity for Western audiences to glimpse a dark history. It is also a chance to revive an ancient art form. Stone sculpture, once a thriving local industry, has suffered due to vast economic challenges and declining tourism. 'This will boost business. Buyers abroad will now see our work and buy directly from the artists,' said sculptor Wallace Mkanka. His piece, depicting the blinded Black face, was selected as the best of 110 entries and will be one of four winning sculptures on display at Oxford. Zimbabwe, meaning 'House of Stone,' derives its identity from the Great Zimbabwe ruins, a 1,800-acre Iron Age city built with precision-cut stones delicately stacked without mortar. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The southern African country has long used stone sculpture as a form of storytelling to immortalize history. The craft survived neaarly a century of colonial rule that sought to erase local traditions, religion and art forms. It thrived internationally instead. Thousands of pieces were plundered from Africa. Some later became subjects of repatriation campaigns. Others became prized by tourists and collectors. A permanent collection of 20 Zimbabwean stone sculptures is displayed in a pedestrian tunnel at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world's busiest. At its peak after independence, Zimbabwe's stone sculpture industry thrived, with local white farmers purchasing pieces for their homes and facilitating international sales. 'Customers were everywhere. They would pay upfront, and I always had a queue of clients,' recalled Tafadzwa Tandi, a 45-year-old sculptor whose work will be featured in the Oxford exhibition. But the industry has struggled over the last two decades. Zimbabwe's global image suffered after controversial land reforms more than two decades ago displaced more 4,000 white farmers to redistribute land to about 300,000 Black families, according to government figures. Late ruler Robert Mugabe defended the reforms as necessary to address colonial-era inequities, but they had unintended economic consequences. 'Many of our customers were friends of the farmers. That is where the problem originated from,' said Tendai Gwaravaza, chairman of Chitungwiza Arts Center. At the center, the sound of grinders filled the air as sculptors carved. Hundreds of finished pieces, ranging from small carvings to life-size sculptures, waited for buyers. 'The only solution now is to get out there to the markets ourselves. If we don't, no one will,' Gwaravaza said. The Oxford exhibition represents such an opportunity, he said. It is the brainchild of the Oxford Zimbabwe Arts Partnership, formed in response to the 'Rhodes Must Fall' campaign that coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States. The group, consisting of Zimbabwean artists, an Oxford alumnus and a professor of African history, initially envisioned a larger project titled 'Oxford and Rhodes: Past, Present, and Future.' It was to have included enclosing Rhodes' statue in glass, installing 100 life-size bronze statues of African liberation fighters and creating a collaborative sculpture using recycled materials to represent the future. But the project was to have cost an estimated about $265,000, far beyond available resources. Eventually, Oriel College provided more than $13,000 for a scaled-down exhibition. 'It's still my hope that one day it could happen, but for now we have just accepted something very small to make a start and to do something,' said Richard Pantlin, the Oxford alumnus and OZAP co-founder. Mutsaka writes for the Associated Press.
NBC News
20-04-2025
- General
- NBC News
Zimbabwe's stone carvers seek a revival as an Oxford exhibition confronts a British colonial legacy
CHITUNGWIZA, Zimbabwe — A pair of white hands blinding a Black face. A smiling colonizer with a Bible, crushing the skull of a screaming native with his boot. Chained men in gold mines, and a pregnant woman. These stone sculptures from Zimbabwe will take center stage at an upcoming exhibition at Oxford University in Britain, aiming to 'contextualize' the legacy of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes with depictions of religious deception, forced labor and sexual abuse. Rhodes conquered large parts of southern Africa in the late 19th century. He made a fortune in gold and diamond mining and grabbed land from the local population. His grave lies under a slab of stone atop a hill in Zimbabwe. Oxford's Oriel College, where the exhibition will be held in September, is a symbolic setting. A statue of Rhodes stands there despite protests against it since 2015. Rhodes, who died in 1902, was an Oriel student who left 100,000 pounds (now valued at about 10.5 million pounds, or $13.5 million) to the school. His influence endures through a scholarship for students from southern African countries. For Zimbabwean stone carvers at Chitungwiza Arts Center near the capital, Harare, the exhibition is more than an opportunity for Western audiences to glimpse a dark history. It is also a chance to revive an ancient but struggling art form. Stone sculpture, once a thriving local industry, has suffered due to vast economic challenges and declining tourism. 'This will boost business. Buyers abroad will now see our work and buy directly from the artists,' said sculptor Wallace Mkanka. His piece, depicting the blinded Black face, was selected as the best of 110 entries and will be one of four winning sculptures on display at Oxford. Zimbabwe, meaning 'House of Stone,' derives its identity from the Great Zimbabwe ruins, a 1,800-acre Iron Age city built with precision-cut stones delicately stacked without mortar. It is a UNESCO World heritage site. The southern African country has long used stone sculpture as a form of storytelling to immortalize history. The craft survived close to a century of colonial rule that sought to erase local traditions, religion and art forms. It thrived internationally instead. Thousands of pieces were plundered from Africa. Some later became subjects of repatriation campaigns. Others became prized by tourists and collectors. A permanent collection of 20 Zimbabwean stone sculptures is displayed in a pedestrian tunnel at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, one of the world's busiest. At its peak following independence, Zimbabwe's stone sculpture industry thrived, with local white farmers purchasing pieces for their homes and facilitating international sales. 'Customers were everywhere. They would pay up front, and I always had a queue of clients,' recalled Tafadzwa Tandi, a 45-year-old sculptor whose work will feature in the Oxford exhibition. However, the industry has struggled over the past two decades. Zimbabwe's global image suffered after controversial land reforms more than two decades ago displaced over 4,000 white farmers to redistribute land to about 300,000 Black families, according to government figures. Late ruler Robert Mugabe defended the reforms as necessary to address colonial-era inequities, but they had unintended economic consequences. 'Many of our customers were friends of the farmers. That is where the problem originated from,' said Tendai Gwaravaza, chairman of Chitungwiza Arts Center. At the center, the sound of grinders filled the air as sculptors carved. Hundreds of finished pieces, ranging from small carvings to life-sized sculptures, waited for buyers. 'The only solution now is to get out there to the markets ourselves. If we don't, no one will,' Gwaravaza said. The Oxford exhibition represents such an opportunity for exposure, he said. It is the brainchild of the Oxford Zimbabwe Arts Partnership, formed in response to the 'Rhodes Must Fall' campaign during the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. The group, consisting of Zimbabwean artists, an Oxford alumnus and a professor of African history, initially envisioned a larger project titled 'Oxford and Rhodes: Past, Present, and Future.' It included enclosing Rhodes' statue in glass, installing 100 life-size bronze statues of African liberation fighters and creating a collaborative sculpture using recycled materials to represent the future. However, the project required an estimated 200,000 pounds, far beyond available resources. Eventually, Oriel College provided 10,000 pounds for a scaled-down exhibition. 'It's still my hope that one day it could happen, but for now we have just accepted something very small to make a start and to do something,' said Richard Pantlin, the Oxford alumnus and OZAP co-founder.
