National Gallery of Zimbabwe
15.06 - 31.10.2022
The Stars Are Bright is a traveling exhibition of pioneering artworks by students of Cyrene Mission, painted between 1940 and 1947. Also known as the Cyrene Workshop, and still running a high school, the institution is Zimbabwe’s first formal art school, founded in the late 1930s by a Scottish evangelist and visionary named Canon Edward ‘Ned’ Paterson (1895–1974). It is situated in the Matabeleland region, just a few kilometers outside the city of Bulawayo. The works in the show were shipped to the United Kingdom soon after the Queen Mother’s visit to Cyrene in 1947. After touring England, Paris and New York for three years, the remainder of the collection went into storage around 1953, only to be discovered in the basement of a deconsecrated church in Shoreditch in 1978. In 2020, the work was exhibited at The Theatre Courtyard Green Rooms in London for the first time in seven decades.
In this conversation, writer Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti talks to Voti Thebe, a former Regional Director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo to discuss contentious issues around the body of work. Thebe is also a veteran artist who participated in the Zimbabwe Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti (BTM): I understand you were involved in the installation of the exhibition in Bulawayo. You were the guest speaker at the official openings in Bulawayo and Harare. What are your thoughts on the work?
Voti Thebe (VT): Zvinemanyanga hazviputirwe! (The creature with horns cannot be wrapped!) As I look at it, the work from Cyrene could not just stay hidden somewhere. It came out because it had horns. Horns that wanted to speak life. Horns that are symbolic to our nation and our aspirations. Some years ago when I heard that the work had been discovered in an annexe of St Michael and All Angels church in Shoreditch, I could not believe it. Until a friend sent me an email with an image. Then I accepted it. No one knew that such work still existed after such a long period of time. To me the work is very sensitive.
BTM: On their Facebook page, ‘The Stars Are Bright’ team describes you as “the local Cyrene guru.” Would you please say more about the special relationship you have with the Mission school?
VT: Haha, I am not an expert as such. Perhaps I was given that title because of my love for the art emerging out of the institution, and having had the privilege of being under the tutelage of the forbearing artists of repute from Cyrene Mission. My mentor Lazarus Khumalo trained at Cyrene just after this body of work had been shipped to London. He briefly trained at Makerere University in Uganda and came back to teach at Cyrene before moving to Mzilikazi Arts and Craft Center where he taught sculpture. He taught me mosaic art when I met him at the then Bulawayo Gallery which is now the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. I have got one mosaic piece mounted on the wall at Cyrene Mission.
After completing my primary education in 1968, I wanted to enroll at Cyrene to study art, but they did not accept me. In 1989, I participated in Pachipamwe II held at Cyrene Mission. The first one had taken place at Murewa Culture House in 1988. The Pachipamwe Workshops (1988-1994) were part of the Triangle Arts Network established in New York in 1982. The workshops of international artists and institutions promoted the exchange of ideas and innovation within the contemporary arts. It was at Cyrene that I encountered Bill Ainsley and David Koloane from South Africa. Local artists like Tapfuma Gutsa and Berry Bickle also attended. There was another one at Thapong Visual Arts Centre in Botswana and others in Zambia and Mozambique as the workshops mushroomed in southern Africa.
Then I served at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. In retrospect, the climax of my career was when the gallery was under the directorship of Dr. Yvonne Vera. We came up with fantastic exhibitions like Thatha Camera. I had a solo exhibition called The Climax. Then I became the Regional Director of the National Gallery. Of course, we came up with great exhibitions working with Clifford Zulu as the curator. And Cyrene Mission fell under our region.
BTM: Early landscape painting by both Black and white artists has been problematised in our region, mainly because of its associations with the colonial enterprise i.e., the depictions of the terra nullius (unoccupied territory). What is your take on the work, considering that most of it is about the Matopo landscapes?
VT: The Cyrene artworks were mainly done by students. The Stars Are Bright is a student exhibition. Those students were not qualified as artists. As such, what you would see in that exhibition is the expression of students who were still experimenting. The depiction of landscapes and the use of colour in the work would be expected. The work was produced within the environs of a primary and secondary school, not even a college. Students experimented to earn marks. Their work was mainly based on Bible verses, and some of it was based on the environment they were growing up in – their villages, their communities, the fights as signified by the spear-wielding warriors, the slaughtering of livestock and wild animals, the day-to-day run of a community. That is what they expressed.
It is a pity that when the whites came and introduced Christianity, they themselves never lived according to the doctrine. They never adhered to their own rules and regulations. These artists understood that wherever Jesus moved he took the form of the local community. That is why Sam Songo painted a Black Jesus. If the Christian way of living had been properly followed, it would have been heaven on earth. However, it is manipulated to suit certain people.
It was only later in life that the likes of Livingstone Sango and Kingsley Sambo, who later came back to teach art at Cyrene, were to be recognised as artists. What I am not aware of is whether they were educated formally or trained to become art teachers, or they were just groomed to become so. They probably just had the skill. Some of them taught at Mzilikazi Art and Craft Centre, which was just a skills-training centre with no art theory taught at the place. That could have been what happened at Cyrene. Even those who were at Cyrene in the 1960s when the national Zhii Riots occurred never expressed those protests in their work as Justin Mtungwazi did.
BTM: After the work toured the UK, Paris and New York between 1949 and 1953, the unsold work was not repatriated back to Rhodesia, bearing in mind the politics of the time perhaps. I still think that, when the collection was salvaged from the basement of the deconsecrated church in Shoreditch in 1978, the London Architectural Salvage and Supply Company (LASSCO) must have returned it home instead of selling it to a collector. Nonetheless, I understand a collector offered to sell it to the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in 2015. They either saw no logic in paying for what is rightfully ours, or simply downplayed the importance of the work. Considering that this collection did not get to the UK as a direct result of colonial conquest, do you think the restitution conversation is warranted?
VT: Ooh yes, restitution is warranted in any kind of artistic expression that was taken away or looted from Zimbabwe. I would say that conversation must continue until final victory, until such works return to Zimbabwe. A luta continua! What we need to do now is to prepare or upgrade our spaces – the galleries, museums, etc. – so that, when this work comes back to us, we are able to preserve it and to present it better than them out there. We need that kind of knowledge and expertise. We need to keep our own work and attract researchers. Imagine researchers coming from Germany and the United Kingdom, or our local institutions to focus on Cyrene. That would be a milestone for Zimbabwe. It would help our nation one way or the other. It would inspire the local artists. All these works should come back to Zimbabwe.
BTM: Seventy years later, The Curtain Foundation represented by the The Honde Valley Hydroelectric Power Trust have brought it home as a travelling exhibition. Before taking the work to the National Gallery, they exhibited it at The Arches at Aberfoyle in Hauna, Honde Valley. Personally, I found it interesting that such an important historical exhibition was taking place outside our cultural capitals (Harare and Bulawayo), some form of ‘decentering’ perhaps! Your take on that?
VT: Yes, seventy years later, money talks, my friend! Money talks even in the arts. Those two institutes that you have mentioned used their money to bring it back to Zimbabwe. I was hoping that the first opening would be in one of our national galleries. I was not privy to the conversation between those two institutes and our national galleries. I never queried that. I realized that, at times, when a sponsor says they want to do this and that, where we fall short in Africa is when we spend time scrutinising and critiquing the initiative.
We have a Ministry of Youth, Sport, Arts and Recreation that is struggling. All they do is to send dance groups to welcome the President when he returns home from trips abroad. At the end of the day, the particular dance group is not even remunerated accordingly. Maybe they might be given just a pack of chips or something like that. That is wrong. We need our minds reset. We need to go back to the drawing board when it comes to the Visual Arts and the arts in general. Our government does not see the arts as an initiative that brings money into Zimbabwe.
Even local institutions need to step up their game. We get invited abroad to go and teach art at colleges and universities, or cultural institutions where we spend three months in residencies. Yet when we come back no one really notices or recognises us. Not even a college would ask us to come and share our practice and experiences. Those are the dynamics that we face.
So, faced with such monumental failures, all we can say is thank you to The Curtain Foundation and the Honde Valley Hydroelectric Power Trust. At least the work has been brought home. It even came to the National Gallery in Bulawayo which is nearer Cyrene Mission.
BTM: Why is this work so important to Zimbabwe?
VT: I will compare the Cyrene work to the Zimbabwe birds or other artworks from Africa that are ‘gracing’ the museums abroad. It is important because it is an indispensable part of our heritage and history. There is a huge gap in our National Gallery collections regarding the Cyrene years because we only have a few works from the institution. Cyrene to me is a navel of creativity in Zimbabwe. That’s where everything started, especially when it comes to looking at art in the Western way.
BTM: I know you visited Cyrene Mission with the team that curated this exhibition. Would it not have been great to also take the work to Cyrene Mission? Not to exhibit it as such, but to take it into the chapel perhaps, and to say a few words as a way of fully welcoming it home.
VT: Yes, we could have taken a few paintings just to show the whole school or even have an open day at Cyrene Mission. That thought never dawned on me or any of us. I would like to think if we had suggested it, they would not have objected. They would have been excited too. Anyway, the school managed to bring a bus full of students to the National Gallery in Bulawayo, which was great.