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Zimbabwe Police Block Art Exhibition On Past Atrocities

In March last year, Owen Maseko was arrested and his art exhibition that portrayed atrocities committed by the Zimbabwean government in the mid-1980s was shut down by the authorities. The exhibition was called “Sibathontisele” (“Let’s Drip On Them”), which not only alludes to blood but also to a form of torture using burning plastic that was frequently  conducted during the Gukurahundi military offensive against Ndebele civilians in the 1980s. Gukurahundi is a traditional Shona word, which means ‘the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains.’ The Mugabe regime chose this word to describe a military operation against a civilian population during the 1980s. In what was officially classified as genocide in September 2010, tens of thousands of people were killed, injured, tortured, humiliated and homes were destroyed.

In an interview with the Observer following his arrest, Maseko said: “I do not have political motivations, just inspiration. If I express a burning issue inside myself, I am healing myself and I am helping others to be healed, because I am bringing into the open a topic that people are afraid to talk about.”  In response to this courageous exhibition, Maseko was awarded a Human Rights and Democracy Award in Harare in October 2010.

In March Maseko was placed on remand on charges of ‘undermining the authority of or insulting the President and causing offence to persons of a particular race or religion’, which has a maximum prison sentence of 12 months. However, the State wanted to extend the charges to that of breaching Section 31 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act by allegedly publishing or communicating falsehoods prejudicial to the State, which has a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. The case has since been referred to the Supreme Court.

Whilst other forms of media that portray the events of the 1980s, such as The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera, have never been banned, why is it that this exhibition caused such an uproar? Perhaps the answer is in the medium itself. Visual art is, by definition, visible; available for all to see. With no single interpretation, this makes it “dangerous” when addressing such a controversial issue within Zimbabwe.

So if it is banned, what use is it in highlighting past and present human rights abuses? It brings into the forefront of people’s minds the issues which the government wished “forgotten”. The act of banning sparks the interest of human rights organisations and highlights the exact issue which the government wanted banned and so inevitably has the opposite effect in the long run. It also further demonstrates the censorship still in place despite the Global Political Agreement signed by Zimbabwe’s three main political parties in September 2008, acknowledging the need for “national healing, cohesion and unity in respect of victims of pre and post independence political conflicts”. As Pathisa Nyathi, a poet, playwright, historian and biographer , has said, “You can suppress art exhibits, plays and books, but you cannot remove the Gukurahundi from people’s hearts”.