The truth will set you free
The Zimbabwean artist, Owen Maseko, was arrested on 26 March when his art work illustrating ‘decades of oppression and violence that have characterised Zimbabwe’ was exhibited by Radio Dialogue, the Zimbabwean community radio station. Radio Dialogue praises Maseko’s bold political statements presented on canvas.
A most thought provoking exhibition featuring the work of Owen Maseko and entitled ‘The Truth Will Set You Free’ was held at the Bulawayo Club in Zimbabwe on 25 March.
The exhibition was launched initially as an art competition and was run by Bulawayo’s community radio station, Radio Dialogue.
Radio Dialogue has been struggling to get a radio license for several years, and they will continue to struggle, all the while trying to live up to their motto: ‘Giving You a Voice’.
However, the organisers of the exhibition have received little or no attention from the police, whilst Owen and Voti Thebe, the acting director of the gallery, were both arrested.
Maseko opened his exhibition on Thursday 25 March at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. The exhibition was an artist’s impression of the harsh reality of Gukurahundi (the name often to the post-independence era of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe) and the associated decades of oppression and violence that have characterised Zimbabwe.
Police tape still festoons one of the galleries at the national gallery where the exhibition took place.
But for some strange reason the Radio Dialogue exhibition was allowed to continue and many visitors passed through the hallowed halls of the Bulawayo Club to view this disturbing exhibition. That the exhibition was held in the Bulawayo Club under the watchful eye of portraits of many colourful colonial figures was an irony in itself!
The inspiration for this project was Pablo Picassos’s ‘Guernica’, which has been described as modern art’s most powerful anti-war statement. Picasso was of course one of the most famous of 20th Century painters, and ‘Guernica’ commemorates the atrocity of the Nazi air force bombing of the village of Guernica in Picasso’s home country of Basque during the Spanish Civil War, in which 1600 innocent civilian villagers were killed.
In this project Radio Dialogue commissioned art works that will become African icons of the suffering of innocent victims caused by racist, tribalistic or politically motivated human rights violations of the past.
Zimbabwe has suffered from violence since the beginning of recorded history. The memory of these violations is still very much alive among Zimbabwean people. Strong anger and resentment goes with it. Unless addressed, such resentment and anger can last for centuries.
The first stage of healing for people who have suffered abuse is public acknowledgement that they have suffered from such abuse.
So long as the general public are unaware of it, or deny that such abuses occurred, the victims still suffer, and retain the hurt, resentment and desire for vengeance deep within their hearts.
Once the nation publicly acknowledges what happened, then we can move onto the next stage of deciding what to do about it, and take action to ensure that it never happens again.
This art exhibition aims to achieve the first stage of this process, TRUTH-telling, through artistic representation – simply to state what happened to publicly commemorate the injustices of the past.
Over the years there have been a series of atrocities. The largest numbers of deaths in recent years were in Matabeleland during the early to mid 1980s. However, much of the current thrust for reconciliation and healing is coming from the most recent killings during the 2008 election campaign. But there were also human rights abuses during earlier election campaigns.
And, of course, one can go further back to the liberation war, to the Rhodesian era, to the colonial invasion, to Mzilikazi’s movement into the country and maybe even to whatever led to the departure of the San people to the Kalahari Desert.
You can view more images from the exhibition on Flickr.
Radio Dialogue – Giving You a Voice – Bulawayo’s community radio station,
9th floor, Pioneer House, cnr 8th Ave / Fife St. 884858
http://www.radiodialogue.com
http://www.zicora.com
4895kHz 8-9pm
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* This article was originally published by Sokwanele.
* Radio Dialogue is a non-profit-making community radio station aspiring to broadcast to the community of Bulawayo and its surrounding areas in Zimbabwe.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.