Well that’s our country – Notes from Bulawayo

The Standard
By Judith Todd
28 March 2010

Just on 11 this morning Vote Thebe, Acting Director of Bulawayo’s National Gallery, rings to ask me to come straight down to his place although he wouldn’t be around. He has accompanied police to the Charge Office and an exhibition, which had opened at the Gallery Thursday, is being closed.

First I ring Minister David Coltart who thankfully, I find, already knew and had spoken to relevant people in the inclusive government. He says he understands a lawyer, Pulu, had been engaged. Coltart gives me a hint of what it was all about by saying there weren’t any specific references in this exhibition to any particular person, “although the glasses…”

The Gallery receptionist is expecting me and I am taken to the exhibition in the main ground floor gallery where staff is covering with newspaper the windows, which give views into the Gallery from the pavement of Leopold Takawira Avenue.

The whole exhibition area, walls, pillars, paintings is drenched in a sticky looking red and as you enter you see a sign that directs you to “Place your ballot here”. “Here” is a toilet stuffed and overflowing with ballot papers where a sinister black figure wearing spectacles seems about to pull the chain to flush the toilet.
Telling the truth and reclaiming the past in Zimbabwe…

This acrylic 2010 exhibition is by Owen Maseko, also now at the police Charge Office with Thebe. While the atmosphere is one of terror and bloodshed, it is also oddly elegant with graceful figures of pregnant women and others fleeing, or trying to flee, along the walls. Even the friezes of a sinister black man wearing glasses are elegant.

One of the most haunting depictions is a set of galvanised faces, loud mouths wide open, imperfect teeth on display, eyes contorted under deeply etched foreheads ……. they made us sing their songs while they tortured and killed our brothers and sisters ………

I join the staff who are papering the windows and look at what had been possible to see from the street, but was now being hidden.

Breaking the silence — through telling the truth. Two black bodies, also drenched in a sticky red, hang by the ankles….dissidents or ordinary civilians? …………….The idea was not only to leave bodies but to leave pieces of bodies, as a warning to others…

… they disappeared are denied a place among the living and also denied a place among the dead……

In Matabeleland most fundamental is the problem of aggrieved spirits and the presence of the murdered dead.

Amongst the paintings writing fluidly covers spaces across the walls and around the pillars.

In our country, perpetrators of violence are still in powerful positions, and survivors remain silenced and afraid. The overwhelming residues of unprocessed pain, anger, suspicion and grief remain in the community as a negative, silent weight, a dark, even humiliating secret that undermines shared community activities, causing finger pointing and division….

Destroying the cohesive functioning of communities has been a deliberate strategic policy by many governments of African countries.
We don’t trust each other any more.

Only the guilty are afraid, only if you know that you are partly responsible, or you participated in the orchestration of this event. “I survived with gunshot wounds, the other 55 died.”

We can still be eliminated at any time … this wound is huge and deep.

As no one will now be able to see the exhibition; they also won’t be able to see what was put in place at the exit for departing viewers under the exhortation GUKURAHUNDI ..the rain which washes away the trash/chaff before spring time ……. times fearful, unforgettable and unacknowledged. A bowl of pieces of chalk sits at the way out. Visitors are invited to “pick a chalk and write something in this ballot room”. Although the exhibition opened only the evening before last, Thursday March 25, the sticky red wall is already full of white, chalky comments.

Leaving the Gallery I call in to say goodbye to an old lady in their little shop. “What is going on?” she asked. I explain. When I remain silent she sighs heavily, waves her hand irritably in the air at something unseen and says “Well, that is our country”.

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