By Dr Tony Monda

FOR the past five decades and even longer, African art emanating from Zimbabwean artistes, especially stone sculpture, has been the playground for Western scholars, uninformed amateur journalists and writers from Europe, art peddlers, roving gallerists and career academic curators.
Bibliographies and references to Zimbabwean art invariably quote the Eurocentric drivel written by such white writers as Celia Winter-Irving, Anthony and Laura Ponter, Olivier Sultan, Roy Guthrie, Roy Cook, Vivienne Prince, Jane Cousins, Joy Kuhn, Clementine Deliss, Fernand Mor, Jonathan Zilberg, Geert Bourgois, Barbara Murray, Pip Curling, Terrence Ranger, Murray McCartney, etc., the list is almost endless.
One wonders if Zimbabwean African scholars have negated and neglected their own culture, or is it because contemporary Zimbabwean sculpture has become a Western construct of a once meaningful indigenous art form?
African’s independence from our erstwhile colonial masters, which took over 100 years to complete, needs to encourage the liberation of our knowledge from its patronising Western constructs.
The medium of stone was traditionally a sacred medium for selected indigenous artistes.
Symbolic and stylised images were carved, etched and scratched into the stone birds of Great Zimbabwe and stored in sacred sites.
The meanings of the symbols were available only to initiates and clan groups of the surrounding areas, the Royal Court and its subjects.
They were not unlike the coat-or-arms of the Munhumutapa dynasties.
To a cultured and sophisticated eye, the imagery and symbolism of Zimbabwean sculpture being produced today has lost the power and authority of the first generation stone art, some of which still turn up in selected collections and galleries to be sold for enormous prices worldwide.
The movement that is now 55 years old, just over half a century, in 2014, has today morphed into an accessible touristic souvenir with the exception of the works of a few gifted sculptors whose art is distinguishable from the mass-production of this art.
Part of the demise of Zimbabwe’s stone sculpture, also known as ‘Shona sculpture’, has been largely due to its poorly researched and erroneous historical interpretations from the numerous aforementioned Western pseudo-scholars on African art and culture.
These former Rhodesian, British, Australian, French, Dutch, German and now Chinese cultural agents are not doing justice to the work produced by the artistes with their highly publicised and manifestly demented discourse on African art.
Africa’s de-colonisation spawned new planes of expectation, and encouraged more demands for the redefinition of the scope of the permissible and sought-after in the cultural imagery, its expression and administration.
The reclamation of our knowledge and cultural base should challenge the certitudes within the representative Western art expositions, cultural curatorship and social control, which presently exists in the scholarship of our art and culture.
One can only conjecture as to why a nation like Zimbabwe that prides itself on its putative unity and sovereignty allows the continuous incongruous definitions of our art by Western scholars.
This predicament of knowledge production serves to reaffirm and expand the necessity for autonomy of knowledge documentation and construction by indigenous scholars, writers and artistes.
The production of knowledge on our heritage should not be owned or transcribed by foreigners, who have imposed their distorted views on this, and other sovereign African civilisations and cultures.
These former white colonialist immigrants have for decades superimposed their stamp of authority and approval on African art.
Zimbabwean and other African artworks, tangible heritage, and identities are being discussed and distributed world over in academic publications, the internet and printed media by foreigners and ex-Rhodesian housewives.
About 96 percent of Zimbabwean stone sculpture belongs and resides in European, American and Eastern museums and residences.
We might as well ask how Zimbabwean sculpture is meant to achieve the sacred and inexorable duty of informing and enlightening the minds of the indigenous children of Zimbabwe about the culture they must inherit when it stands on occidental plinths stripped naked of its ownership in museums and residences thousands of miles from the country and people to which it refers.
Our forefathers once told us: “That after the last Shona bull had been stolen, the breed will now be known as an Afrikaner Bull.”
A fact that we do not acknowledge today is that the so-called Afrikaner Bull is a conception of our indigenous genetic material.
Is Zimbabwean art and sculpture a product of a negotiation between the artiste and a white art establishment?
Such appropriation of cultural knowledge takes place in the definitions and understandings written on our art.
It is equivalent to cultural sabotage, indeed genocide, and must be countered on all fronts.
This continued verbal domination and cultural subjugation does not auger well for future scholarship of Zimbabwean art and culture.
Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD in Post-Modern Art Theory and a Doctorate in Business Administration( DBA) in Post-Colonial Art and Heritage Studies. He holds a Law and Art Diploma from Georgetown University, Washington D.C., and worked with WALA (Washington Area Lawyers Association). He also studied law and photography at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, DC., USA. He is a practicing artist, art critic, author, designer and Corporate Image Consultant.