THE visual arts and our heritage are the first port of call of a Nation; one sees Zimbabwe (the country), before understanding it or learning to speak the languages.
But do people one really understand what they see in our culture, our works of art or our tangible heritage?
For the past decades, the visual arts and the teaching of art has been based on a Euro-centric template, most of which was designed and dispensed in old missionary schools; to the extent our traditional identity was gradually replaced by an ‘Africanised’ version of Western Christianity.
The missionaries knew all too well the creation of visual arts consolidated one’s vision, conceptualisation and worldview of religion and self.
Hence, they eradicated our art forms and replaced them with syncretic religious effigies, as seen in some of the early churches such as Serima and Cyrene missions, among others, which ensured that Afro-Christian art permeated most of colonised Africa even before we were able to make an attempt to re-discover or record our indigenous art of centuries ago.
Nigerian Oshogbo, Tanzanian Makonde, Sahelian, Tinga-Tinga and Shona Art were some of the manifestations and strains of African modernism from the mid-1950s onwards.
It took over half a century from 1890-1950, often described by art historians as ‘The Short Century of Africa’, to rediscover our traditional visual culture, albeit in contemporary art forms.
Of these contemporary African art forms, Zimbabwe Shona Art was more of a revolution than most art scholars and historians care to acknowledge.
It challenged the colonial Christian art of the times and the settler socio-political dispensation of colonial Rhodesia.
Subsequently, Zimbabwean Shona sculpture reinforced the traditional narratives, orature and socio-cultural roots and cultural grounding of the indigenous Zimbabwean people and their visions; 30 years before our political independence.
Suffice to say, for most post-colonial African countries, art education went through a process of re-discovery, or what the Ghanaians call ‘sankofa’ (resuscitating traditions and memory from the broken pot), which literally means to go back into one’s culture for inspiration.
Going forward, in today’s digital and animation age, the processing of our identity becomes even more difficult and distorted due to the absence of a cultural format from which animation can derive.
Zimbabwe has yet to form its own language in the electronic domain and medium of animation.
To date, our animators and art educators have not been grounded in the history of African visual culture and the processes of producing art in the old analogue format, for example, kuumba (moulding), kuveza (sculpting) and kuruka (weaving).
As a result, our African trajectory, vocabulary and techniques will be scrambled and lost in a tangle of digital wires.
An even more disturbing scenario in our current art education system is that the art teachers are not qualified, practising artists themselves
Therefore, they cannot impart the psychomotor skills, conceptualisation processes and the various other techniques required to teach and create art, which for the most part, is a very physical and practical subject.
The current race to embrace the digital age in our education system without the history, knowledge or skills of making art is like giving an unlicensed, reckless commuter omnibus driver a fleet of busses for public transportation.
The many fatal accidents and the risks of driving are ever-present today for this reason.
This is the state of art education in Zimbabwe today.
Apart from a few private studios and private schools that have employed professional artists to teach art, the majority of schools and tertiary institutions, including universities, have employed teachers without the specific art pedagogy, history and technical art skills, who in turn, have produced art graduates without the basic knowledge of art and the requisite skills and techniques required for the profession.
Art was never divorced from the world as it is in the capsulations of European institutionalism.
African people lived with art and art lived with us.
The language of instruction for art, however, has been English in its most technical and unadulterated form with its appendage of art history and the socio-psychological history and memory of European politics which influences this art history.
In order to fully understand European art, one had to understand its religion, culture, politics, weather, tools, technologies, language and philosophies.
For indigenous Africans, however, art resided in their society, among the people, in the environment; the memory, meaning, aspirations and mind of the indigene.
The production of art for many African artists today has pandered to Western tastes.
For example, in Zimbabwe, the women’s decapitated buxom bodies in stone, that are proudly produced and displayed as ‘torsos’, derived from the remnants of European antiquity, do not have their genesis in our culture and do not espouse ubuntu/hunhu or gender parity.
While studies of nude torsos may be good for anatomical sketches in physiognomy, anatomy and style, they denigrate the concept of women in our culture; since our women are not mere body parts for Africans!
The colonial Western institutionalisation of African art meant removing indigenous art from its milieu, thus eradicating its meaning, relevance, content, implications and nuances.
The consequential incompetent futility of art-education in Zimbabwean institutions today is a major stumbling block for the development of art.
This is notable especially in Government polytechnics, higher and tertiary institutions and colleges where art is taught by teacher-trained teachers without an iota of art knowledge or interest in the subject, opting instead to adopt outdated Western-style art teaching, imparting no visual cognition and thus perpetuating the cycle of mediocrity in tertiary art institutions.
Likewise, the same under-par ‘art’ teachers, teaching art in the newly-established universities are churning out equally obtuse and supercilious art and design graduates in order to enrich their coffers at the expense of the student.
Art and design pedagogies need to be changed appropriately to suit the Africanist trajectory of the new educational syllabus.
We need to conduct empirical studies of design practices in our own African contextual milieu.
This should assist us to create an awareness of the elements of mathematical patterns and the scientific and technological systems inherent in long-established terrigenous practices of African art and design, for the benefit of our indigenous aesthetic, industrial and creative bases.
A pool of knowledge on design thinking must be developed with Afro-centric cognitive modes and learning styles suitable for the indigenous Zimbabwean framework.
We cannot afford to be blinkered to the history of our African genius any longer.
Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD in Art Theory and Philosophy and a DBA (Doctorate in Business Administration) and Post-Colonial Heritage Studies. He is a writer, lecturer, musician, art critic, practising artist and corporate image consultant. He is also a specialist art consultant, post-colonial scholar, Zimbabwean socio-economic analyst and researcher.
For views and comments, email: tonym.MONDA@gmail.com