By Dr Michelina Andreucci

FROM an early age, young Zimbabwean girls played ‘mahumbwe’ – from the word ‘kuumba’, meaning to mould, create or fabricate in clay.
While Western European girls played with plastic dolls and doll houses, African children made their own dolls, using various clays, straws of grass and tiny pebbles, each with their own specific style and unique design.
In the countryside, young boys herding cattle moulded bulls and cows in clay/mud in-between honing their skills in animal husbandry.
Later on with the advent of the automobiles in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), young boys fashioned their own kinetic wire cars and bicycles modelled after early models such as Bedfords, Morris Minors, Zephyrs, Vauxhalls, Fiats, Peugeots and showing ingenuity and a faculty for industrial design.
Creativity and the faculty for realising objects in three-dimension was innate to most indigenous African children.
While colonialism brought about mechanisation, it inadvertently destroyed the creative faculty of the indigenous people.
Given that the various colonial curricula developed prior to our independence were for the subservience of indigenous people, there were no African designers.
Design was exclusively for whites for which they underwent apprenticeships.
Africans were limited to woodwork and carpentry or working on a manufacturer’s conveyor belt; removed from design principles and design philosophy.
This disempowerment of the African and disconnect with the culture and design, created a ‘dependency syndrome’ on Western mechanisation.
Needless to say, the basis of industrial design resides in one’s creative capacity to conceptualise and realise functional objects in three-dimensions, a given skill for African people in general.
Today, as we drive around Harare, we will come across woven reed and basket furniture, primarily from the African apostolic sects who also make zinc domestic products of buckets, basins, baths, funnels, watering cans and wooden furniture, which have been made for several decades in Zimbabwe.
However, the dependency syndrome has ‘blinkered’ creativity of what was then traditional industrial design.
Therefore products are limited to a single product with no innovation.
In order to advance industrial design, Zimbabwe needs to equate modern industrial design with traditional design patterns in the Iron Age.
If we go back to the original clay female form-furnaces which were a result of the discovery of ancient metallurgical excavations, they were the first example of industrial design at its most rudimentary.
The products that were produced from there were functional and relied on hereditary design craftsmanship, (humhizha).
From the edifices of Great Zimbabwe to the clay furnaces and traditional gold and iron workings of ancient Zimbabwe, industry was thriving and already ‘zoned’.
It was so organised that the early settlers followed ancient gold and iron workings to amass their wealth and develop Southern Rhodesia.
This testifies to the need for Zimbabweans to further study and make use of geo-industrial zones and capitalise on the discipline of industrial design which is a forgotten ancient practice from the hearth of Zimbabwean civilisation.
Our soil was always the first medium of expression, conceptualisation, realisation and design.
The reeds that grew out of the river banks became the basketry and the clay became the pottery.
Surely our children at nursery school need to be taught the basics of manufacturing, moulding and creating for the future of industrial design in Zimbabwe.
Have we in Western idealism and capitalism lost our ancestral industrial design visions?
The traditional industrial skills we now take for granted need to be honed and adapted to the new curriculum in the learning institutions to ensure a continuity of Zimbabwe’s design traditions.
In fact, the study of industrial design must be the first keystone of our nation building and mechanisation process.
Learning from our past repository of African technical wisdom should inform the present and future of our industrialisation.
In a moving tribute penned by the Minister of Primary and Secondary Edcation Dr Lazarus Dokora, he mentioned how Cde Alexander Kanengoni, the late Deputy Editor of The Patriot said: “The new curriculum framework whose major principles are inclusivity, accessibility, equity, relevance, respect (hunhu/ubuntu/ vumunhu), diversity, gender sensitivity, transparency and accountability,” should be the crux of the new educational dispensation.
However, I would like to add how better to cherish the Zimbabwean identity and value our heritage, history and cultural traditions than through the creative, scientific and academic discipline of Zimbabwean industrial design.
The current drive for Information Communication Technology (ICT) is destroying genuine indigenous African hands-on creativity (mabasa emawoko) and creating clones of foreign ideas, expertise and needs at the expense of our own innovation and culture.
The information programmed in computers is foreign information and not always applicable to local conditions
In his maiden address to Zimbabwe, on the eve of the country’s independence on April 18 1980, Cde Robert Mugabe said: “Independence will bestow on us a new personality, a new perspective and indeed, a new history and a new past.”
With industry at low ebb since 2007, Zimbabwe needs a new industrial design curriculum to revive the economy.
The Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-ASSET) cannot be achieved without a directional curriculum on which the Zimbabwean design philosophy should be anchored on.
Industry cannot be revived without industrial design.
Hence, industrial design is the final realisation of Zim-ASSET and cannot be taken for granted.
Zimbabwe with its unique personal character, its people endowed with innate design skills can now re-emerge from the shadows of colonialism as great designers and innovators in their own right through industrial design; and become more productive, more efficient, therefore wealthier and eventually more powerful as a nation and as a people, less dependent on foreign products.
It is therefore obvious; that the revival of Zimbabwean industries is hinged on industrial design and its inclusion in the new national school curricular.
Dr Michelina Rudo Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian Researcher, Industrial Design Consultant and Specialist Hospitality Interior Decorator. She is a published author in her field.
For views and comments, email: linamanucci@gmail.com