Guruve, one of the most spiritually driven areas of Zimbabwe, is a vast tract of wilderness and mountains, bottle stores and butcheries, deposits of stone and sculptors dotted like lonely planets in a vast galaxy. In Guruve, minds once swayed by traditional African beliefs are now swayed by the edicts of a number of independent Christian churches whose worshippers wear white and conduct their services under trees on the side of the road. It is these beliefs and their practices which constitute the non-material culture of the Guruve area – the original home of many of the Tengenenge sculptors and painters. These beliefs have a profound effect on the artists’ work.
For the visitor, having waved to a series of art dealers on wheels, lavish 4 x 4s, the occasional scotch carts, women with babies on their backs and men walking miles to the nearest store, the first sighting of sculpture on the right hand side is the huge Springstone “Owl” by Oswald Kanengoni and Gift Chengu. On the right is Victor Faya’s “Chief”, a huge piece of Springstone the colour of green cheese, with slanted slits for eyes and a brutal line of a mouth. Proceeding further, the visitor will see areas of bush designated to the work of each sculptor. On the left, past the “Owl”, there are first generation sculptor Enos Gunja’s huge Springstone encephalitic heads and, next to them, the ultra modern, geometric consummately finished sculptures of Gunja’s son Bester – a photo line-up of himself and his brothers in one stone. Further up are the sculptures of Tembo Balama, “Chiefs and Spirits”, in raw Springstone, the colours of ancient clay and terracotta, and standing alone, the late Bakari Manzi’s “Woman”, like a giant ship’s prow with hair tossed by a storm at sea.
Then the visitor comes to a large verandah, similar to that of an outstation on an Indian tea plantation during the Raj. This is the social hub, the epicenter of Tengenenge, a place where the international art world converges in the middle of the African bush. The verandah provides an interface between over three hundred sculptors and the sculptor-driven administration. Here the visitor is offered a three-star meal cooked by the Chef, Frederick and his wife Erina, the daughter of the late Barankinya Gosta. Gosta was a Chewa sculptor from Mozambique, who turned wooden logs into writhing snakes and painted out garish images of the character of Chewa folklore on canvas with PVA.
Hanging from the verandah walls are Gosta’s and his daughters’ (Erina and the late Sherry) paintings which are cheery narrative renditions of Chewa legends and memories of fishes and crocodiles in the rivers of Mozambique. There are also more formally rendered elephants in blue and red against a black background by bulbous heads of the late Bernard Matemara, master-sculptor of Tengenenge, whose forays in stone into African mythology remain largely not understood by the western viewer but whose works container tremendous power and repressed energy, somehow freed in huge naked figures with attributes of both genders.
If the visitor is fortunate they will enjoy the hospitality and humour of Tom Blomefield, Founder Director of Tengenenge, now seventy six years old, with the body and beard of a benevolent Father Christmas. It is from Tom that they will hear tales of lions and leopard; mountains climbed, pegged and claimed; porcupine holes fallen into; and sculptures made in the shape of shovels and spades – memories of his days as a chrome miner in the Great Dyke.
And if the visitor is a good listener they will be told the stranger-than-fiction story of the “beginning of the beginning” of Tengenenge. They will hear how Tom, coming from South Africa, became an apprentice on a tobacco farm near Impinge Mine on the way to Tengenenge. Here he was given by the owner of the farm, a Chewa Grammar book, a candle and a pole and dagga house, and was told to learn the Chewa language of the immigrant farm workers from Zambia and Malawi within three months. They will learn that hi became fluent in Chewa and thus became interested in the workers’ culture, in particular their satirical masked dance – the Gule Wamkulu. This is the great dance of the social institution of the Nyau, a secret male initiation society with dancers wearing masks of Josepha, Maria and Simone in mockery of missionaries and treating its audience to the sight of a huge man making a grand entrance through the bush on stilts, the Makanja. Later, when the visitors walk through the forest of stones, the Nyau might emerge from the bushes, their masks painted strident white red and black, and the Makanja teeter through the trees.
Master Gunja, brother of Costa Gunja, comments; “At Tengenenge the Nyaus can dance, the Christians can pray, the traditionalist brew beer for their spirits and the non-belilevers just work on their stones.”
Visitors will also hear how Tom befriended the late Chief Chimburere of Guruve – no slick wizard but an old man in a shiny black suit – and had his head filled with African wisdom. They will hear how when international sanctions against Rhodesia decimated the tobacco market, Tom was faced with the redundancy of workers, and how sculptor Crispen Chakanyuka, coming home to Guruve, visited Tengenenge and told Tom about the serpentine stone which could be mined in the Great Dyke. It was Chakanyuka who suggested that the farm workers deploy the creativity applied to mask-making for the “Gule” into making stone sculpture.
So, the “beginning of the beginning” of Tengenenge was a group of would-be sculptors, including Tom, carving stones with old pieces of farm machinery under a mulberry tree.
Delving further, the visitor learns that although the Tengenenge sculptors and painters are of different cultures and religious beliefs, which they live by and practice freely without rancour, many have shared histories, and common social preoccupations. They also have shared life experiences, family and inter-marital ties which solidify community life. Tengenenge offers sculptors and painters a sense of place, social and personal space as well as artistic freedom.
Today the ara for sculpture has grown. Sculpture climbs the foothills of the Great Dyke mountains and winds its way down to the area where husks of tobacco plants remind of the “hay day” of the tobacco farmers of the Horseshoe Block.
Tengenenge today is as much part of the “art world” as New York, London, Venice, Dakar, Senegal or Sydney. Tengenenge does a roaring trade in stone sculpture. Each weekd there are visitors from the Netherlands striding through the bush noting their appointments with sculptors in their filo faxes, inscrutable Koreans with cameras, setting up their laptops on logs in the bush, visitors from galleries in the US wearing baseball caps, English visitors spreading picnics and crystal glasses on their rugs in the bush. There are film crews tying their cameras to logs, and students of stone sculpture and African art completing their thesis by candlelight in pole and dagga houses.
One Belgian gallerist said, “We meet the people in Guruve we meet in New York, the people at Tengenenge, we meet in London”
Nails as well as stones are hammered, crates are made and sculptures, lying like stranded whales, are packed, taken to Harare by truck and sent around the world.
Although they are courteously taken around the sculpture at Tengenenge visitors are not guided in the decision of what to buy. They exercise their own judgment, their understanding of what is good sculpture, what they like and what they don’t like. Some fill ten crates with sculpture and others one. Others put their sculpture in the back of the car and some buy nothing at all but simply take back home the memory or a photograph. Some may prefer the stones stripped bare of their natural properties by the Gunja brothers, others the earth-scarred “ancients of stone” by Victor Faya and still others the folk stories which wind upward in stone in the sculptures of Smecky Kagore, who is also part of the Tengenenge administration.
Cat lovers light on the plump cherubic cats of Wilfred Tembo, playful in stone. Others prefer the luscious elephants in fruit opal of Tendai Musonza. Then there are those sculptors who are part of the “beginning of the beginning” of Tengenenge, Josia Manzi of Yao origin, capturing the drollery of Yao folklore in stylish sculptures of consummate finish, and Amali Malolo, over eighty years old, whose “Baboon Eats a Pumpkin”, and whose “Crocodiles” would be well at home in the wilder waters of Lake Malawi.
Going down “Barankiny Avenue” towards the green face of the mountains of the Great Dyke with its grey stubble, remnant of chrome mines, the bush and scrub is but lights upon Douglas Shawa’s massive tapering heads which remind of the “Gule” and the “American Flowers” of Shubikayi Shawa, his brother, forms of flowers with buds in suggestive places appeal. Further down is a stand with no name and there is a sculpture of a woman with a Nefertiti face, a Mona Lisa smile and cat’s paws which any proud owner would call “My Cat Lady”. Here raw Springstone comes into its own.
Traditionally in Africa the laws of nature have governed how rural people live, and there have been the animistic belief that animals and birds of the kid that abound at Tengenenge have been hosts to spirits. Moveti Manzi, son of Josia Manzi makes beautifully formed rain birds in Springstone, Charles Chisuti the shadowy outlines of elephants seen from a distance, Uxorious Matemera the kind of flowers that blossom and bloom in the bush of Tengenenge. And legends, if they are good legends, live on. There are sculptures which represent baboons as being hosts to spirits, and lions the same.
Tengenenge cannot be done in a day. It rquires time, and time again, to familiarize with each sculptor and get to know their sculptures. For those who have the “time and time again” there are pole and dagga houses somewhat like “rest houses” in the mountains of India or Ceylon. There is the Guruve Hotel, a hot pink structure like a Mexican abode with a bar for meeting the locals. There are game ranches in the area with suitable accommodation, where the visitor can observe the animal and bird subjects of much Tengenenge sculpture.
If the visitor wants to see Zimbabwean stone sculpture, without concession to the “international look” of the sculpture made in the urban areas, they must go to Tengenenge. If the visitor also wants to meet the same people he or she might meet in New York or London, they must go to Tengenenge. If they want to hear the stories of one of the greatest adventurers to come to Africa, they must certainly go to Tengenenge. Or if they are engaged in studies in the discipline of rural and social development in Africa, Tengenenge is an obliging and facilitating case study. It is in sympathy with the ecologist and the environmentalist and the lover of grasses, armed with a Bundu book, can spend many happy hours there. The energetic can mount their backpacks, fill their water bottles, pitch their tents, charge their solar cell phones and climb the mountains of the Great Dyke while the cat lover can feed the off-cuts of cheese from the table to cats who have come down from the chrome mine.
The visitor to Tengenenge will find examples of communite spirit rare in the world of today which has been blighted by self-interest. Sculptors load trucks, mend roads, help each other dig the stones from Kandemwa, the largest serpentine mine in Southern Africa, only a kilometre away from the village.
Tengenenge, this unique place in Zimbabwe, continues to pull people from all over the world, and makes them realize that there is a part of Africa which is peaceful and tranquil, where life goes on as it has gone on for many years, but which adapts to the modern world and globalization as effectively as any multi-national company. At Tengenenge African culture is not dressed up and put on the stage to please the visitor. It is simply there, in the way people live, make their sculpture, paint, practice their beliefs and behave to other people.
That culture embraces the visitor who leaves Tengenenge a better person and will always return.
Originally published in Skyhost, Air Zimbabwe's inflight magazine, Vol 2003 .. permission by kind favor of E. Mambambo of Skyhost.
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