Using bold images of blood and gore, Owen Maseko’s banned exhibition brought up a subject that still stokes Zimbabwe’s thinly veiled ethnic tensions.
Paintings of village women weeping tears of blood stood against walls splattered with red graffiti, before police took them down and banned the exhibition.
Maseko’s exhibition at the Bulawayo Art Gallery was a protest against the Gukurahundi, the military campaign launched by a Zimbabwean army unit in the 1980s against armed dissidents. Rights groups say thousands of civilians were killed.
In September the exhibition became the first art in years to be officially banned by the Zimbabwe government.
In a government notice Home Affairs s secretary Melusi Matshiya announced Maseko’s exhibition had been banned under censorship laws. Matshiya said the “effigies, words and paintings on the walls portray the Gukurahundi era as a tribal, biased event”.
And, he pointed out that “the male statue showing genital organs standing at the opening in the gallery [is] proof of indecent nature and as such is prohibited from public exhibition”.
The Zimbabwean government also dusted off a colonial-era law that compels artists to hold “entertainment licences”, which they must renew every year.
Hours after the exhibition opened police arrived at the gallery, covered some of the art with old newspapers and arrested Maseko. He is now challenging the ban in the Constitutional Court. “As an artist, I am inspired by what happens around me, my experiences, other people’s experiences,” he said from Bulawayo. “An artist needs to be relevant. Gukurahundi is part of history, even if it is a history others do not want remembered.”
Last week a coalition of rights groups gave Maseko an award for “his bravery in giving a face and voice to the Gukurahundi massacres through visual arts”. But, Maseko said, his ordeal has left him isolated as cowed fellow artists keep their distance from him.
One of his canvases depicts a group of women wailing beneath the words: “They made us sing their songs while they tortured us and killed our brothers and sisters.”
Maseko said his work was based largely on the testimony of victims. The military campaign ended after former PF-Zapu leader Joshua Nkomo agreed to unity with Mugabe. But that agreement is a source of great bitterness and frustration for Maseko, as it is for many Ndebele activists.
“The unity accord was signed only because Nkomo was desperate to stop the killings,” he said.
Maseko insisted Zimbabwe’s attempts at “national healing” can succeed only if citizens are allowed to express themselves freely on issues such as Gukurahundi.