There’s this curious photo of me, receiving a prize at The National Gallery of Zimbabwe. The bizarre fact is, that I’m getting my award from Robert Mugabe. Song & Season is the title of this linocut. It was made in Harare when most of my time was taken up with mothering. The piece won the Zimbabwe Heritage Open at the National Gallery and I received my prize from the President. As a nation where a civil war had raged just a few years before, we were still at the stage of feeling very positive about our newly independent country. This print reflects that hope. We were not to know that the violence hadn’t stopped, and that innocent civilians in Matabeleland, where I grew up, were being slaughtered by Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade. More than 20,000 people lost their lives: supposedly in peacetime.
With recent events surrounding Mugabe’s resignation as Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, I’ve dug out this photo and reflected somewhat on a confusing and little understood history.
I’m just one of a minority society of people who grew up in a country with a bush war going on. In a landscape of harsh dramatic beauty a complicated conflict grew and carried on until Rhodesia’s independence in 1980.
For the decades of the mid 60s and 70s, life under Smith’s regime unfolded. Convoys, curfews and security alerts, and escorts to school, drills for survival strategies - should an attack take place, and constant updates mixed with propaganda. The music of that time heard as part of Forces’ Requests, the suspicion felt in and out of towns; the dangers ever present. ‘Walls have ears’ was a slogan often seen written across the limed walls of our childhood. The grenade screens protecting the windows, guard dogs outside at the security fences, and distant sounds of helicopters when things escalated in the bush.
Goldmines found in cattle country, sprawling villages of mud dwellings and kraals across the scrub; and smoke, sunsets and mosquitos, spiders and snakes. Egrets spotted white against a charred landscape after fires; storms in the rainy season biblical in their delivery. Herding cows, swimming in damns sliding down mine dumps…the Ndebele people who spoke with clicks, whose quarters we visited as children, whose food we shared, whose dogs chased us through the bush.
And during this period I left the war to visit the UK in 1976 neither English nor entirely African. I had arrived believing the Rhodesian Forces were fighting terrorism; and I returned confused, influenced by the BBC claiming the soldiers were battling for freedom. I went home, unable to adapt, back to the sun and the granite outcrops and homeland of eagles - where I’d spent most of my childhood and now where I reached adulthood, got married and lived on a farm the size of an English county.
Throughout the years I protected myself with a ‘government issue’ weapon. An Israeli firearm called an Uzi. I wore it walking out on the lands across my shoulder, and then across my belly when I became pregnant. I held it ‘cocked’ at the open window when travelling as a passenger, going from the bush, into the capital. It is true that I never thought I wouldn’t use it if I had to. I happened to be a good shot. Practise was done at one’s local range along with everyone else in the community, so that we remained familiar with our firearms and adept at handling their functions.
Travelling across country was a nerve wracking experience with road blocks and the risk of encountering mines planted on dirt roads. Flying was particularly terrifying as the Viscounts made ‘corkscrew’ take offs and landings to supposedly confuse heat-seeking missiles which threatened the skies.
When I was eight months pregnant I happened to be in a district clubhouse which was mortared. I dived beneath a table and waited for the all clear.
Weeks after this baby was born, peace came to the country. Overnight the Rhodesian Army handed over to Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe emerged. We all wanted it to work, so we looked forward and hoped and rebuilt our lives without the conflict.
After a brief honeymoon period when the country flourished and grew there were rumours about a Zimbabwe Army fraction, who were said to be slaughtering innocent people in Matabeleland. It was difficult to hear and register, and many chose not to believe the murmurs and whispers. I’d heard from journalist friends that disused mine shafts were being used to discard the bodies and that torturing and burning of villages was becoming commonplace.
As the violence continued and more farms owned by whites were seized, Zimbabwe started to decline, the economy shrank and its people suffered. It was hard to leave and the decision a painful one. Those left behind accused the quitters of taking ‘the chicken run’ as if moving on were a cowardly thing. So today I still feel pangs of guilt, mixed with the twinges of longing for a land I once knew and loved and lost.
My ‘scar drawings’ were begun in response to working directly with soldiers in Wiltshire on an arts project I spearheaded. We visited Salisbury Plain together. The unique and vast tract of land owned by the Ministry of Defence that is Salisbury Plain opened up many memories for me, and presented many parallels with a landscape I’d turned my back on. Outside its fringes the countryside rolls in picturesque tranquillity.
My understanding of the soldier on the city streets reminded me of that girl who I once was, my brother and classmates joining the army in a country in Africa, too young to fight, as always.
Around this time with the opening up of old wounds I began experiencing flashbacks and PTSD was identified by a clinical psychologist. I worked with her through this diagnosis and the treatment I was fortunate enough to receive over 11 months. The sessions were cathartic and instrumental in the further development of my drawings.
Scratching into paper I record things. The scar drawings are the handwriting for the history that confused a whole generation, the leading up to Mugabe’s inauguration, and beyond til now.
The doctor I saw gave me this 1996 quote from Elie Wiessel: ''It is not because I cannot explain that you won't understand, it's because you won't understand that I can't explain."
Prudence Maltby November 2017 Salisbury Wiltshire
With recent events surrounding Mugabe’s resignation as Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, I’ve dug out this photo and reflected somewhat on a confusing and little understood history.
I’m just one of a minority society of people who grew up in a country with a bush war going on. In a landscape of harsh dramatic beauty a complicated conflict grew and carried on until Rhodesia’s independence in 1980.
For the decades of the mid 60s and 70s, life under Smith’s regime unfolded. Convoys, curfews and security alerts, and escorts to school, drills for survival strategies - should an attack take place, and constant updates mixed with propaganda. The music of that time heard as part of Forces’ Requests, the suspicion felt in and out of towns; the dangers ever present. ‘Walls have ears’ was a slogan often seen written across the limed walls of our childhood. The grenade screens protecting the windows, guard dogs outside at the security fences, and distant sounds of helicopters when things escalated in the bush.
Goldmines found in cattle country, sprawling villages of mud dwellings and kraals across the scrub; and smoke, sunsets and mosquitos, spiders and snakes. Egrets spotted white against a charred landscape after fires; storms in the rainy season biblical in their delivery. Herding cows, swimming in damns sliding down mine dumps…the Ndebele people who spoke with clicks, whose quarters we visited as children, whose food we shared, whose dogs chased us through the bush.
And during this period I left the war to visit the UK in 1976 neither English nor entirely African. I had arrived believing the Rhodesian Forces were fighting terrorism; and I returned confused, influenced by the BBC claiming the soldiers were battling for freedom. I went home, unable to adapt, back to the sun and the granite outcrops and homeland of eagles - where I’d spent most of my childhood and now where I reached adulthood, got married and lived on a farm the size of an English county.
Throughout the years I protected myself with a ‘government issue’ weapon. An Israeli firearm called an Uzi. I wore it walking out on the lands across my shoulder, and then across my belly when I became pregnant. I held it ‘cocked’ at the open window when travelling as a passenger, going from the bush, into the capital. It is true that I never thought I wouldn’t use it if I had to. I happened to be a good shot. Practise was done at one’s local range along with everyone else in the community, so that we remained familiar with our firearms and adept at handling their functions.
Travelling across country was a nerve wracking experience with road blocks and the risk of encountering mines planted on dirt roads. Flying was particularly terrifying as the Viscounts made ‘corkscrew’ take offs and landings to supposedly confuse heat-seeking missiles which threatened the skies.
When I was eight months pregnant I happened to be in a district clubhouse which was mortared. I dived beneath a table and waited for the all clear.
Weeks after this baby was born, peace came to the country. Overnight the Rhodesian Army handed over to Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe emerged. We all wanted it to work, so we looked forward and hoped and rebuilt our lives without the conflict.
After a brief honeymoon period when the country flourished and grew there were rumours about a Zimbabwe Army fraction, who were said to be slaughtering innocent people in Matabeleland. It was difficult to hear and register, and many chose not to believe the murmurs and whispers. I’d heard from journalist friends that disused mine shafts were being used to discard the bodies and that torturing and burning of villages was becoming commonplace.
As the violence continued and more farms owned by whites were seized, Zimbabwe started to decline, the economy shrank and its people suffered. It was hard to leave and the decision a painful one. Those left behind accused the quitters of taking ‘the chicken run’ as if moving on were a cowardly thing. So today I still feel pangs of guilt, mixed with the twinges of longing for a land I once knew and loved and lost.
My ‘scar drawings’ were begun in response to working directly with soldiers in Wiltshire on an arts project I spearheaded. We visited Salisbury Plain together. The unique and vast tract of land owned by the Ministry of Defence that is Salisbury Plain opened up many memories for me, and presented many parallels with a landscape I’d turned my back on. Outside its fringes the countryside rolls in picturesque tranquillity.
My understanding of the soldier on the city streets reminded me of that girl who I once was, my brother and classmates joining the army in a country in Africa, too young to fight, as always.
Around this time with the opening up of old wounds I began experiencing flashbacks and PTSD was identified by a clinical psychologist. I worked with her through this diagnosis and the treatment I was fortunate enough to receive over 11 months. The sessions were cathartic and instrumental in the further development of my drawings.
Scratching into paper I record things. The scar drawings are the handwriting for the history that confused a whole generation, the leading up to Mugabe’s inauguration, and beyond til now.
The doctor I saw gave me this 1996 quote from Elie Wiessel: ''It is not because I cannot explain that you won't understand, it's because you won't understand that I can't explain."
Prudence Maltby November 2017 Salisbury Wiltshire
