Me & Mr Mugabe
by Prudence Maltby, prompted by Mugabe's resignation as leader of Zimbabwe
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
Writing for Cicatrix - the scar of a healed wound
Ewan Clayton, MBE, Professor in Design, University of Sunderland
Songs of Experience
What the anvil? What dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
The scarring of a total struggle runs deep. It affects the land, generations of those who fought, their families and friends as well as the institutions created to contain the forces of disassociation that conflict can unleash.
What place has art in this? The poets and artists of the First World War have left us a resounding testament to the power of art to engage these difficult themes. But the work continues. In wartime fearsome images of sound, spoken language and sight can enter our inner landscapes unbidden, unless we work with them they can run amok through the generations, at the level of an individual, a community or an entire society. As with physical wounds their effusions may be staunched, their ‘fearful symmetry’ wrestled with, connections established. ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ asks Blake in his famous poem The Tyger. The establishment of relations between disparate materials is one of arts defining activities. The primal roar of the Tyger is ‘contained’ in Blakes’s poem. So too we can act against the disassociations that fearfulness, pain, conflict and loss may materialize. Yet this pathway has a mystery at its heart. Standing on the edge of a great plain three artists have come together to share a journey, an exploration of the ‘landscape’ they inhabit. They come to reflect on the Great War, on war in general, aware in one case of a childhood in Northern Ireland, in another seared by the terrors of the Rhodesian Bush War. Their immediate landscape presents them with contradictions and provoking associations. An open plain containing prohibited space. Villages, once home to living communities, emptied. They find fragments of the Great War from collapsed trenches to the ‘Fums up’ good luck charms Henny Burnett works with; baby dolls with winged feet carried by soldiers as protection against bullets, shells and gas. The film by Susan Francis hints at a further truth. On her journey through an isolated landscape we see barbed wire enclosures where nature is allowed free rein. These images reverse those of the garden whose enclosing walls keep rampant nature at bay. But in the garden is the mystery. Acts of enclosure help us relate to the whole; the garden enclosed, the charm, the research laboratory, are ways of resisting the overwhelming character of the wild – of the open plain or the engulfing forest or the terrors of an unknown death. Disassociation can be a mechanism that allows necessary acts of survival. Through one lens it seems to be a falling apart, yet through another it represents an act of containment, and a new assemblage becomes possible, paralysis potentially overcome. The plain’s monuments – circles, avenues and pathways – indicate other acts of connection that art makes possible – the use of ritual and myth: re-enactment. There are hints of this in Prudence Maltby’s drawings scarifying the paper surface, part map, part dream, part pure embodiment. Her grandfather, Joseph Cribb, worked for a while at Ditchling in Sussex alongside the great poet of the first World War David Jones – mythologizing was the path Jones trod in his great long poem about the war In Parenthesis. So what is a scar, a cicatrix (Jones would have loved the word – it sounds like the name of an ancestor sleeping beneath the barrow). It is the new tissue that binds a wound together, the evidence, after the trauma, of inter-connections that holds things in being. In this exhibition it is the theme that reaches out to visitors, binding past and future, ourselves and others, in shared reflection amidst the ambiguous legacies of human conflict.
Fiona Robinson:
We are nearly at the end of 2014 and have four years to go to 2018 and so three years to continue to memorialize the Great War. There have been a lot of different attempts already to jump on the bandwagon with all the potential for hastily thrown together superficial shows. Cicatrix is not in that category. It is thoughtful, poignant and respectful.
Henny Burnett has constructed 100 Wiltshire Towers filling the recesses of each one with tiny objects, some as found, others fabricated, altered and displayed alongside small cast figures based on the ‘Fums-Up’ good luck charms which were given to soldiers by their sweethearts before they set off for the Front. All these tiny sculptures contain an element gathered on Salisbury Plain.
The miniscule figures are topped with Juniper berry heads, a plant that grows on the Plain and which is reputed to have a life of a hundred years. This is a touching installation and in a curious and engaging twist visitors are invited to exchange one of the figures with something they have made, a reminder of impermanence, of the charms lost by their lost owners. The scale of the towers and the scale of the figures, so small and insignificant are in gross contrast to the enormity of what happened and the huge forces of power which resulted in so many bodies being blown into smithereens, into tiny pieces and discarded on French soil. It is not difficult to be struck by the sadness of the appalling waste that WW1 was responsible for, but Burnett’s Salisbury Plain Mess Tins are also heartbreakingly evocative. Collections of objects contained in Kilner jars together with stitched fragments of cloth maps of the area on Salisbury Plain where each object was found. All this could just as easily have been gathered from Flanders Fields, transferring the location to an English Plain associated with the Military, brings it closer to home.
The fragility hinted at in Burnett’s sculpture is present in Prudence Maltby’s installation of small drawings, paper, scarred and marked, lines pushed and pulled across surfaces, fragile objects in need of protection. Raw pigment and overlaid mark making building layers, a sense of scar tissue healing but always leaving the evidence of the original damage beneath the layers.
Susan Francis’ approach is different, using installation and a video which sees all of this through a lens. The lens is that of a camera but inevitably it parallels the barrier of time, the disconnection caused by the placing of glass between an object viewed and the viewer. 21stcentury perceptions of what happened in 1914 are seen through the wrong end of the telescope of time. Memories are ring-fenced by time, there is no one left now to reminisce, to mull over events, to weave new memories. What we know is now stagnated and set within an enclosure which holds within it, beyond reach, the lost voices of first hand
Writing for Common Thread at Trowbridge Arts
Dr Michele Whiting
“…’Beneath the Seven Sisters’ – The title grounds the work in reality, however, the lines and marks of the drawing encode shapes into the mind’s eye. Serrations, inscribing, drawing over and over, varied pressure causing tonal shifts, all play with our thoughts about time within the overall space of the drawing. We can’t ‘see’ a literal place but we can feel its edges, depths, its hesitancy. We can only guess at its meaning or the circumstance of its being; its context. Is it important to know? Maybe, as philosopher Michel Foucault wrote, it is more interesting to think about spaces of multiplicities, in other words spaces of many things: these ‘heterotopias’ indicate less obvious geographies (spaces) that lie between things, ‘counter-sites’, quietly subversive.”
by Prudence Maltby, prompted by Mugabe's resignation as leader of Zimbabwe
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
Writing for Cicatrix - the scar of a healed wound
Ewan Clayton, MBE, Professor in Design, University of Sunderland
Songs of Experience
What the anvil? What dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
The scarring of a total struggle runs deep. It affects the land, generations of those who fought, their families and friends as well as the institutions created to contain the forces of disassociation that conflict can unleash.
What place has art in this? The poets and artists of the First World War have left us a resounding testament to the power of art to engage these difficult themes. But the work continues. In wartime fearsome images of sound, spoken language and sight can enter our inner landscapes unbidden, unless we work with them they can run amok through the generations, at the level of an individual, a community or an entire society. As with physical wounds their effusions may be staunched, their ‘fearful symmetry’ wrestled with, connections established. ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ asks Blake in his famous poem The Tyger. The establishment of relations between disparate materials is one of arts defining activities. The primal roar of the Tyger is ‘contained’ in Blakes’s poem. So too we can act against the disassociations that fearfulness, pain, conflict and loss may materialize. Yet this pathway has a mystery at its heart. Standing on the edge of a great plain three artists have come together to share a journey, an exploration of the ‘landscape’ they inhabit. They come to reflect on the Great War, on war in general, aware in one case of a childhood in Northern Ireland, in another seared by the terrors of the Rhodesian Bush War. Their immediate landscape presents them with contradictions and provoking associations. An open plain containing prohibited space. Villages, once home to living communities, emptied. They find fragments of the Great War from collapsed trenches to the ‘Fums up’ good luck charms Henny Burnett works with; baby dolls with winged feet carried by soldiers as protection against bullets, shells and gas. The film by Susan Francis hints at a further truth. On her journey through an isolated landscape we see barbed wire enclosures where nature is allowed free rein. These images reverse those of the garden whose enclosing walls keep rampant nature at bay. But in the garden is the mystery. Acts of enclosure help us relate to the whole; the garden enclosed, the charm, the research laboratory, are ways of resisting the overwhelming character of the wild – of the open plain or the engulfing forest or the terrors of an unknown death. Disassociation can be a mechanism that allows necessary acts of survival. Through one lens it seems to be a falling apart, yet through another it represents an act of containment, and a new assemblage becomes possible, paralysis potentially overcome. The plain’s monuments – circles, avenues and pathways – indicate other acts of connection that art makes possible – the use of ritual and myth: re-enactment. There are hints of this in Prudence Maltby’s drawings scarifying the paper surface, part map, part dream, part pure embodiment. Her grandfather, Joseph Cribb, worked for a while at Ditchling in Sussex alongside the great poet of the first World War David Jones – mythologizing was the path Jones trod in his great long poem about the war In Parenthesis. So what is a scar, a cicatrix (Jones would have loved the word – it sounds like the name of an ancestor sleeping beneath the barrow). It is the new tissue that binds a wound together, the evidence, after the trauma, of inter-connections that holds things in being. In this exhibition it is the theme that reaches out to visitors, binding past and future, ourselves and others, in shared reflection amidst the ambiguous legacies of human conflict.
Fiona Robinson:
We are nearly at the end of 2014 and have four years to go to 2018 and so three years to continue to memorialize the Great War. There have been a lot of different attempts already to jump on the bandwagon with all the potential for hastily thrown together superficial shows. Cicatrix is not in that category. It is thoughtful, poignant and respectful.
Henny Burnett has constructed 100 Wiltshire Towers filling the recesses of each one with tiny objects, some as found, others fabricated, altered and displayed alongside small cast figures based on the ‘Fums-Up’ good luck charms which were given to soldiers by their sweethearts before they set off for the Front. All these tiny sculptures contain an element gathered on Salisbury Plain.
The miniscule figures are topped with Juniper berry heads, a plant that grows on the Plain and which is reputed to have a life of a hundred years. This is a touching installation and in a curious and engaging twist visitors are invited to exchange one of the figures with something they have made, a reminder of impermanence, of the charms lost by their lost owners. The scale of the towers and the scale of the figures, so small and insignificant are in gross contrast to the enormity of what happened and the huge forces of power which resulted in so many bodies being blown into smithereens, into tiny pieces and discarded on French soil. It is not difficult to be struck by the sadness of the appalling waste that WW1 was responsible for, but Burnett’s Salisbury Plain Mess Tins are also heartbreakingly evocative. Collections of objects contained in Kilner jars together with stitched fragments of cloth maps of the area on Salisbury Plain where each object was found. All this could just as easily have been gathered from Flanders Fields, transferring the location to an English Plain associated with the Military, brings it closer to home.
The fragility hinted at in Burnett’s sculpture is present in Prudence Maltby’s installation of small drawings, paper, scarred and marked, lines pushed and pulled across surfaces, fragile objects in need of protection. Raw pigment and overlaid mark making building layers, a sense of scar tissue healing but always leaving the evidence of the original damage beneath the layers.
Susan Francis’ approach is different, using installation and a video which sees all of this through a lens. The lens is that of a camera but inevitably it parallels the barrier of time, the disconnection caused by the placing of glass between an object viewed and the viewer. 21stcentury perceptions of what happened in 1914 are seen through the wrong end of the telescope of time. Memories are ring-fenced by time, there is no one left now to reminisce, to mull over events, to weave new memories. What we know is now stagnated and set within an enclosure which holds within it, beyond reach, the lost voices of first hand
Writing for Common Thread at Trowbridge Arts
Dr Michele Whiting
“…’Beneath the Seven Sisters’ – The title grounds the work in reality, however, the lines and marks of the drawing encode shapes into the mind’s eye. Serrations, inscribing, drawing over and over, varied pressure causing tonal shifts, all play with our thoughts about time within the overall space of the drawing. We can’t ‘see’ a literal place but we can feel its edges, depths, its hesitancy. We can only guess at its meaning or the circumstance of its being; its context. Is it important to know? Maybe, as philosopher Michel Foucault wrote, it is more interesting to think about spaces of multiplicities, in other words spaces of many things: these ‘heterotopias’ indicate less obvious geographies (spaces) that lie between things, ‘counter-sites’, quietly subversive.”
