While most of Manuscripts and Archives’ patrons expect to find textual materials documenting history in our holdings, the repository is also home to a surprising array of content which appeals to our visual and aesthetic sensibilities, often found in unexpected places. Whether it be through intentional art-objects or just the bored meanderings of pen that we may see in the margins of a personal journal, that humanness expresses itself in this way, whether representationally or abstractly, consciously or not, is just as important as how it’s expressed in syntax and ordered thought; it can help the researcher approach the psychological and emotional spaces of their subjects of inquiry in ways that the written word cannot. These are the oblique angles of research.
Over the past several months, I have had the great opportunity to work with SML cataloguing librarian Charles Riley on an Arcadia funded project cataloguing all of the African language pamphlets in MS 1351, the Pamphlet Collection. Literally hundreds of these pamphlets pass though my hands every two weeks or so, and while I can’t read any of them, I’ve grown accustomed to gleaning their meaning from the idiosyncratic illustrations that many of them employ. The examples that I’ve selected were all chosen from boxes 203 and 204 of the collection, are written in the Shona language, a Bantu language native to Zimbabwe and southern Zambia, and were mostly published in the 1960s and 1970s.
The drawings are emotional, sometimes feverish, depicting an array of social norms, spirituality, and family life during a time of upheaval in African politics and culture. Methodical hatches fall into pointillist textures. Soft-pencil scumbling washes over frenzied accent lines. Heavy contours, almost cloisonné, recall the formalism of artists from Paul Gauguin to Robert Crumb.
Charles Riley will help us contextualize these drawings and the new literature of an independent culture in emergence.
“Rhodesia during the 1960s and 1970s was a country in the heat of transition. It had declared unilateral independence in 1965 from the United Kingdom in defiance of the official policy of ‘no independence before majority rule’, shedding its status as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, and entered into a prolonged civil war, marked by arson, bombings, anthrax and chemical attacks. This lasted until the ceasefire of the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979 that led the way to independence under majority rule in 1981, as the new nation of Zimbabwe.
“One institution that successfully managed to survive the long period that came between decolonization and majority-led independence was the Southern Rhodesia Literature Bureau, founded in 1953, which changed its name first to the Rhodesia Literature Bureau and then to the Zimbabwe Literature Bureau, operating under the Ministry of Education in cooperation with external publishing houses until its closure in 1999. While the literature that resulted was definitely not free from pressure and influence to meet with the approval of whichever government was in power, it was able to fulfill a mission of producing and promoting literature in Zimbabwean languages: notably Shona and Ndebele.
“The founding of the bureau came three years before the publication of the first novel in Shona, Feso, by Solomon Mutswairo through Oxford University Press in Capetown1. His Ambuyamuderere (‘Green praying mantis’) is a collection of children’s songs and games published in 1967 as a collaboration between the bureau and Oxford University, with translations in English. Mutswairo wrote the lyrics for the new Zimbabwean national anthem, Simudzai Mureza wedu WeZimbabwe (‘Blessed be the land of Zimbabwe’) in 1994. Predecessors to the adoption of this anthem had been Ishe Komberera Africa, the Shona translation of the Xhosa Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, and Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia sung to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. Of Mutswairo, G. P. Kahari writes, “the traditional story-teller, the ‘sarungano’, told his tales well but Mutswairo, in taking advantage of the latter’s techniques and incorporating them into English nineteenth-century narrative styles, did better.”
Charles and I will explore more Shona history, texts, and art next week. Stay tuned!
1 correction