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Accepted Paper:
Can art and artists actively engage and address extractivism in Zimbabwe?
Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti
(Rhodes University)
This study focuses on a documentary premiered by Bus Stop TV in 2020, and a collaborative exhibition by Kiluanji Kia Henda from Angola and Felix Shumba from Zimbabwe from 2023, to explore the role art and artists play in engaging and addressing the exploitation of communities for resources.
Paper long abstract:
Section 13 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe clearly states that communities should and must benefit from the extraction of natural resources within their area. Section 332 of the said constitution is clear on what communal land is, and on the rights the community and the individual have over the land. The same section clearly spells out the role of the traditional chiefs on the governance and distribution of the land. Yet with the surge in the number of European and Chinese companies extracting mineral resources in Zimbabwe, the communities find themselves losing everything to the foreign mining entities. They are being displaced from their ancestral lands and they are losing their farmlands. Livelihoods are being destroyed. Worst of all, they are witnessing the exhumation of the buried relatives, which is more of a taboo to them. Operating between these transnational mining entities and the communities are corrupt local chiefs and government officials whose hands are greased by the extractors. This study focuses on 'Black granite quarrying take toll on Mutoko communities', a documentary premiered by Bus Stop TV (via YouTube in 2020), and 'Memories of the Poisoned River', a collaborative exhibition by Kiluanji Kia Henda from Angola and Felix Shumba from Zimbabwe (at the National History Museum in Luanda in 2023) to explore the role art and artists can play in engaging and addressing the exploitation of communities for resources.