Building new life from Zimbabwe’s stone
David Jamali
While Zimbabwe’s election crisis holds the country on a knife-edge, many Zimbabwean Australians are continuing their day-to-day lives, and desperately hoping for a peaceful transition of power. Through it all, AfricanOz spoke to Melbourne-based David Jamali about his background in human rights, development and art in Zimbabwe. Article below. For the latest on Zimbabwe, see Google News
Zimbabwean stone sculpture artist and permanent Australian resident, David Jamali is no stranger to electoral tension. He was previously at the helm of Zimbabwe’s Human Rights Association, and – since coming to Australia in 2002 – has managed African and East Asian development programs for Oxfam and now World Vision. In that time he’s seen how corrupt or unstable states can wreak havoc on the human condition. But he’s also seen how people can rise above adversity and carve out a new life for themselves.
It’s a level of hope and motivation that has seen him, from an early age, focused on building the capacity of others. As a teenager he set up programs to help local widows and sculpture artists support themselves. Later, as a Zimbabwe human rights worker, he saw the importance of economic and social empowerment:
“Poor people couldn’t come to meetings about human rights when they were busy finding food”, says David. So he helped set up skills training and income generation programs. “It was a more holistic approach,” he says, “that worked well.”
David is not one for quick fixes – he’s big on analysis and tailored responses. Even in his work as a sculpture artist, specialising in the Shona tradition of stone carving, he works carefully with the many dimensions of the stone:
“A stone speaks its own language,” he says. “The process between stone and artist is to negotiate what the stone wants and what the artist wants. You need to see something within the stone, and bring out the message within… ”
And the message is an important one: “Sculpture is a story that needs to be told, the expression of a particular society. While we can’t always do much about things, as artists we can start to talk about it, discuss the issues raised… Art can be a medium for change,” says David.
Since moving to Australia David has risked most of the money he’s earned to help Zimbabwe-based artists promote their beautiful work to the West.
“People are living from hand to mouth in Zimbabwe. I want to provide work for sculptors. Artists are exploited. People are coming in to Zimbabwe, paying almost nothing for high quality art. If we can empower the artist, enable one worker to come up, then others will follow.”
It’s a belief in building the capacity of others he’s had since childhood, when local township poverty encouraged him to set up income-generation schemes supported by the local Catholic Church. “Many of the widows in the parish were living on one meal a day,” says David. “Two nuns from the US encouraged me to formulate and develop ideas to assist them. These grew into projects for young people, and a tailoring project for the widows. I sat there with them and sewed!”
He did the same with a sculpture group (whose offspring still exists in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare) – a process that drew him into becoming an artist himself. However it wasn’t long before his interest in humanity encouraged him to join the famed ZimRights (Zimbabwean Human Rights Association).
In the following decade he was to witness dramatic changes under the reign of President Mugabe’s Zanu PF party, in power since Zimbabwe’s independence. The legacy of colonial rule in Rhodesia (where indigenous Zimbabweans had very few rights), saw one oppressive system eventually lead to another. Throughout the 1990s President Robert Mugabe began exercising increasingly tighter control on people’s rights. Meanwhile, David’s organisation ZimRights was receiving international donor support for civic education, election monitoring and legal services programs. The United Nations even asked the organisation to submit them with ‘shadow’ reports on human rights in Zimbabwe, giving them considerable international standing.
As ordinary Zimbabwean’s understanding of human rights grew, the government began to find ZimRights more confrontational and critical – culminating in a crackdown in 1997 when, according to David “ZimRights organised a march against police brutality… The protest gave courage to others to support the human rights cause, and for the first time the Government began to call ZimRights an opposition group.” During that time, workers were intimidated. Mugabe-supported thugs destroyed shops. Many human rights protesters were locked up – including David for a short period, before lawyers came to his aid.
Then in 2000, the international media spotlight fell on Zimbabwe when the Mugabe government famously stormed farms owned by white landowners. According to David, it was a time when Zanu PF supporters began to infiltrate ZimRights, and the organisation lost a lot of its outside funding.
It was also a time when many in Western countries began to view Zimbabwe’s problems as a case of black against white. “But the issue in Zimbabwe is not about race,” says David, “It’s about structures that are inherited [from colonial Rhodesia] that are making things difficult. Yes, the land issue needed to be addressed. But not in the way it was timed and conducted.”
David is sometimes frustrated at the international media’s ignorance of problems faced by indigenous Zimbabweans: “Sometimes I get really angry when there is political violence in Zimbabwe, and a few indigenous people are killed and there is no coverage in the Western media. But when one white person dies, it is international news.”
For years David witnessed and filed reports on human rights abuses committed against Zimbabweans of all backgrounds (See www.kubatana.net And the economic effects of Mugabe’s rule and resulting international sanctions have had a devastating effect on the livelihood of his family and friends who have seen rising inflation, massive unemployment and chronic food shortages.
Last year when David returned to his township of Tafara he found much of his family house destroyed under Mugabe’s famous ‘slum demolition’ programs. His own extended family of 17 were forced to share 3 bedrooms between them, and “many people are still living in the open,” he says.
However, rather than dwell on these bitter developments, David has stepped up his income-generation plans for local artists and community members, working to provide both resources and an outlet for artists to sell their work overseas. He also works on southern African development programs with World Vision, provides current affairs news and commentary on Melbourne’s 3CR Radio, and academic presentations on Zimbabwe, while completing a Masters in International Development.
He’s currently focused on establishing a website with a fair trade online store to market quality art from Zimbabwe and beyond – including exchange programs between artists from Australia and Zimbabwe, and the possiblity of starting Shona sculpture classes. “It will be a one stop shop to get an understanding of Zimbabwe culture and the history of Shona sculpture,” says David, who is “looking forward to working with individuals, retailers, collectors and galleries who want to make a difference”. The profits will be directed back into other community development intitiatives through Mavambo Development Program, a project initiated by David in Harare in 2000.
Clearly, despite the continuing uncertainty in Zimbabwe, David remains hopeful of people’s ability to rise above adversity, given the right resources and assistance. It’s a vision he carries through in the hope of a new Zimbabwe.
David now lives in Melbourne with his Australian partner and baby. His World Vision work now also sees him based (for part of the year) in Southern Africa – a situation which David says makes him “feel more connected – living on both continents.” You can contact David at david_jamali@yahoo.com
USEFUL WEBLINKS: 3CR – www.3cr.org.au
World Vision – www.worldvision.com.au
ZimRights – www.kubatana.net
