Disrupting Zimbabwe’s Silenced Pasts through Art: A Conversation with Owen Maseko

This chapter weaves together the core elements of several conversations during 2022 in Zimbabwe and Denmark respectively, between multi-talented Zimbabwean artist and creative activist, Owen Maseko, and Denmark-based Zimbabwean scholar, Amanda Hammar. Maseko is especially well known in relation to his one-man exhibition of paintings and installations at the National Gallery in Bulawayo addressing the state-led Gukurahundi massacres in the 1980s, which was forcibly closed in 2010 by the then still Mugabe-led regime. Yet Maseko is marked by a much broader set of relationships to both his own past and to the wider social and political histories, presents and futures of Matabeleland, which continue to shape – indeed to ‘haunt’ – his interweaving personal, artistic and political journeys. In the context of Zimbabwe’s current political environment in which “anything you do can easily be a crime”, he is acutely aware of what it means to speak one’s own truths, let alone to disrupt the state-enforced silences surrounding the violent truths of Gukurahundi. Despite this, he is naturally drawn to being part of a wider, collective process of making visible, naming and memorialising both historical and present injustices through his art and other creative practices. He recognises being simultaneously a unique individual artist and deeply bound to the communities of which he is a part. In this, it is clear to him that his story is not “my story alone”.
Keywords: Zimbabwe, Gukurahundi, political art, witness, memory, disrupted silence, Owen Maseko