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

Amanda Hammar, Owen Maseko*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearchpeer-review

Abstract

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
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Politics of the Past in Zimbabwe
EditorsAstrid Rasch, Amanda Hammar, Minna Johanna Niemi
PublisherBrill
Publication date2025
Publication statusPublished - 2025
SeriesAEGIS-Brill African Studies Series

Cite this