Zimbabwe: Tengenenge - a Cultural Melting Pot

ONCE it was our cultural roots, our background, upbringing, induced beliefs and behavioural patterns which proclaimed our cultural identity, had a long-term effect on who and what we are, how we see and perceive and how we are seen and perceived.

Today we move away from our cultural origins, so that they are often unrecognisable in the way we live and behave.

Many of us are the sum of our exposure to many cultures so that we ourselves are examples of cultural diversity, but it is not all people who stick with and stand fast for the culture they were born with.

Few people stay put, they pull up their roots, go from the third world to the first, the village to the township, the township to the city, adapt to and adopt the ways of other cultures.

But sometimes they like to retain aspects of what came before and see it as more than their history -- the local idioms of their language, their ingrained habits, their means of expression, their music, their dances, their ways of marking rites of passage.

And so it was during the l950s in the Southern African region there were people moving away from both their countries and their cultures to find work in what is now Zimbabwe on the tobacco farms in the Guruve district and what is now Zambia on the line of rail.

These people -- Chewas from Malawi and Zambia, Yaos from Malawi, Mbunda Mbundus from Angola and north-west Zambia travelled light, their possession were meagre, their wealth lay in their cultures, with their richness of music and dance and art.

The Chewas who came to the Guruve district to work on tobacco farms, brought with them their Chewa language, to become the lingua franca on the tobacco farms, still spoken today among local people, Chewa and non-Chewa.

They bought with them what might now be termed a "cultural dance" their Gule Wamkulu, the Great Dance of the Social Institution of the Nyau, part of the socialisation of the male Chewa, an initiation into adulthood.

So the Nyau remained part of the Chewa way of life in the land of the Korekore with their lion spirits and legendary kings and in Guruve the home of chiefs and spirits.

And so it was that a young apprentice tobacco farmer, Tom Blomefield from Durban, seeking adventure, a horse breaker, the favourite dancer with other men's wives, a chrome miner, was stationed on a farm up Impinge way. Chewa he learned and beginning to think in Chewa, with a grasp of the cultural concepts embodied in the Chewa language, he became close to his Chewa workers.

In these workers he saw artists, makers of masks and drums, musicians and dancers.

He saw the need for them to express their beliefs in a life beyond through drumming and dancing, wearing costumes and masks.

And there were Yaos from Malawi and he learned the descriptive powers of their language in its most rudimentary form.

These people adapted to local conditions, they married into the local community, they began to speak the local Korekore, but culturally they remained who they were and where they came from, and retained the traditional African cultural values of respect for others, and a sense of community.

So when Tengenenge started, in l966, the sculptors saw opportunity to express their cultural identity and background, and keep their cultures secure and intact, through stone sculpture.

In all cultures religious beliefs variously through the written word, myths, rituals or through prayer instruct people how to behave.

So at Tengenenge these people of various spiritual backgrounds who had learned to live together as workers on the tobacco farms, despite their different cultural origins, to live together as sculptors.