dialogue Zimbabwe Mobilizes ICAC’s Shift from Coup de Grâce to Cultural Coup Ruth Simbao, Raphael Chikukwa, Jimmy Ogonga, Berry Bickle, Marie Hélène Pereira, Dulcie Abrahams Altass, Mhoze Chikowero, and N’Goné Fall To whom does Africa belong? Whose Africa are we talking about? … R S is a Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and It’s time we control our narrative, and contemporary art is a medium the National Research Foundation/Department of Science and Tech- that can lead us to do this. nology SARChI Chair in the Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa in the National Gallery of Zimbabwe () Fine Art Department at Rhodes University, South Africa. r.simbao@ ru.ac.za Especially aer having taken Zimbabwe to Venice, we needed to bring R C is the Chief Curator at the National Gallery of the world to Zimbabwe to understand the context we are working in. Zimbabwe in Harare, and has been instrumental in establishing the Raphael Chikukwa (Zvomuya b) Zimbabwe Platform at the Venice Biennale. J O is an artist and producer based in Malindi, Kenya. he International Conference on African Cultures His work interweaves between artistic practice and curatorial strate- (ICAC) was held at the National Gallery of gies, and his curatorial projects include e Mombasa Billboard Proj- Zimbabwe in Harare from September –, ect (2002, Mombasa), and Amnesia (2006-2009, Nairobi). In 2001, . Eight delegates write their reections on he founded Nairobi Arts Trust/Centre of Contemporary Art, Nairobi (CCAEA), an organization that works as a catalyst for the visual arts the importance of this Africa-based event. and the creation of signicant art projects. Ruth Simbao: Signicant events took place in the study of the B B is an artist who works between Zimbabwe and Mozambique, arts of Africa in , registering a valuable geopolitical shi of addressing the region’s long history of colonialism that has been, in part, docu- T the center of gravity in terms of knowledge creation. e Arts mented, regulated, and perpetuated through the written word of the coloniz- Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), a US-based ers. She is most fascinated by the fragments of history that remain from both o cial scripts as well as personal, everyday notes, cookbooks, scrapbooks, and organization in the discipline, held its seventeenth triennial at the almanacs of the generations of Africans living under colonial rule. University of Ghana in Accra—the rst to be held on the African continent. Opening the conference, Professor Kwesi Yankah M H P is a program o cer at the Raw Material highlighted the signicance of this meeting “on African soil” in Company in Dakar, Senegal. She has a strong interest in developing a year that marks the sixtieth anniversary of Ghana’s indepen- curatorial projects at the intersection of art, knowledge and society. dence, which was a moment in history that “had a ripple eect on D A A is an international fellow at the RAW the … liberation of the entire continent” (: ). Academy in Dakar. Her research focuses on the intersection of perfor- mance, social issues and narrative. In the same year another important international confer- ence on the arts of Africa took place on the African continent, M C is Associate Professor of African History at the Univer- this time at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare (Figs. sity of California in Santa Barbara and ACLS Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of African Music, Power –), which celebrated its own sixtieth anniversary—that of the and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe (2015). national gallery known during the colonial era as the Rhodes National Gallery. e International Conference on African N’G F is a curator and a consultant in cultural strategies. She was the editorial director of Revue Noire from 1994 to 2001, and an associate Cultures (ICAC) engaged with processes of decolonization and professor at the Senghor University in Alexandria, Egypt from 2007 to 2011. questioned why most conferences on the arts of Africa take place She is the co-founder of the Dakar-based collective GawLab, a platform for in the north and why the dominant market for African art still research and production on art in public spaces and technology applied to remains outside of the African continent. e conference was artistic creativity. organized by the director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Doreen Sibanda, who stated in her opening speech that “there is african arts SUMMER 2018 VOL. 51, NO. 2 Downloaded from| http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar_a_00399 by guest on 02 October 2021 1 Delegates at the 2nd International Conference music festival at the then Rhodes National Gallery in Salisbury on African Cultures (ICAC), which was hosted by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare, Zimbabwe, from August –, (Fig. ). is congress drew delegates 11–13 September 2017. from the African continent, the United States, Europe, the United Photo: courtesy of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Kingdom, and the Caribbean and was meant to be a biannual 2 The 2017 International Conference on African event that would take place in dierent African cities. e direc- Cultures was held at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, tor of the Rhodes National Gallery, Frank McEwen, stated in his and included the exhibition African Voices, curated by opening ICAC address that it was crucial for an exhibition of Raphael Chikukwa. Photo: courtesy of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe African art to be “staged in Africa.” As Nzewi (: ) argues, e exhibition of visual art at ICAC marked the rst time anywhere that a comprehensive collection of African art was displayed. e an urgent need for Africans to create the future we want,” and more than works drawn from collections in Africa, Europe, the chief curator, Raphael Chikukwa (Fig. ), who asked: “How and the USA, and from artists’ studios, occupied two oors of the do we harness Africa’s contribution to the global world?” Rhodes National Gallery. is long-awaited second ICAC revived and reimagined the rst ICAC (known as the International Congress of African Further, he highlights the importance of ICAC ’ as the progen- Culture), which consisted of a congress, an exhibition, and a itor of the s and s festivals that espoused pan-Africanist VOL. 51, NO. 2 SUMMER 2018 african arts Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar_a_00399 by guest on 02 October 2021 | congress, however, remained a consid- eration of the impact of African culture on the rest of the world, rather than on African culture by and for Africans. A number of participants of the ICAC questioned the impetus of this “northward-looking gaze.” Harare-based artists Chikonzero Chazunguza and Misheck Masamvu asked respectively, “You can join the global, but as who?” and “When do we participate like us? Why do we always leak outwards?” ere was a sense of urgency in many of the ICAC discussions. As curator N’Goné Fall urged, We can’t wait for state-level or top-down ini- tiatives. We need to be relevant to our own contexts and to have platforms where we can make mistakes…ere’s an urgency to make things happen and not to wait. internationalism and “assembled and celebrated African and Speakers articulated this urgency as a pressing need to “break black expressive cultures in a global context” (Nzewi : ). open epistemologies [so that we] go beyond only receiving ese included the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal other people’s imaginaries” (Mpho Matsipa), and as a need to in , the First Pan African Cultural Festival in Algeria in ask “What is the language we use here on the continent [when] , and the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts in over of writing comes from outside the continent?” (Bisi Nigeria in (FESTAC ’). Silva). Strategies to counter waiting were articulated as “mis- ICAC ’ was lauded as “the rst international cultural event chief-making” that embraces the “messiness of things” through a on African soil … [representing] a bold shi from the diaspora south-to-south lens (George Shire), and as “kicking out with the as the physical site of pan-African internationalism to Africa” heels”—that is, being recalcitrant in terms of posture and attitude (Nzewi : ). According to Saburi Oladeni Biobaku (: (Paul Goodwin) (Fig. ). ), pro-vice chancellor and director of the Institute of African is accumulative sentiment that “time has now run out,” Studies at the University of Ife, Nigeria, the congress aimed to expressed by a number of participants in Harare, just two months correct the ways that Africa had been misconstrued and deni- before the coup d’état that ended Robert Mugabe’s thirty-seven- grated and to “refute past misinterpretations and place African year-long rule in Zimbabwe, reects the broader sociopolitical Culture in its true perspective.” e overall focus of the climate in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa, and elsewhere. e 3 Marie Hélène Pereira, Dulcie Abrahams Altass, and Raphael Chikukwa (left to right) speaking on the ICAC panel Exploring Curating in Africa: Methods, Processes and Education. Photo: courtesy of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe 4 Participants at the International Congress of African Cultures at the Rhodes National Gallery (now the National Gallery of Zimbabwe) in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, in 1962. The photo- graph includes delegates Frank McEwen (director of the Rhodes National Gallery, Zimbabwe), Vincent Akwete Kofi (Winneba Teacher Training College, Ghana), Tristan Tzara (Romanian/French performance artist and founder of Dadaism), Pearl Primus (dancer and choreographer, USA), William Bascom (director of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, USA), William Fagg (Department of Anthropology, British Museum), Roland Penrose (cofounder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London), Selby Mvusi (South African artist and educator based in Kumasi, Ghana), and Alfred Barr (director of the Museum of Modern Art, USA).