San Francisco Public Library – Main Branch, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco
After the A Luta Continúa liberation poster exhibition ended, people began to discover the collection online and occasionally contacted me to display them. I took some and hung them in a local show at the Louden (now London) Nelson Community Center in Santa Cruz. Chimurenga Library reached out, inviting me to share a few posters at a liberation struggle exhibit commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition “Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa,” co-organised by SFMOMA and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (February 14 – June 8, 2014). Three posters from my collection were featured in that installation, two revolving around PAIGC martyr Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, a third by artist Babatunde Folayemi, for the 1977 Festival of Art and Culture held in Lagos, Nigeria, who I had met while living in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1976-1977.
Later, “The Chimurenga Library” could be found on all floors of the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Branch from May 24 – June 29, 2014. Commissioned by SFMOMA specifically for the SFPL, the interactive installation included video, audio, and library materials and draws attention to the participation of African American artists, writers, and performers, connecting pan-African histories and practices of diaspora from the Bay Area to Africa and beyond.
Posters played an extremely important role in liberation support. They helped galvanize opposition to minority rule and encouraged material aid for people engaged in resisting apartheid in South Africa and settler colonialism in Angola, Bissau, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and elsewhere. They were also incredibly well crafted works of art, using innovative techniques like silk screen. The confluence of art and a commitment to mass democratic movements is represented in these particular engaged exhibitions.
The Chimurenga Library is a long-term, knowledge-producing project that aims to reimagine the library as a laboratory of wide-ranging curiosity, critical thinking, daydreaming, socio-political commitment, partying and reading. Initiated in 2009 and presented by the Cape Town-based collective Chimurenga, it is an opportunity to use the library as a conceptual and physical space in which memory is preserved, history is written and their reactivation is possible.
Chimurenga is a Shona word, from the Tshishona language spoken by Mashona people of Zimbabwe (called Rhodesia from 1895-1980). Seized from the Mashona and the Amandebele (Ndebele) in the 1890s, it led to unprecedented resistance by both rival nations in 1896. Its SiNdebele equivalent is Umvukela. This came to be known as the First Chimurenga, in which spirit mediums played leading roles.
The British South Africa Company (BSAC) established hegemony in the wake of these uprisings and ceded authority to British settlers in 1923, at which time Southern Rhodesia was established as a British Colony. Merged into the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasalandin 1953, it consisted of three entities, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland (present-day Malawi). In 1965, not wishing to read the independence handwriting on the wall, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front proclaimed a “Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI)” in 1965, allying with other white minority ruling regimes in the Southern African subcontinent. This settler defiance and suppression of African assertion provoked what became the Second Chimurenga or War of Liberation involving an African National Congress, a mainly Ndebele Zimbabwe African People’s Union ZAPU, a mainly Shona Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), and decades of armed struggle. In 1980, after negotiations with Britain at Lancaster House in 1979, African majority rule occurred. Chimurenga inspired music by young township bands led by people like Oliver Mutukudzi and Thomas Mapfumo, guitarists building upon traditional melodies and rhythms of the mbira. Chimurenga then, has deep meaning for Zimbabweans.