BY MICHELINA ANDREUCCI
From an early age young Zimbabwean girls played “mahumbwe” – from the word “ku’umba”, meaning to mould, create or fabricate in clay.
Whilst Western European girls played with plastic dolls and doll houses, African children made their own dolls, using various clays, straws of grass and tiny pebbles; each with their own specific style and unique design. In the countryside young boys herding cattle – “vakomana vachi fudza ngombe”, moulded bulls and cows in clay/mud in between honing their skills in animal husbandry.
Later with the advent of the automobiles in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), young boys
fashioned their own kinetic wire cars and bicycles modelled after early models such as Bedfords, Morris Minors, Zephyrs, Vauxhalls, Fiats, Peugeots and the “Black Mariahs; showing ingenuity and a faculty for industrial design. Creativity and the faculty for realising objects in 3-dimension was innate to most indigenous African children.
Whilst the colonialism brought about mechanisation, it inadvertently destroyed the creative faculty of the indigenous people; given that the various Colonial curriculums developed prior to
independence, were for the subservience of indigenous people, there were no African designers; design was exclusively for whites for which they underwent apprenticeships.
Africans were limited to woodwork and carpentry or working on a manufacturer’s conveyor belt; removed from design principles and design philosophy. This disempowerment of the African and disconnect with the culture and design, created a ‘dependency syndrome’ on Western mechanisation.
Needless to say, the basis of industrial design resides in one’s creative capacity to conceptualise and realise functional objects in 3-dimentions. A given skill for African people in general. Even today, as we drive around the environs of Harare, we will come across woven reed and basket furniture, primarily from the African apostolic sects who also make zinc domestic products of buckets, basins, baths, funnels, watering cans, etc., and wooden furniture, which have been made for several decades in Zimbabwe.
However, the dependency syndrome has ‘blinkered’ creativity of what was then traditional industrial design.
Therefore, products are limited to a single product with no innovation.
In order to advance industrial design, Zimbabwe needs to equate modern industrial design with
traditional design patterns in the Iron Age. If we go back to the original clay female form-furnaces which were a result of the discovery of ancient metallurgical excavations, they were the first example of industrial design at its most rudimentary.
The products that were produced from there were functional and relied on hereditary design craftsmanship, Humhizha. It was a very strong link to a design DNA which came from centuries of indigenous craftsmanship.
In Europe in the 1930s the “Triennale di Milano” (The Milan Expo), in Italy, was introduced as a means to showcase and promote Italian products. It was also about turning around the wheels of demand and supply; rather than the designers responding to the demand of society, designers created a demand for their products through analysis of the shortcomings of a product, making the cycle of design continual.
Thanks to the vast Italian artistic traditions of smiths, glass craftsmen, cabinet makers, carvers, potters, furniture makers, and lighting designers, etc., Italian industry was revived following the Second World War; thus ensuring a constant demand for their products.
From the edifices of Great Zimbabwe to the clay furnaces and traditional gold and iron workings of ancient Zimbabwe, industry was thriving and already ‘zoned’. It was so organised that the early settlers followed ancient gold and iron workings to amass their wealth and develop Southern Rhodesia.
This testifies to the need for the rightful owners “wene we mu Zimbabwe” to further
study and make use of our geo-industrial zones and capitalise on the discipline of industrial design which is a forgotten ancient practice from the hearth of Zimbabwean civilisation.
Our soil was always the first medium of expression, conceptualisation, realisation and design. The reeds that grew out of the river banks became the basketry and the clay became the pottery. Surely our children at ECD level need to be taught the basics of manufacturing, moulding and creating for the future of industrial design in Zimbabwe.
Have we in the throes of Western idealism and capitalism lost our ancestral industrial design visions?
The traditional industrial skills that we now take for granted need to be honed and adapted to the core curriculum of learning institutions to ensure a continuity of Zimbabwe’s design traditions. The study of industrial design should be the first keystone of our nation building and mechanization process.
Learning from our past repository of African technical wisdom should inform the present and future of our industrialisation.
In his maiden address to Zimbabwe, on the eve of our Independence on 18 April 1980, the then Prime Minister, Cde. Robert Gabriel Mugabe predicted “…Independence will bestow on us a new personality . . . a new perspective and indeed, a new history and a new past . . .”
However, I would like to add how better to cherish the Zimbabwean identity and value our heritage, history and cultural traditions than through the creative, scientific and academic discipline of Zimbabwean industrial design.
The current drive for ICT today is destroying genuine indigenous African hands-on creativity – “mabasa e mawoko”, and creating clones of foreign ideas, expertise and needs at the expense of our own innovation and culture. The information programmed in computers is foreign information and not always applicable to local conditions
With industry at low ebb since the early 2000s, Zimbabwe needs a new industrial design curriculum to revive the economy. NDS-1 cannot be achieved without a directional curriculum on which the Zimbabwean design philosophy should be anchored on. Industry cannot be revived without industrial design. Hence, industrial design is the final realisation of any strategy and cannot be taken for granted.
Zimbabwe with its unique personal character, its people endowed with innate design skills can now re-emerge from the shadows of colonialism as great designers and innovators in their own right through industrial design; and become more productive, more efficient, therefore wealthier and eventually more powerful as a nation and as a people, less dependent on foreign products.
Dr Michelina Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian researcher, and is a published author in her field. For Comments E-mail: linamanucci@gmail.com
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