The artistic responses

Maingaila Muvundika – A message from the Minister of Power

When reading through the programme for the official opening of Kariba Dam in 1960, Maingaila was struck by an image of a man accompanied by a dystopian-type heading, ‘A message from the Minister of Power’. This referred to an address given by Malcolm Barrow, then a minister in the government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, with responsibility for what we would now consider the Ministry of Energy. Rather than concentrating on Barrow, an individual colonial administrator, Maingaila’s creative response explored ideas of masculinity in contemporary Zambian society and the traditional life-cycle of a man.  

Maingaila reflects:

‘When I came across the title Barrow held, it spoke to me deeply. Growing up [in Zambia] titles were and are still very important to people’s identity. There is a currency that comes with being someone with a title, people listen to what you have to say.'

During his time at the Libraries, Maingaila came across a number of periodicals, namely Horizon, Z Magazine, and the Central African Examiner. His work focuses on how we react to the stimuli of the environment in fabricating a sense of self. Looking through the archives, he created a (deconstructed) zine discussing the different milestones that are traditionally expected of men within Zambian society, from holding a professional job, parenthood and institutional affiliation.

The zine titled ‘WATTS ON,’ a play on electricity and hot topics, aims to subvert the status quo of Africans inheriting colonial systems for personal gain, advocating instead for using these systems as vehicles for change to promote a new message that prioritizes the interests of Africans. An example of this is  ‘Wear Your Hair’, a call for black men to let go of the brush cut as a default and embrace their afro crowns or ‘Art Issues’ which seeks to put value on art as a viable career for artists in Zambia.

Mainga’s other pieces included self-portraiture work in response to a series of self portraits taken in the 1970s by Zambian photographer Alick Phiri, now part of the Zambia Belonging collection; a linocut of an imagined self titled ‘Chilimba (Radio)’, a commentary on the power music has to open up a new world to people miles away; and a first look at a series of self portraits which will form part of a wider developing series looking at contemporary masculinity.

Mainga concludes:

‘All this art ultimately works to add to the larger narrative of why individuals need to produce and publish work that introduces different ways of being within communities and encourages diversion from rigid societal expectations.’

Edith Chiliboy – Mary goes to school

The publication ‘Mary goes to school’ was produced by the Northern Rhodesian Information Department in the 1950s to promote the building of schools by the colonial government for, in the author’s words, ‘training girls in all the duties of a wife and mother, as well as teaching them to read and write well’. Edith’s response challenged norms of colonial and post-colonial education in Zambia. Using the mediums of film and fabric printing, Edith considered how knowledge exchange is passed on in formal and informal settings across generations.

Sana Ginwalla – Indian migration

Drawing on her family archive, Sana explored ways to visually represent her own complex personal history with the ‘empire’. She intervened in the archive by re-designing book covers from the RCS and CAS library such as the short-lived periodical Indian Emigrant, N. Gangulee’s Indians in the Empire Overseas, The arts Britain ignores, The Muslims of British India and The Role of Indian Minorities in Burma and Malaya. 

Anthropological and ethnographic literature, as exemplified in the content of these books, have a clinical reading that serves to be a study of humans without managing to convey any human connection in its reading. In order to contest this, Sana reinterpreted and redesigned the covers using images from her own family archives that reside in the Zambia Belonging collection. They map a visual history of her family’s history of migration between Burma, India and Zambia. 

The act of decontexualising and re-contextualising is an intervention she proposes in the act of counter-archiving. This intervention is further applied to the machinery used to create the artworks. By using an advanced laser cutter at the ARU FuturesLab to then build an aesthetic of analog woodcut prints, Sana further challenges how we use, contextualise and adapt the materials and resources available to us to make new imaginations of the past.

One of the images that makes the new cover of The arts Britain ignores is Sana’s Burma-born Indian parents visiting her Bengali-Shan maternal grandmother, Rashida, who escaped from Burma to the United Kingdom in the 1980s and made a living as an undocumented seamstress in a clothing factory and school. Marginalised due to her labour as a working class migrant and still residing in the UK, the image represents her fortitude in creating a sphere of her own and community of belonging through her practice in stitching after the age of 43 in loneliness and exile. 

Sana constructs the idea of syncretic identities with multiple belongings to land, race and language demonstrating to her art that migrates across forms of materiality, in this case through woodcuts. By creating a living narrative of people who sit on the margins of human history, these fictive series of book covers is a memorial to her family but also to the many migrants who were indentured or now find themselves precariously crossing seas to better futures abroad.

Kerstin Hacker – mineral resources in Zambia

Kerstin’s research in the archive began with trying to determine when the mineral Manganese was first mined in Zambia. Using the experience of a recent field trip to Mansa in northern Zambia, Kerstin juxtaposed her recent photographs of mining activities with snippets of text from government records (Official Publications).

The result was an emotive display which highlighted the exploitative costs of mining, both the scars to the landscape and to the humans involved in this activity. Kerstin will continue her research at CUL to inform a collaborative exhibition with preeminent Zambian artist Geoffrey Phiri planned for 2026.