Pioneering art collection returns to Zimbabwe after 70 years
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — For the first time in his life, Gift Livingstone Sango, 65, saw a painting by his father depicting Jesus as a Black man.
“My father used to draw Jesus as Black because God is for all of us. He is not a God of color,” said Sango.
The painting done by his late father in the 1940s is part of a historic exhibit, “The Stars are Bright,” now at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe for the first time since the collection left the country more than 70 years ago.
A photograph of Sango’s father, Livingstone, as a young boy hangs next to the painting.
“We never knew our father was such a great artist but after 70 years we are seeing these pictures. We are being called," said Sango. "Some of these pictures we had never seen before. I am seeing my father as a boy.”
Sango's father went on to become an accomplished taxidermist working for the National Museum in Bulawayo.
The compelling exhibit at the National Gallery until the end of October is of paintings done in the 1940s and 1950s by young Black students at Cyrene Mission School, the first to teach art to Black students in what was then white minority-ruled Rhodesia.
Using bold strokes and bright, lush colors filling the entire canvases, the students depicted African life in dance, household chores and hunting wildlife alongside the emerging modern world of railroads and electricity lines. The paintings vividly depict tales of African folklore as well as Bible stories in an arresting intersection of African tradition, history and the Christianity introduced by western settlers.
The paintings quickly won admirers, including Britain's King George VI, who visited the school in 1947. A collection of the work created at Cyrene school between 1940 and 1947 was sent overseas to be shown in London, Paris and New...