Zimbabwean art

Zimbabwean art includes decorative esthetics applied to many aspects of life, including art objects as such, utilitarian objects, objects used in religion, warfare, in propaganda, and in many other spheres. Within this broad arena, Zimbabwe has several identifiable categories of art. It is a hallmark of African cultures in general that art touches many aspects of life, and most tribes have a vigorous and often recognisable canon of styles and a great range of art-worked objects. These can include masks, drums, textile decoration, beadwork, carving, sculpture, ceramic in various forms, housing and the person themselves. Decoration of the body in permanent ways such as scarification or tattoo or impermanently as in painting the body for a ceremony is a common feature of African cultures.

Spoken or musical art is also a prominent part of Africas generally. Various instruments including drums, lamellophones and stringed bows have been used in Zimbabwe, while oratory, poetry, fable telling, praise singing and tribal ritual chants are also prominent.

In recent decades Zimbabwe has become widely recognized internationally for its sculpture.

It is useful to examine Zimbabwean art through time, by area, by main tribal division and as indicative of recent historic and political changes.

There is an artistic tradition in Zimbabwe that can be traced back to pottery of the Early and Late Stone Age and rock paintings from the Late Stone Age. Many rock paintings produced by San artists between 10000 and 2000 years ago are found in cultural sites in Zimbabwe and these demonstrate a high degree of skill in drawing. Many depict recognisable animal figures and use shading and colour to enhance the visual impact. The archaeology of Zimbabwe includes numerous pottery finds, which assist in the reconstruction of linguistic and cultural groupings within what is here termed Shona. The pottery indicates that the people of the Late Iron Age were settled agriculturists and they have been categorised as forming groups such as the Harare culture and the Leopard’s Kopje culture: the latter established in 980 AD in a site called K2. This group moved to Mapungubwe where they used stone walls to separate the ruling class from the rest of the population. This settlement was abandoned in the thirteenth century at around the time that a now much better-known site was developed by others who lived on the Zimbabwean plateau. This was Great Zimbabwe, which dates from about 1250–1500 AD. It is a stone-walled town (Zimbabwe means "royal residence") and shows evidence in its archaeology of skilled stone working: the walls were made of a local granite and no mortar was used in their construction. When excavated, six soapstone birds and a soapstone bowl were found in the eastern enclosure of the monument, so these Shona-speaking Gumanye people certainly produced sculpture. Each object was carved from a single piece of stone and the birds have an aesthetic quality that places them as genuine "art". In comparing them to other better-known African stone sculpture, for example from the Yoruba culture, Philip Allison, writing in 1968, stated "The stone sculptures of Rhodesia are few in number and of no great aesthetic distinction, but Zimbabwe itself has a place of peculiar importance in the study of African cultures".

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Wikipedia