Quel sens donner au Graphisme ethniQue ? - graphic design

37. InTerVIew sakI MaFundIkwa
graphic design in afrika: saki Mafundikwa
by saki Mafundikwa
I returned home last year after an absence that totalled twenty years, going to school and then working in the US. I
decided to come back home to start ZIVA, a New Media Arts school. ZIVA, besides being an acronym for Zimbabwe
Institute of Vigital Arts, is also a Shona word meaning “knowledge.” “Vigital” is a word I created to describe the
school – training students in the visual arts using digital tools. The school opened its doors on February 1, 1999,
with four students! We offer a full-time one year Graphic Design course, which we hope will lead to a four-year
degree program. We are currently in advanced discussions with Parsons School of Design in New York for affiliation.
We also offer a number of eight-week courses for working students; these courses meet in the evening twice a
week for three hours, and they include Design for the Web, Digital Imaging for Print and Multimedia, and a Master
Design Class. Enrollment for these short courses varies. We hope to add Animation and Digital Video soon.
I share teaching and administration duties with Jane Shepherd, who has headed the graphic design department
at the Harare Polytechnic for the past seven years, and Dudzai Saburi, a graduate of the Architecture program at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the USA, a webhead, and a VP at Cyberplex Africa, the largest web
development company in the country. We are in conversation with others to come on board to teach.
At the heart of ZIVA’s mission is a desire to create a new visual language – a language inspired by history, a language
that is informed by but not dictated to or confined by European design, a language that is inspired by all
the arts (sculpture, textiles, painting and Afrikan religion), a language whose inspiration is Afrikan. We are at a
crossroads in the history of design right now with the young designers of the Western world rejecting the straitjacket
confines of what design is and is not. First was the word, and it was modernism. A band of thieves headed
notably by one Pablo Picasso and including accomplices like Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Paul
Klee, and Henri Matisse “discovered” African sculpture, giving birth to “modern art” and altering the course of
western civilization. While the others were impressed by the forms, the abstraction, the craftsmanship, the freedom
of the African artists, it was Picasso who tapped into its “spirituality.” According to André Malraux, in La Tête
obsidienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1974; pp. 17–19), Picasso had the following reaction when he visited the Trocadéro
to see some Afrikan masks in 1906:
“The masks weren’t like other kinds of sculpture. Not at all. They were magical things. And why weren’t the
Egyptian pieces or the Chaldean? We hadn’t realized it: those were primitive, not magical things. The Negroes’
sculptures were intercessors… Against everything, against the unknown, threatening spirits. I kept looking at the
fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything. I too think that everything is unknown, is the enemy! I
understood what the purpose of the sculpture was for the Negroes. Why sculpt like that and not some other way?
After all, they weren’t Cubists! Since Cubism didn’t exist… all the fetishes were used for the same thing.
They were weapons. To help people stop being dominated by spirits, to become independent. Tools. If we give form
to the spirits, we become independent of them. The spirits, the unconscious, emotion, it’s the same thing. I understood
why I was a painter… Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that day – not at all because of the
forms, but because it was my first canvas of exorcism – yes, absolutely!”
These remarks were made to André Malraux in 1937. Jack Flam, in his essay, “A Continuing Presence: Western
Artists/African Art” (New York: Museum of African Art, 1994; p. 62), makes the following important observation,
“Equally important, he also seems to have understood that African art was meant to be used rather than merely
looked at; and used not only by its audience, but by its creator. That is, the process of making the work was meant to
be conceived as an integral part of its function – as with a ‘fetish.’ The physical act of working on the Demoiselles
d’Avignon seems to have been an act of ‘exorcism’ for Picasso. In fact, the Demoiselles may be the first European
painting that consciously fulfilled a function like that of African sculpture.”
Well then, if Afrikan art directly influenced Cubism, and Cubism – according to Philip Meggs in his “History of
Graphic Design” (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992; p. 240) – changed the course of painting and graphic
design, how come then one never hears any mention of Afrikan art as being the forefather of graphic design? It
is time that Afrika, the original home of humanity and life itself, rose from the condescending “darkness” into the
light. It never ceases to amaze me when in 1999, just a few months before the new millennium, I still hear of Afrika
being referred to, in some quarters, as the “Dark Continent.”
So it is with this realization that only we, Afrikans, could set ourselves free that the idea of ZIVA came about. But
how to make one’s ideas have an impact on a continent as massive as Afrika? The answer came in the form of an
unexpected request from Jackie Guille, a professor at Middlesex University, who’d been asked by UNESCO to
coordinate the first in a series of Arts workshops. She asked me to be one of the trainers for the threeweek workshop
at Makerere University, Uganda. The series, called “UNESCO Artists in Development – Creativity Workshop”
(the brainchild of UNESCO director of cultural affairs Dr. Raj Issar), aims to bridge the gap between north and
south through cross-cultural exchanges and the sharing of creative and technological know-how, thus creating the
two-way traffic we seek. This one was the “Textile and Graphic Design Workshop,” which attracted twenty-five
participants from fourteen countries in the Eastern and Southern regions of Afrika. I could not believe my luck!
Here was a golden opportunity for me to put my ideas to the test.
I had never met graphic designers from Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, or Mozambique before, and I had to
quickly snap out of the myopia of judging their work by European standards. These were Afrikan-trained designers
– unlike me, an Afrikan trained in the west. Soon I realized that force-feeding Afrikans design principles
62