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On Nehanda, colonialism and the power of memory...
My understanding of art is that it immortalises. The old image of Mbuya Nehanda's vessel depicts an old woman who was aged and had gone through brutalisation by the colonial Government.
It is how the colonialists wanted her remembered and notwithstanding the manner in which photographic equipment was still novel at the time. It is not the aesthetic sum-total of the figure we now loosely refer to as Mbuya Nehanda, the nuance on names is for another day.
With that in mind, this is why I am a proponent of the re-imagination of Mbuya Nehanda. Anyone who has lived long enough knows that age alters physicality. day.
I am not how I looked a decade ago, and my grandmother too tells tales of how she would turn heads during her youth in Mozambique. Besides her smile which has remained beautiful, very little supports her claims as time does what it is best known for. I digress.
Memories are powerful, the image of Mbuya Nehanda we have in our heads is a construction of white people. A product of framing meant to cast aspersions on the element of indigenous knowledge and demonise the spirituality we bore as a people.
Art is seen as a medium of justice. Even if we may never get compensation for the strife we endured during colonialism, we can at least pay homage to central figures in our struggle through the best elements of their existence.
Would you want to be remembered with an image taken as your enemies were sentencing you to death?
We can re-present Mbuya Nehanda, in her freshness. She was at one point full of life too. In my opinion that is a better memory to preserve than the unfortunate depiction of settler sadists.
The fact that many of us are complaining asking for that traumatized image of the lady we now refer to as Mbuya Nehanda showed how vicious the colonialists were in communicating our humanity. We may never recover in this lifetime.
