GONCALO MABUNDA AND THE IMPLEMENTS OF WAR.

By Nii B. Andrews.

The Mozambique civil war (1977 – 1992) was protracted and terrible. 

Over 1 million Mozambicans lost their lives and an estimated 5 million were displaced.

It is also a pity that just recently, devastating floods have killed over 1000 people with barely a whimper from the AU or its car loan friendly parliaments.

During the civil war, many countries in the region and beyond got involved with armies, manpower and material. 

These countries included Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania, North Korea, Germany, UK  and the US.

Both principal combatants, FRELIMO and RENAMO committed numerous atrocities; child soldiers, mass internment of civilians, sex slaves and extra judicial killings; by far RENAMO were the worse.

The barbarity of the war totally engulfed the artist, Goncalo Mabunda, in his formative years; he was born in 1975 in Maputo – the same year that Mozambique gained independence from Portugal after another vicious armed conflict.

Over seven million guns were used in the civil war, in addition to grenades, landmines and rocket launchers. 

The Christian Council of Mozambique embarked on an important initiative at the end of the war in order to expunge the massive arsenal. A lot of the stockpiles were destroyed.

Some of the weapons were handed over to a collective of artists who then disassembled them and utilized the parts in sculptural pieces.

It was inevitable that these items will be transformed into artworks that drew on the collective memory of the country marked by violence at its birth and continued violence for the first decade and a half of its history.

In Mabunda’s hands, the deactivated weapons of war carry strong political connotations.

But he succeeds in creating objects of aesthetic beauty that transmita positive reflection on the transformative power of art and the resilience and creativity of African civilian societies.

His thrones reference the attributes of power in an obtuse or deeply ironic commentary on a childhood stalked by the senselessness of killing, maiming, separation and destruction. 

Can anyone run faster than a bullet?

The masks utilize a critical Modernist language to comment on a traditional African genre that encodes power, knowledge and secrecy…..ironically, the very attributes that enable successful armies to function.

Mabunda has attained international recognition and his work is featured in important private collections, top museums and prestigious auction house sales.

He still lives and works in Maputo – “beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks”.