Zimbabwe Mobilizes: ICAC’s Shift from Coup de Grâce to Cultural Coup

To whom does Africa belong? Whose Africa are we talking about? … It’s time we control our narrative, and contemporary art is a medium that can lead us to do this.

National Gallery of Zimbabwe (2017)¹

Especially after having taken Zimbabwe to Venice, we needed to bring the world to Zimbabwe to understand the context we are working in.

Raphael Chikukwa (Zvomuya 2017b)

The International Conference on African Cultures (ICAC) was held at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare from September 11–13, 2017. Eight delegates write their reflections on the importance of this Africa-based event.

Ruth Simbao: Significant events took place in the study of the arts of Africa in 2017, registering a valuable geopolitical shift of the center of gravity in terms of knowledge creation. The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), a US-based organization in the discipline, held its seventeenth triennial at the University of Ghana in Accra—the first to be held on the African continent. Opening the conference, Professor Kwesi Yankah² highlighted the significance of this meeting “on African soil” in a year that marks the sixtieth anniversary of Ghana’s independence, which was a moment in history that “had a ripple effect on the … liberation of the entire continent” (2017: 2).

In the same year another important international conference on the arts of Africa took place on the African continent, this time at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare (Figs. 1–2), which celebrated its own sixtieth anniversary—that of the national gallery known during the colonial era as the Rhodes National Gallery. The 2017 International Conference on African Cultures (ICAC) engaged with processes of decolonization and questioned why most conferences on the arts of Africa take place in the north and why the dominant market for African art still remains outside of the African continent.³ The conference was organized by the director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Doreen Sibanda, who stated in her opening speech that “there is an urgent need for Africans to create the future we want,”⁴ and the chief curator, Raphael Chikukwa (Fig. 3), who asked: “How do we harness Africa’s contribution to the global world?”⁵

1.

Delegates at the 2nd International Conference on African Cultures (ICAC), which was hosted by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare, Zimbabwe, 11–13 September 2017.

Photo: courtesy of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe

2.

The 2017 International Conference on African Cultures was held at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and included the exhibition African Voices, curated by Raphael Chikukwa.

Photo: courtesy of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe

This long-awaited second ICAC revived and reimagined the first ICAC (known as the International Congress of African Culture), which consisted of a congress, an exhibition, and a music festival at the then Rhodes National Gallery in Salisbury from August 1–11, 1962 (Fig. 4). This congress drew delegates from the African continent, the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean⁶ and was meant to be a biannual event that would take place in different African cities. The director of the Rhodes National Gallery, Frank McEwen, stated in his opening ICAC address that it was crucial for an exhibition of African art to be “staged in Africa.”⁷ As Nzewi (2013: 98) argues,

The exhibition of visual art at ICAC marked the first time anywhere that a comprehensive collection of African art was displayed. The more than 350 works drawn from collections in Africa, Europe, and the USA, and from artists’ studios, occupied two floors of the Rhodes National Gallery.

Further, he highlights the importance of ICAC ’62 as the progenitor of the 1960s and 1970s festivals that espoused pan-Africanist internationalism and “assembled and celebrated African and black expressive cultures in a global context” (Nzewi...