Chikonzero Chazunguza and his place in Ottawa. Photo by Mike Levin.

By Mike Levin

The world turns, governments fall and life is never the same again. Some of history’s most enduring creations come out of the instability people feel in transition. Instability drove Chikonzero “Chiko” Chazunguza to three continents, accompanied by an artistic voice that grew from utopian to political. In Ottawa, the Zimbabwean is trying to make sense of what that voice is now trying to say.

His paintings derive completely from the colours and energy of Southern Africa’s visual arts and music, but the instantaneous intuition of painting was always a preliminary step to the print-making that’s now his focus. “Printing is more methodological, a synthesizing of all elements into one. Like a synthesizer in music; (the resulting image) is fuller,” he says. The analogy is the story of his life.

Chiko has saturated himself with this irony, where one discovers that the creative path you set out on brought you to the most unexpected destination. That place is never a physical location, like Canada; it’s a process of connecting the spirit to the environment.

“Art was never what we were gonna do,” he says. But art was the only thing available when you grew up in the Highfield area of Harare, Zimbabwe’s (then Rhodesia’s) capital city. “In a ghetto, parents can’t afford toys, so you make them, create your own. I have so many cuts on my hands from making things… look. We were always asking, oh, how did you make that? And them drawing them later when we had paper. We were proud of showing these things.”

Cityscape. Photo courtesy of Chiko.

At age 10, Chiko made his own piece of ID using the photo of a white boy he clipped from a magazine, not realizing he was bastardizing his cultural identity. “We were children. We had pride in who we were, what we were doing. I always believed in the best. I had a rude awakening.”

His father delivered medicine for a pharmacy; mothers didn’t work. “My parents didn’t push us, they wanted us to accept ourselves, to grow up and make our own choices. That’s the cultural identity I grew up with. (Political change in Rhodesia) was tense, but I didn’t feel it at the time. We were doing what we were doing to our best level.”

It meant playing bongos and dancing to release pent-up expression, or trying to find something, anything, of value in what passed for academic training in a ghetto high school. Chiko took woodworking and after graduation was hired at a local shop. But the job lasted one day because he was too short to reach materials on high shelves. His walk home took him past Harare’s National Art Gallery.

“I had never been in a place like this, but the statues outside made me decide to go in.” He looked at the art, took a deep breath and walked over to the information desk. “I asked, ‘do you train people here?’ They said yes, and I filled out an application. This still surprises me today.”

Whoever vetted Chiko’s application saw something. He spent two years at the gallery’s school, subsidized by a British American Tobacco Company grant. All he remembers was two years’ worth of total passion, of seeing for the first time what opportunities art could present. At the end, he earned a scholarship to continue his studies at the Institute of Pictorial Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. When he left the ghetto, everything changed.

The Observor. Courtesy of Chiko.

“It was a serious shock. It was November, so cold, and no one spoke English,” he remembers of his arrival in 1987. It took all day to find his student-town accommodation, and he wondered if he would be able to survive this transition. His roommates weren’t all that different:  film makers, musicians and other artists from around the world. Out of this cauldron could only come creative sedition, to match the political revolution gathering steam in Sofia’s streets.

Chiko spent seven years in the city; he stumbles over the English words that describe his experiences, a time when he was first forced to see himself through other people’s eyes and then process the moments of clarity that flowed from it.

In his third year, the communist government in Bulgaria fell. Politics was everywhere. “It’s funny, in school, growing up, I was into a utopian type of art. In Bulgaria I got very political. Somehow, when I went back (to Zimbabwe), I stuck with this.” Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe in 1980, but when Chiko arrived home  in Harare in 1994, the country was sliding into a mixed chaos of economics, politics and AIDS.

The Master’s degree he earned in Bulgaria bestowed the credibility to teach and produce art that he showed throughout Europe and Southern Africa. But his homeland’s disintegration had a strong influence. “The pride was gone. All I wanted to do was criticize, people, relationships, communities for not doing enough,” he says.

Election 2002, Harare. Courtesy of Chiko.

Although he continued teaching and organizing workshops, his personal expression swerved into installation and performance art that rarely bothered to hide his frustration. For the 2002 presidential elections, he and friends took to the streets to mock politicians. In 2005, his main project was called Beyond Freedom, a critical stance on the country’s leadership. By 2008 his name was frequently showing up in magazine articles as “an artist who chooses to stay in Zimbabwe,” but the reality was different. “I had too much limelight. I had to leave,” Chiko says.

Chikonzero Chazunguza knows that Canada is a culture of promotion, that the place of art in our society is only tangential to the path we’re on right now. He’s just too polite to say it. Since moving to Ottawa he’s made the rounds of the galleries and landed shows at several, including a solo show at the Great Canadian Theatre Company’s Fritzi Gallery. He’s sharing space in a Rideau Street storefront to run workshops, and volunteers for database work at the Ottawa Community Immigrant Services Organization.

Handehande. Photo courtesy of Chiko.

His luxury is that his creativity is culture-based and therefore more able to embrace universal visual images. It can actually be quite calming. “I’ve learned not to resist what I know now because it means understanding that you aren’t in full control. It makes you open to new possibilities.” But it can be as frustrating as protesting the pathological political system of his home. And this, he says, is where years of synthesis have paid off.

Chiko has come to see his cultural identity – the one that started with a fake ID of a white boy  – not as a source of pain or embarrassment, but as fuel. “You grow up, you make choices, and it’s all based on that identity. Now I’m really proud of it.”

He also knows he has to produce a new body of work to replace the pieces that have been lost and stolen over the past few years. “Social structure is very much the same in all cultures. You just use energy to see what comes out. This is what Canada offers, a chance to reveal my soul.”