Despite losing the referendum, Maviyane-Davies goes on, Mugabe consolidated his power, adjusting laws to criminalize criticism of him. “All of a sudden he changed those laws and made everything I did illegal.” Fearing for his own safety and that of his wife and his two-year-old daughter, he put out word that he was leaving. He was offered a job teaching graphic design at MassArt, where he continues to work.
“Mugabe is a ruthless dictator. There are no two ways about it. People [outside Zimbabwe] are only beginning to see it now, but we knew it for a long time.” The posters are a way to spread the word. “You want the world to see it, you want people to know.”
The artists whose work is featured in “Reflections in Exile” address turmoil — from war to poverty to AIDS to despotic leaders — in post-colonial Africa. The show was organized by Barry Gaither of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and Candice Smith Corby, a member of the exhibitions committee at the South Shore Art Center, where the “Reflections” premiered in April.
Salem Mekuria, an Ethiopian who lives in Wellesley, presents Ruptures, a 22-minute video triptych installation. It’s an impressionistic history of the past century in Ethiopia, touching on the defeat of Italian forces intent on colonizing the country in 1896 and 1935. Here’s Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, a leading figure in the 1963 formation of the Organization of African Unity, which in 2002 was superseded by the African Union. He was overthrown during a Communist uprising in 1974. An elderly mother visits a mass grave where she believes her son, who was killed during the ensuing fighting, is buried. “They killed so many people through the night, so many young people. And they scooped up my son and the others onto waiting trucks, as if they were dirt. I am sure here is where they dumped him.” Revolutionaries wave signs saying “Land to the Tiller.” A boy drives a plow behind an ox. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Communist dictator who was in charge in the 1970s, during what became known as the “Red Terror,” rants. Soldiers fight. A statue of Lenin lies toppled in a mud puddle. A woman talks of being HIV-positive. (“At times I already feel dead.”) Cattle wander a city street. People scavenge bottles and food from a garbage dump.
It’s a sad litany. Mekuria has a way with juxtaposing images and building rhythms as she cuts from one to the next. But I wish it felt less like a list. And if you’re unfamiliar with the history of Ethiopia, you’ll probably be lost. (Try skimming a summary before you go.)
Khalid Kodi addresses the genocide taking place in his native Sudan with Violence Transcribed, which depicts shabby clothes pinned along three clothes lines. The shirts, dresses, and sheets are caked with what looks like mud — and perhaps is meant to suggest blood. It’s as if they’d been trampled. Staring out from under the grime are printed faces: African children, men in suits, a woman with two children. They watch you, tired or ominous.
