Takudzwa Guzha’s Circle and beyond: migration inside and outside the work by Zimbabwean artists in South AfricaBy Lifang ZhangClosing his residency at Post Studio Arts Collective, Zimbabwean artist Takudzwa Guzha is heading for his home country from Makhanda, a quiet town in South Africa where the Rhodes University is located. He might pass by Johannesburg, viewing the mountain-sized mine dump outside the car window. This artificial landscape would remind him his late grandfather, who was a migrant miner working at the Witwatersrand Native Labor Association (WNLA) famously known as ‘Wenera’ by Zimbabwean locals. His grandfather might have added some tiny height to the toxic sand-coloured mountain gleamed with golden slags. Guzha now hasexperienced the same trip between Harare and Johannesburg to seek for a better life. The difference is—Guzha takes the journey as an artist, telling the migrating and mining story of his grandfather, who had travelled the route many times from the colonial period of Southern Rhodesia to the independent Zimbabwe under Mugabe’s rule. Circle as a visual element has been applied by Guzha in almost all his works. “Everything exists in a circle. The life is a cycle. Everything. Some things keep repeating themselves but sometimes just in a different way.” This view of fatalism does not sound like from a young person like him. However, before embarking on his own trip to South Africa from Chitungwiza, a town of a few kilometres outside Harare, he has seen the “circle” of migration among his family members, his relatives and his friends, “they just finish studying and they go, finish and they go. Some of them studying there, working there and they just come back and go.”Pondering on the stories repeating themselves from the generation under colonial rule to the generation of “born-free”, Guzha decided to focus on migration in his work after three yearsof art training, associated with the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, as a student from 2015-2016 and as a resident artist in 2017. Living in the same country where his grandfather once mined, Guzha’s project during his art residency at Post Studio Arts Collective explores the life of migrant mining workers since Rhodesian period, engaging with the experiences of Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa
