JENNIFER KYKER WAS a student in Oregon, US, when she first encountered the renowned photographer and journalist Chicago Dzviti’s work. Flipping through a photocopied zine titled “Dandemutande,” she stumbled upon a mini-biography Dzviti had written in 1994 on the renowned mbira player Sekuru Thomas Wadharwa Gora, along with an accompanying photo. She was struck by the image, enough to want to use Dzviti’s other works in a project about Sekuru Tute Chigamba, her mbira teacher.
Years later, Kyker, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Rochester in New York, US, would gain full access to the late Dzviti’s considerable photography collection and the right to store it in an archive located in the university's department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation beginning in 2017.
Containing approximately 270 colour slides, 140 prints, 155 separate rolls of film negatives and news clips, the archive is substantial. Excluding the National Archives of Zimbabwe, “these materials comprise one of the most extensive archival collections of photographs of Zimbabwe, and one of the few collections focused on the work of a Zimbabwean photographer,” reads the informational text on the archive’s webpage.
Today, 75 of Dzviti’s photographs hang on the walls of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in an exhibition titled “Portrait of Zimbabwe,” or “Mifananidzo yeZimbabwe,” that both unearths a departed era of the country’s past and elicits questions about who gets to own, protect and distribute a legend’s legacy.
The exhibition, which opened on 29 May and will be on view until the first week of August, is composed of photos by Dzviti that present a breadth of Zimbabwean life from 1993 to 1995. The images portray a Zimbabwe remembered only by those who lived through that era, said Kyker, who put together the exhibition alongside Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa, a curator at the gallery.
“The Zimbabwe that went into the ‘90s was not the same Zimbabwe that came out of the ‘90s,” Kyker said during a walkthrough of the exhibition on 13 June. That decade was “a crucible,” during which “everything changed,” she added.
In this way, “Portrait of Zimbabwe” is a historical exhibition, preserving a moment in time that, for the most part, no longer exists. The turn of the millennium brought with it the crumbling of social welfare programmes and economic hardship that flipped the hopeful post-Independence Zimbabwe on its head. The before is visible in the aesthetics captured in Dzviti’s prints.
The black-and-white images in the exhibition are grouped according to their subject matter, with implied categories such as Zimbabwean musical life, mbira players and craftspeople, children, and repatriated Mozambican refugees. Correspondence between Dzviti and a peer confirmed that he had planned for the photos to be arranged in series such as these, the curators said, which made “Portrait of Zimbabwe” one of the easiest exhibitions to curate.
One section features some of the greatest names in Zimbabwe music history, the likes of Oliver Mtukudzi, Stella Chiweshe, Albert Nyathi and Ephat Mujuru, some of whom incorporated the mbira, the mukube mouthbow and other traditional Zimbabwean instruments into their artistry. These popular artists are captured alongside traditional musicians and mbira makers such as Sekuru Chigamba and Sekuru Gora.
These images are brought to life by a few physical objects placed in this section of the exhibition. Artisanal mbira sit proudly below images of their craftspeople, and, in the centre of the room, a glass display case holds Dzviti’s camera, newspaper clips about him and written by him, as well as his ID photo and business card, bringing Dzviti himself into the gallery.
Some photo outliers didn’t fit so neatly into the categories, including an image of unidentified people holding guns in a mountainous locale that appears to be the Eastern Highlands, a selection of colour photos not grouped by theme and a portrait of Robert Mugabe. Muchemwa speculates that Dzviti’s inclusion of the last of these was his way of equalising his subjects.
Muchemwa, whose first encounter with Dzviti was when Kyker approached her in 2022 about the potential for an exhibition, said her favourite shot is one of Thomas Mapfumo, also known as Mukanya. “Those who follow my work know that I am obsessed with things to do with resistance,” she said, adding that Mapfumo is one of the greatest faces of activism.
In the photo, the icon, dressed sharply in a blazer and hat, holds a microphone and faces forward with his body angled slightly away from the camera. The high contrast of the image creates a striking interplay between shadow and light without compromising the richness and texture of Mapfumo’s dark skin.
Dzviti’s “eye for Blackness” was a unique skill that few have mastered, Muchemwa said, attributing it to his singular ability to connect with his subjects. “You’ll see Black joy, and that is something that not many people have been able to portray,” she added.
This is especially true in Dzviti’s images of Zimbabwean children captured in the mundanity of rural life. There is no poverty depicted; only smiles as a group of five kids walks through the street, one balancing a bucket on their head, two others engrossed in their books. In another, three kids stand almost triumphantly atop an ox-pulled carriage. A boy in the foreground, standing apart from the others with a whip in his hand, looks back at the camera straight-faced.
“Just kids being kids,” Muchemwa said.
CURATING THE EXHIBITION took about two years. Kyker and Muchemwa had to sift through 250 photos before whittling them down to the selected 75. But first, Kyker had to choose the 250 from an estimated 4,000 single images. Dzviti's good friend, Calvin Dondo, had been storing these along with negatives, contact sheets marked with X's that indicated Dzviti's favourite shots, prints, colour slides and other paraphernalia.
Dzviti's family gave Kyker express permission to use and archive his work, but to do so, she had to transport the materials from Zimbabwe to the US, where they would be kept in an archive at her university and where she would later work with a Rochester-based studio to create the prints for “Portrait of Zimbabwe.”
The choice to not only process the materials in the US but also house them there, thousands of miles away from Dzviti’s home, prompted questions during the walkthrough in June. Why did the photos captured by a Zimbabwean photographer have to leave the country? Why couldn’t the images have been printed in Zimbabwe? Why is the archive, the components of which Dzviti's family and friends had held onto for years, located in a country that the majority of Zimbabweans cannot access?
This was Kyker’s dilemma.
The family had maintained the intellectual property rights to Dzviti’s work and was compensated for donating the materials, so Kyker had her bases covered in that regard. However, she faced a moral quandary when it came to, first, where to house Dzviti's collection and, later, where to print the photos for the exhibition.
While the 75 selections were framed by Wechi in Harare, Muchemwa and Kyker said as far as they knew, no studios in the country offered the desired photo printing paper. With limited time and resources — Kyker's work on the exhibition relied on funding from a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship and her university — the US, where she had easy access to an equipped studio and could monitor the printing process, was her best option.
“Ethically, it’s wrong to take these materials outside the country, and yet I still did it because there was no choice,” Kyker said. The exhibition never would’ve happened had the pieces not left the country, she added.
Still, she couldn’t help but feel guilty. Sitting in the airport with containers full of Dzviti's belongings — over 100 prints and separate rolls of film negatives, over 200 colour slides, and news clips — Kyker feared “that maybe I would be arrested for stealing patrimony,” she said. Although what she was doing was legal, she nonetheless felt uneasy. The materials, after all, were and are Zimbabwe’s inheritance.
Kyker did not directly respond to questions about whether local institutions in Zimbabwe had the capacity and technical ability to hold and preserve Dzviti’s work, choosing instead to give anecdotal examples that pointed to “no.” Ultimately, she said she made peace with her decision. The materials, she said, “went out there because they had to, for purposes of sending back remittances” to Zimbabwe.
The exhibition serves as such.
.JPG)
