Chicago Dzviti photograph collection

The Chicago Dzviti photographic collection includes photographs taken in the early 1990s by Chicago Dzviti in Zimbabwe, the United States, and Europe. The collection includes negatives, contact sheet, prints, color slides, and related print materials. The earliest known date for an image in this collection is October 4, 1991, and the latest photographs in the collection were taken shortly before Chicago Dzviti’s death in 1995.

The largest part of the collection is made up of negatives. This includes one hundred and fifty five separate rolls of film, although many of these rolls are partial. The vast majority of negatives are black and white. In addition, the collection includes approximately one hundred and forty prints. The majority of prints are also black and white, and were printed by Chicago Dzviti in a home darkroom in Zimbabwe. The collection also includes around two hundred and seventy color slides. Many of the original housings for the negatives have been preserved as part of the collection, which also includes a small number of black and white contact sheets, a few biographies of Zimbabwean musicians written by Chicago Dzviti, and a small number of Flemish-language articles featuring Chicago Dzviti’s work originally published in the Belgian newspaper De Morgen in December 1994. Apart from the Zimbabwean National Archive, 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.

Working as a photojournalist, Chicago Dzviti captured a wide-ranging record of Zimbabwean life during the early 1990s. During a relatively short period of years, Chicago Dzviti’s photographs documented an era in which the ambitious social welfare programs implemented after independence were increasingly abandoned in favor of a World Bank Economic Structural Adjustment Program. In the context of these social changes, Dzviti’s photographs pay special attention to issues of work, production, and labor, documenting a range of activities that include peasant agriculture, artisan craft production, domestic tasks, commercial agriculture, and urban labor movements. Related themes, including gender, poverty, displacement, and access to resources, are also prominent throughout his oeuvre. In terms of subject matter, the Chicago Dzviti collection encompasses six series: Zimbabwean Musical Life; Rural Life; Repatriation of Mozambican Refugees; Commercial Farmworkers; Urban and Miscellaneous; and Dzviti’s Travels in Europe and the US. Across all of these series, Chicago Dzviti’s subjects are clearly aware they are being photographed, and are often looking directly at camera. Yet, the photographs do not appear posed. Instead, they depict people in the midst of their everyday activities and environments.

Series I: Zimbabwe Musical Life

This collection offers a particularly impressive visual record of Zimbabwean musical life. Through his work with Kunzwana, Chicago Dzviti took an extensive series of photographs depicting musicians, including performers and instrument makers of several different types of Zimbabwean mbira. Among them are the njari, matepe, munyonga, and mbira dzavadzimu.

The mbira dzavadzimu, or “mbira of the ancestral spirits,” is a particularly iconic Zimbabwean instrument. Originally, its performance context is in ritual events held for families and communities to communicate with their ancestral spirits through living mediums. Many of the mbira dzavadzimu’s most notable 20th century performers, including Ephat and Fradreck Mujuru, Thomas Wadharwa Gora, Tute and Irene Chigamba, and Chris Mhlanga appear in Chicago Dzviti’s photographs. Since the 1960s and 70s, the mbira has also become prominent in Zimbabwean popular music, most notably in the mbira-guitar style pioneered by artists such as Thomas Mapfumo and Jonah Sithole, both of whom are featured in this collection.

Chicago Dzviti often devoted an entire role of film to a single performer, capturing various angles, poses, and backgrounds. His photographs range from portraits of individual players, makers, and ensembles to depictions of recording sessions, live performances, and informal performance settings. Chicago Dzviti frequently chose to depict mbira players and instrument makers with their wives, children, and other family members. These include photographs of mbira musicians in which family members appear casually in the background, as well as portraits in which musicians appear together with members of their families.

In addition to featuring mbira players and makers, Chicago Dzviti’s photographs also depict people playing various other Zimbabwean instruments. These include the chipendani mouthbow, the kavembe and hosho percussive shakers, acoustic and electric guitars, marimbas, and a variety of drums. In some cases, his photographs depict homemade instruments, including guitars and drum sets. Performance contexts include music festivals, ritual events, street musicians, and casual informal settings, such as musicians playing both mbira and guitar while seated in cars. Chicago Dzviti’s photographs also include images of many Zimbabwean popular musicians. Many of the artists he documented, both popular and traditional, are featured performing during Zimbabwe Musicians’ Day.

Series II: Rural Life

In Chicago Dzviti’s oeuvre, images of rural life mirror those of Zimbabwean musical life in their importance. These images include many individual and group portraits of men, women, and children. Within these different groups, subjects are depicted doing ordinary activities appropriate to their particular gender and/or age. Children, for example, are featured attending school, herding cattle, using slingshots, snacking, listening to the radio, caring for younger siblings, and playing mahumbwe, a traditional role-playing game similar to house. Men, on the other hand, are featured repairing nets, cobbling shoes, fixing bicycles, and in the gumboots typical worn by miners. Women are often depicted in kitchens or domestic yards, and are frequently engaged in activities related to the processing of food, such as winnowing, sifting, grinding, and cooking. They are also often depicted alongside their children. In most cases, Chicago Dzviti’s rural images featured unidentified locations. A few roles of film, however, are identified as having been taken in Dzviti’s home district of Shamva, and in the neighboring Pfungwe region.

While Dzviti’s photographs depict many different kinds of labor, the work of fetching water is a particularly prominent theme in this work, and is especially salient in this series on rural life. Men, women, and children are all depicted participating in the work of water collection and transportation. Women and children are often featured balancing containers of water on their heads in the process of transporting them from water collection points to domestic households. Men, women, and children are often featured together at boreholes, which appear in Chicago Dzviti’s images as a site where both physical labor and social interactions extend across boundaries of gender.

Series III: Repatriation of Mozambican Refugees

In the 1980s, South Africa’s Apartheid government sought to destabilize the Mozambian state by sponsoring a militant, insurgent nationalist movement known as the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Mozambican National Resistance), or RENAMO. The situation soon escalated into a civil war, leaving millions of Mozambicans displaced by the early 1990s. Among them were hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans who fled to Zimbabwe, where many of they were placed in refugee camps. As the civil war drew to a close in 1993, the Zimbabwean government announced plans to repatriate nearly 150,000 refugees in what was then the largest single operation ever to have been conducted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Africa. This voluntary repatriation of Mozambican refugees continued throughout 1994 and 1995, and Zimbabwe’s last group of Mozambican refugees returned to their home country in May, 1995.

Chicago Dzviti’s photographs depict the voluntary repatriation of Mozambican refugees from several different refugee camps. In many of the images in this series, refugees are depicted in front of tents in the camps where they were housed, transporting and loading their belongings onto bus, and seated on buses awaiting their departure. Additional images that may depict refugees are also grouped with this series, and depict scenes such as children lined up in assembly, and groups of women cooking. Often, small details such as orange plastic fencing or mismatched school uniforms are key features suggesting images that may be likely to depict refugees.

Series IV: Commercial Farmworkers

This series includes over a dozen rolls of film taken in the last year of Chicago Dzviti’s life as he embarked on a new project documenting the lives of Zimbabwe’s commercial farmworkers. Dzviti apparently did not have the chance to print many of these images. However, a few of Dzviti’s images appear in Dede Esi Amanor-Wilks’s book In Search of Hope for Zimbabwe’s Farmworkers (Panos, 1995).

Series V: Urban and Miscellaneous

This series depicts urban scenes from a wide range of subjects, ranging from photographs of Chicago Dzviti’s own family to urban workers’ events, images of political figures, and photographs of street children. There are also some miscellaneous images, such as portraits of individuals that do not obviously fit into any of the other series.

Series VI: Dzviti’s Travels in Europe and the US

This series documents Dzviti’s travels to Europe and North America. It includes both his own photographs and photographs of him taken by other individuals such as Richard Selman. Within this series, several rolls of film document the Spirit Talk exhibition at Middle Tennessee State University and related performance events.