Joram Mariga

• Name — Joram Mariga • Birth Name — Joram Mariga • Born — 1927 • Birthplace — Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe • Place of death — Bonda Mission Hospital, Zimbabwe • Field — Sculpture • Training — Informal • Movement — Shona sculpture • Awards — Highly Commended, Zimbabwe Heritage Exhibition, 1989

Born near Chinhoyi, (formerly called Sinoia) in what in 1927 was Southern Rhodesia, Joram Mariga was ethnically Shona and spoke Zezuru, a local dialect. He was the son of a sangoma, and both of his parents were artistic. His father and elder brothers (Copper and Douglas) were expert woodcarvers, while his mother made pottery. All of them sold their work to members of the community. Aged eight or nine, he started to carve wood, and at school he joined wood working classes. As a herdboy, his first subject-matter was cattle. Joram attended secondary school in Goromonzi and studied at the Waddilove Institute. He qualified as an agriculturist and was employed by Agritex. His career as a sculptor in stone began in 1957 when he discovered long sought-after caches of green Inyanga (Moon) soapstone while leading a roadbuilding crew in eastern Rhodesia. Unaware of the importance of his find, he started to use it to produce utensils and small figures. He also began teaching members of his road building crew to carve the stone using woodcarving tools.

• Illustration — Joram Mariga talks to Detlef Hansen about the story of stone sculpture in Zimbabwe (rec. 1994) • Illustration — Protective Spirit, done in his typical 1990s style Mariga was married four times. With his first wife, Doreen, he had a daughter, Mary. His second wife was Philipa, the mother of Owen, Richard and Robin. Anne was his third wife who was the mother of Walter, Daniel, Aaron and Jay. In 1976 Joram married Maud but they had no children. As Jonathan Zilberg has pointed out, the nascent Shona sculpture movement was slow to gain momentum, partly because of the generally negative attitude in the 1960s and 1970s of local Europeans toward Frank McEwen and the sculptors he encouraged, in what was still a country ruled by a white minority government whose Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 was seen by the United Nations as racist. According to Aeneas Chigwedere, a Zimbabwean historian and politician, there were at that time very few educated black Africans who saw any value in what Joram Mariga and others were doing and they did not buy art that reflected their own culture, owing to indoctrination by the white ruling class. The importance of individual artists and their patrons in drawing the new sculpture movement to the attention of a worldwide audience has been discussed by Pat Pearce (a sculptor who lived in Nyanga and who first introduced Mariga to McEwen) and by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir. Much of Mariga's work includes themes drawn from the culture of the Shona people, and incorporates subject matter taken from nature. He believed that "One should avoid realism, create a large place for the brain and large eyes, because sculptures are beings who must be able to think and see for themselves for eternity". Many of his sculptures were carved in springstone but Joram also used more unusual stones such as leopard rock (a serpentine with green and yellow inclusions), and lepidolite, in the lilac purple colour available to him. One of the lepidolite sculptures, “Spirit of Zimbabwe” (1989) was displayed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1990 and the catalogue for the exhibition includes both a picture (p. 28) and extracts from an interview with Mariga (p. 42-43) when he worked there from 22 to 30 July 1990. It also includes (p. 44) a picture of his large work “Communicating with the Earth Spirit” (1990). In 1989, two of Mariga's works were Highly Commended in the Zimbabwe Heritage Exhibition at the Natitional Gallery, where his solo exhibition "Whispering the Gospel of Stone" had taken place. One of these, called "Calabash Man", is illustrated in Celia Winter-Irving's book on Stone Sculpture (see Further Reading) which also contains much additional material on Joram in his artistic context. The catalogue “Chapungu: Culture and Legend – A Culture in Stone” for the exhibition at Kew Gardens in 2000 depicts Joram's sculpture “Chief Chirorodziwa” (Lepidolite, 1991) on p. 100-101. Besides being a sculptor, Mariga was a teacher, counting among his students John and Bernard Takawira and Crispen Chakanyuka, (all his nephews), Bernard Manyadure, Kingsley Sambo, and Moses Masaya. He would also take students from further afield, generally while travelling. In 2000, Mariga gave a filmed interview with Jonathan Zilberg, in which he gave an account of his life and work.

• 1962 New African Talent, National Gallery of Zimbabwe • 1963 New Art from Rhodesia, Commonwealth Arts Festival, Royal Festival Hall, London • 1972 Shona sculptures of Rhodesia, ICA Gallery, London • 1989 Whispering the Gospel of Sculpture, National Gallery of Zimbabwe • 1989 Zimbabwe op de Berg, Foundation Beelden op de Berg, Wageningen, The Netherlands • 1990 Zimbabwe Heritage (National Gallery of Zimbabwe), Auckland, New Zealand • 1990 Contemporary Stone Carving from Zimbabwe, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK • 1991 The Thirty Five Years, Chapungu Sculpture Park, Zimbabwe • 1993 Talking Stones II, The Contemporary Fine Art Gallery Eton, Berkshire, UK • 1994 Joram Mariga: An Exhibition of Recent Sculpture, Chapungu Sculpture Park, Zimbabwe • 2000 Chapungu: Custom and Legend – A Culture in Stone, Kew Gardens, UK • 2001 Tengenenge Art, Celia Winter-Irving, World Art Foundation, The Netherlands