Qualla: Tengenenge

Tengenenge: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IGTaylor, CC BY-SA 4.0. The word itself means "the beginning of the beginning." In the Korekore dialect of Shona, Tengenenge gestures toward origins, toward the moment before a thing starts. It turned out to be the right name for a place that has given form - literally, chiseled into stone - to one of the most important art movements in modern Africa. Since 1966, hundreds of sculptors have lived and worked on this hillside in Zimbabwe's Guruve District, turning hard green-black serpentine into human faces, spirit figures, animals, and forms that refuse easy categories. Some of the names that emerged here - Bernard Matemera, Henry Munyaradzi, Sylvester Mubayi, Fanizani Akuda, Bernard Takawira - are now in museum collections from London to New York.

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Image: IGTaylor | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tengenenge: A Farm That Became a Studio

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wewoewi (Diskussion), Public domain. Tom Blomefield came to this land to grow tobacco and mine chromium. By the mid-1960s, neither business was paying. International sanctions against Ian Smith's white-minority Rhodesian government, which had unilaterally declared independence in 1965, had squeezed commodity exports...

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Image: Wewoewi (Diskussion) | Public domain

Tengenenge: The First Generation

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IGTaylor, CC BY-SA 4.0. The artists who cut their first pieces at Tengenenge in the late 1960s became known as Zimbabwe's first generation of stone sculptors. Their work reached the wider world largely through Frank McEwen, director of the National Gallery of Rhodesia in Salisbury, who organized exhibit...

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Image: IGTaylor | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tengenenge: Through the War and Back

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IGTaylor, CC BY-SA 4.0. The sculpture community kept working without him for a while, but by 1979 the Rhodesian Bush War had reached the hills of Guruve. Guerrilla fighters moved through the area, most of the artists scattered, and Tengenenge emptied out. December 1979 brought the Lancaster House Agreem...

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Image: IGTaylor | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tengenenge: The Stone and the People Who Shape It

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IGTaylor, CC BY-SA 4.0. Serpentine from the Great Dyke is a difficult medium - hard enough to hold fine detail, soft enough to be carved by hand with chisels and rasps, and prone to surprising the sculptor with hidden seams of color. The artists who settled at Tengenenge developed techniques that are st...

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Image: IGTaylor | CC BY-SA 4.0