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Saki
Mafundikwa is a maverick visionary who left a successful
design career in New York to return to his native Zimbabwe and open
that country's first school of graphic design and new media.
Mafundikwa is the author of Afrikan
Alphabets, a comprehensive review of African writing
systems. He has participated in exhibitions and workshops around
the world, contributed to a variety of publications and lectured
about the globalization of design and the African aesthetic. In
going home and opening his school, Mafundikwa's ambition is nothing
less than to jump-start an African renaissance.
Mafundikwa was moved to draw from an early
age. Using a stick,
he illustrated on every surface he could find—on the ground, in the
sand, even tattooing his thighs and arms. He loved drawing letters
in particular. Though he had not yet heard of printing and thought
typeset words were done by hand, his aim as a child was to make
letterforms as good as those he saw in books.
On
becoming a designer:
My family
always knew me as an artist, so to them it's always
been like, "God gave him the gift. We do not understand completely
what he does, but he's done well for himself."
His father, a schoolteacher, recognized
Mafundikwa's constant
scribbling as a talent to be nurtured. He enlisted his son to
design classroom instruction materials, and soon other teachers
were making use of Mafundikwa's artistic gifts, too.
Mafundikwa left Zimbabwe as a young man in
the late 1970s
because his country was at war. As some of his peers were being
drafted into the colonial army and others were joining the
guerrilla force fighting for liberation, he summoned the courage to
follow a different path. He journeyed to Botswana and declared
himself a refugee. There, due to his high school achievements, he
was able to secure a scholarship to study in America. Mafundikwa
says, "Sometimes you have to leave home to discover yourself. If I
hadn't left home, I would never have become a graphic designer, and
I would never have discovered African alphabets."
It was at Indiana University that he finally
recognized his true
calling. Though he'd chosen a fine arts and telecommunications
double major, Mafundikwa often volunteered to design flyers for
university parties. Another student noticed his work and suggested
that he really belonged in graphic design.
He was introduced to two professors in the
design department.
Since he had no portfolio to present, they queried him about his
life and family. They were intrigued when he mentioned his mother
was good at embroidery and crocheting, and that he drew patterns
for her. Mafundikwa says, "These people were smart enough to know
that this was design. [In Zimbabwe] we didn't know what it was,
didn't have a word for it, but it was design." He was invited to
study with them, and eventually changed his major.
On his education:
Yale, with its Swiss style, is where it all
came together for me
and that is where I adopted the modernist mantra " less is
more."
Mafundikwa went on
to receive an MFA in graphic design from
Yale. A flame was lit during his application interview with
professor Alvin Eisenman. Eisenman was aware that certain African
countries had writing systems, like the hieroglyphics of Egypt, so
he asked Mafundikwa if there was a Zimbabwean alphabet. The idea
that, in addition to the oral traditions of the continent, African
knowledge had been passed on in unique written form centuries ago
was a revelation to Mafundikwa. He became passionately devoted to
the subject, finally taking it on as his thesis project.
New York was Mafundikwa's next stop. There
he worked at various
jobs as an art director for advertising and publishing (which he
enjoyed immensely). He designed and art directed for various
imprints at Random House. In addition to designing books, he took
on a number of freelance jobs creating promotional materials for
popular recording artists. And he took part in the media boom as
part of the team developing the Fodor's website. During this period
Mafundikwa also taught a class at Cooper Union called Experimental
Typography. The topic and his instruction elicited inspired work
from his students.
At the end of 1997,
Mafundikwa decided he could be more useful
in Zimbabwe than in New York. He left a comfortable life and
returned to his native land to open the Zimbabwe Institute of
Vigital Arts, or ZIVA. "Vigital," a word of his own creation,
refers to visual arts taught using digital tools. Ziva means
"knowledge" in Mafundikwa's native Shona language.
His advice to new graduates:
You wanna break the rules? Well, you gotta
LEARN the rules
first. Learn to draw like your life depends on it.
Through the school, Mafundikwa tries to
illuminate graphic arts
as a viable career path for Zimbabwe's young people. He says, "It
was the most natural thing for me to come home and start a school
of design. Because I figured, my god, how many hundreds of young
people in Zimbabwe would never know there is a field called graphic
design. It was the right thing for me to do, because I felt so
fortunate that I was able to figure it out."
At the outset, Mafundikwa funded the school
by cashing in his
401(k) from Random House. He continues to pour all of his freelance
design earnings into ZIVA because the political climate in Zimbabwe
has made it impossible for him to garner other financial
support.
Zimbabwe currently suffers
from an economic, political and
social crisis, which can be attributed to its government. Scores of
supporters of the opposition have been arrested and displaced. In
April 2008, The New York Times published the indelible
image
of a woman with a child strapped to her back crawling under a
barbed-wire border fence to escape. But while others flee,
Mafundikwa remains committed to his country and his cause. He says,
"We all live on this thread of hope that change is going to come.
That's why I'm still here. Those that are not eternal optimists
like me—they left a long time ago. I believe in this country."
In 2004, Mafundikwa published Afrikan
Alphabets, a result
of 20 years of research and a testament to Africa's intellectual
wealth. It is his hope that Africa can imprint itself on the canon
of graphic design. Mafundikwa says, "The dream is for something to
come out of Africa that is of Africa." He knows it will be a
monumental task, but he is confident that his book and his school
are steps in the right direction.
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