By Dr. Andrew Mulenga
Artists, across various branches of the creative tree, often act as social agents in the public sphere, advocating for social justice issues like artistic rights, creative freedom, and economic equity. Using platforms such as social media, a new generation of artists, in particular, is leveraging their artistic abilities to express their concerns through comedy, painting, and more. They raise public awareness of complex issues by simplifying them into more approachable and enjoyable interpretations. Among these creative practitioners are the comedian Ackim Chibale and the painter Nukwase Tembo from Zambia.
In addition to stand-up comedy, Chibale frequently writes short articles on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, where he has a sizable fan base. He also has a YouTube segment where he parodies serious news stories. He feels that his satirical renditions encourage his audience to consider current events more critically.
He is also driven to discuss artists’ rights because, for the longest time, being an artist has been his primary goal. With that in mind, he strives to give his all in everything he does, as it has taken him a long time to hone his craft and find a platform.Given his dedication to honing his craft, Chibale believes it’s vital for artists like him to address socially conscious issues that resonate with the public.
Chibale emphasizes the importance of personal conviction for artists before involving organizations or government, noting that: “Artistic intervention in the public sphere is crucial, but artists should take a personal stance before involving organizations or the government. When you get to workshops and meetings, artists will be asking about lunch and transport refunds because it takes a long time before you start reaping benefits as an artist,” he says. “Artists should believe in their ideas before engaging in public intervention, as it can champion the wrong ideas in the wrong hands.”
Chibale sources material not only from the news but also from life experiences and travels. He recalls a dry spell when he was staying at home with his parents and had very limited material to work with.
“If I was going to make a joke, it would just be about the amount of pornography on the internet; outside of that, I had nothing going on. Shortly in the second half of the year, the stars aligned, and I started to travel,” he says. He traveled around the country to Southern Province, Central Province, and Northern Province, and he started to see the world in a different way.
“Before long, the President will say something; everyone keeps saying he said he will fix things, but then I ask, why is he not fixing the country? In my travels, I found people who suffer from ‘face blindness,’ the inability to remember people’s faces,” he says jokingly. “Sadly, I feel politicians suffer the same thing, except for them it’s not face blindness but country blindness. So it’s not that the president doesn’t want to fix the country; he has just forgotten which country he promised to fix.”
Chibale gives another example of source material from his visit to a hospital, where he noticed cues everywhere except the door marked “VCT,” which led to the room for voluntary counseling and HIV testing. He also noticed that hospitals did not provide medication and that the staff was rude, both of which he used as source material. He believes that there is always room for satire, no matter how difficult things are in the nation.
Chibale’s comedic career began in 2016 with his church buddies, who pushed him to start recording jokes. It was almost like a prank. Before he established his footing, he encountered a few rejections at different restaurants, bars, and public areas, so it was not all plain sailing.
By 2018, he was already performing with international acts in the SADC region. He has also shared the stage with prominent international acts like the German comedian Toby Arsalan and Malawian comedian Daliso Chaponda, famous for being a finalist in the variety show Britain’s Got Talent and launching the BBC Radio 4 series Daliso Chaponda: Citizen of Nowhere.
“I’m still doing my best, and chasing a dream can be exhausting. I will keep performing, and outside that, I will continue living my life. What keeps me going for now is my ambition, my wit, and my inability to quit,” concludes Chibale.
Getting to the painter Tembo, she frequently serves as the model in her works, highlighting the highly biographical nature of her paintings that potentially serve as a critique of her own subjectivity as a woman in a patriarchal society.
Tembo’s paintings, influenced by surrealism, often reflect themes of political and economic liberty. Economic liberty, in fact, is a subject that Tembo is particularly passionate about, and it inspired one of her works from 2018, a painting entitled Dead Aid, after the 2009 bestselling book by Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo.
In her book Dead Aid, Moyo openly criticizes the aid sector, even going so far as to label it as “malignant.” She argued that the more than $1 trillion in development aid provided to Africa alone in the last 50 years has not improved the continent’s situation but has instead failed to produce sustainable economic growth and reduce poverty. She asserted that Africa needed to wean itself off aid over the course of the following five years and provided a list of alternative ways to fund development.
Tembo points to the reasons why she felt inspired by Moyo’s book and thought she would interpret elements of it visually as well as add her own thoughts to related arguments from the book.
“What prompted me to do the work in 2018 was the debt Zambia has accrued over the past 10+ years and seeing how, despite being a country blessed with natural resources,” says Tembo, “we still seem to be blind to the value that we possess. A blindness that keeps us holding up a begging bowl in exchange for change from the money that is made by imperialism, off our natural resources.”
The artwork portrays a lavishly attired African woman, wearing a blindfold, holding a bowl that contains a few gold coins and clearly hankering for more. The woman, as Tembo explains, represents Zambia, or by extension, other African countries caught in a similar situation.
At the time the artist created the piece, there was controversy surrounding the exploitation of the Lower Zambezi National Park as an open-pit mine. She thought the painting served as a reminder of how unfairly Zambia is treated in matters such as mining and the environment. She felt that Zambia was being robbed blind, unaware of its own value, and was going about pleading for scraps of the money taken from her. This raises the question of why Zambia is still among the world’s poorest nations despite possessing enough natural resources to make it a prosperous country.
A garland of flowers resting atop the woman’s head may symbolize purity and beauty, suggesting the natural resources the artist mentions. Coins representing the immense wealth generated from these natural resources are woven into the woman’s braided hair. One of the most striking aspects of the artwork is the trio of hands plucking coins from either side of the woman in what might be described as a devious act of thievery. The cuffs of their clothing, hinting at business suits, suggest that these hands symbolize capitalism and the diplomatic way the outside world approaches the African continent in search of its mineral wealth.
The light-skinned hands plucking coins from the woman’s hair might be seen as Euro-American or Far Eastern in hue. This is likely influenced by the US-China Trade War, which has impacted Africa’s development agendas, including Zambia. Bhaso Ndzendze, a former research director at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Africa-China Studies, alluded to such a “war” in his findings in “Impact of the US-China Trade War on Africa’s Development Agenda” at the Africa-China Think Tanks Forum in 2019.
Nevertheless, Tembo’s work on humanitarian concerns and her exploration of the complexities of human existence through the perspective of an African woman have not gone unnoticed, as evidenced by her accolades, including the “Zed Women’s Awards – Creative Woman of the Year” from a Zambian business organization. In the Zambian context, there are insufficient support systems for the production and sale of art, with extremely little assistance from the corporate and public sectors. Tembo, a self-employed visual artist who depends solely on the sale of her paintings, can be considered daring for doing so.
She began her career in the Lusaka art scene in the mid-2000s, and in 2016, she gained some recognition abroad when her work was included in the Barclays L’Atelier (now ABSA), one of the most prominent art contests in Africa, which is open to visual artists between the ages of 21 and 35.
It was one of her paintings entitled Status Quo that got her nominated. The painting was a parody primarily of Eurocentric social behaviors that have been steadily globalized through mass media. It was also a critique of the global fashion and modeling industries, as well as their customers and audiences.
Ultimately, though they draw from different branches of the creative tree, Chibale and Tembo are united by a common purpose: to use their art as a mirror reflecting the realities of their society. In a world where art often seems removed from the everyday struggles of ordinary people, they remind us that creativity, like the strong roots of a tree, can indeed be a powerful tool for change carrying with them a message of resilience, awareness, and the relentless pursuit of justice.
