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Stanely Mushava Arts Correspondent
The flagship edition of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair’s Indaba sessions have come to an end but will be outlived by the astute discussions held over its two-day stretch.
Points of interest raised during the Indaba include the bleak prospects faced by the book sector, challenges of translation, functions of local sculpture, fusion of music and literature, marriage of indigenous traditions and pentecostalism and inadequacy of the Western intellectual property rights regime.

Arguably one of the country’s premier academic turfs, the Indaba now makes way for Book Exhibitions, currently running at the Harare Gardens, the Literary Evening to be held tonight at the Book Café and the Writers’ Workshop, slated for tomorrow morning at the Book Café.

Tanzanian intellectual property buff Dr Eliamani Laltaika, who also graced the Indaba, short-circuited the current trademark and patents regime as unfairly slanted in favour of its Western originators at the expense of Africa and other regions.

Dr Laltaika pointed out the inability of western intellectual property right regimes to protect indigenous cultural heritage.
He urged collaboration among African scholars, civil society and research organisations in research and advocacy for a legal regime that protects African indigenous heritage.

“Protection of traditional knowledge of indigenous people poses an array of legal and policy challenges,” Dr Laltaika said.
“The most critical of which is inability of the current legal system grounded in western philosophies, to recognise “communitarian rights”.’

“One way of affirming community rights of traditional and indigenous peoples is to respect and integrate their customary law in the international and national legal system,” he said.

Shumirai Nyota highlighted the limitations and challenges of translating literary works from a European to an African language.
She cited two works translated from English into Shona “A Grain of Wheat” (Tsanga yeMbeu) and “Alice’s Advaventures in Wonderland” (Alice Munyika yeMashiripiti).

Nyota demonstrated that literature does not emerge cultural vacuum but in the context of both the source and target language texts.
She noted that translation is easy where cultural elements in the translated works have equivalents in the Shona language and culture but difficult where concepts and terms were alien to Shona.

Presenting on Shona sculpture, Barnabas Chikonyora pointed out that Zimbabwean communities were not believers in the philosophy of art for art’s sake and it is in this setting that the tradition of local sculpture first emerged. Chikonyora said Western colonisation and globalisation, through the influence of Europeans like McEwen, gave this art an international status and brought but flawed it with modernist tendencies in the process.

“All that Africans needed from these Europeans and other foreigners was international exposure to make their art more universal, not prescriptions on forms and themes,” Chikonyora said.

“Sadly what is now seen and passed on as Shona sculpture are merely ill-informed caricatures of the real true to form and function of Shona sculptural products,” he said.

In his dissent, Musaemura Zimunya, whose poetry, particularly in “And Now the Poets Speak,” engages the rock motif, said McEwen was the disciple of a school sympathetic to Picasso.

Picasso was a fan of African art hence might not have been that much of a vandal as far as indeginous sensibility was concerned, Zimunya pointed out.