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Wynona Mutisi

Rhodes University

At around 0811hrs on the morning of March 16, 2020, I received a text message from my university’s official communications. It stated that academic activities for the day had been temporarily suspended. Consultations were being held to decide on a way forward.

It had only been about five weeks since the start of the first semester and news had gone around that there was a new virus, which fortunately enough had not yet reached us in our small university town of Makhanda, formerly Grahamstown.

Receiving that text message as I was preparing to leave for campus made the threat of the virus real and it was something neither I nor my classmates and lecturers were prepared for.

On March 18, 2020, Rhodes University completely shut down, ending term 1 of the first semester abruptly in order to comply with the new national rules for Covid-19.

Many students returned to their home cities and countries, but I decided to stay behind in Makhanda, naively hoping to be back on campus as normal within a matter of weeks.

The beginning of 2020 marked the start of my journey as a final year Fine Art student and I was looking forward to the perks that come with being a final year student but also absolutely dreading the workload.

Fine Art is a studio practice-based subject, so it meant that we were heavily dependent on access to the various studio facilities on campus to do a satisfactory job in the very least.

More importantly, it was also a tradition of the Rhodes School of Art to host a graduate exhibition at the end of each year featuring the final year students’ bodies of work.

The graduate exhibition attracted many attendees from various departments in the university, friends from the community and often enough, the graduates’ parents would also come. We could never have anticipated that the class of 2020 would break that tradition for a more unconventional approach to the graduate exhibition.

Figuring out what was to happen to the graduate exhibition was something we only began to worry about a little later. The immediate problem that needed addressing was how to go about producing artwork without the studio space as we were now under a national lockdown.

In addition to producing artwork, we also needed to submit a 10 000-word thesis for our second mandatory major, Art History & Visual Culture.

Many of my classmates had to rethink their concepts for their body of work to adjust to whatever materials they would have access to in their homes.

My work then became a completely digital composition seeing that I had no access to adequate resources to make physical work. It certainly was challenging and many times I contemplated giving up but, in many ways, the experience challenged me to be creative in ways I would not have been.

Our lecturers were more than understanding and over several Zoom meetings they helped us navigate this new way of working whilst also adjusting what was expected of us as final year students.

Staying indoors for months took a toll on my mental health and the mounting pressure of completing my final year in the middle of a pandemic also affected my mental health. Apart from that, there also was the perpetual anxiety over possibly contracting Covid-19.

While in Makhanda, I lived with my extended family and it was much better being under lockdown with them as opposed to being alone like many other students who also decided to stay behind.

I certainly did long to be at home, in Zimbabwe, where my mother and sisters were, especially when the lockdown period kept getting extended.

I feared that I might not be seeing them for a while. It did not help my situation either that I had last been home in February 2019. I underestimated the effect of being away from home for a long time and faced with a situation that restricts you from going back home is heartbreaking, to say the least.

I do realise that my experience of living and studying under a lockdown is far more privileged than most people’s. Many were separated from anyone they could call family; others had no access to devices to enable them to carry on learning online and others had no access at all to the internet or conducive study environments.

My bedroom became my studio, lecture room and study and it is not everyday I get to say that I produced a graduate exhibition and thesis in my bedroom.

I am grateful for the successful completion of my degree and to top that, the best feeling has been being able to return home under the relaxed travel restrictions.

Being at home has made me feel at peace and refreshed. Worrying over the pandemic has not ceased though. Covid-19 is still a threat and I am still trying my best to stay healthy and keep my family safe.

While 2020 presented several losses, a win for my Fine Art class of 2020 was to showcase our graduate exhibitions in the form of our first ever online exhibition where many people around the world can safely enjoy in their own homes.

Until we can meet again in the Rhodes School of Art for another graduate exhibition or anywhere for that matter, let us stay hopeful knowing that this too shall pass but only if we keep our distance, wear masks and wash those hands regularly!