As a young girl in Masvingo village in Zimbabwe, Chipo Musandi's toys were hammer, chisel and stones. And her destiny was chiselled by the counselling of her grandmother, now 107 years old. For Berlin-based Chipo, her art comes from listening to stones, says Shalaka Paradkar.

It is her first visit to Dubai, and Chipo Zainab Musandi is enjoying the attention. Resplendent in her wine-coloured silk dress and a feathered hat, she makes an arresting picture as she poses with her sculptures. 

The More Café and its sun-dappled garden, where we meet for the interview, is dotted with her work. The subjects are animals and birds, and scenes from village life in Masvingo (Zimbabwe). Most of the pieces are exuberant, yet hefty, hewn as they are from 300-million-year-old volcanic rock, and Musandi looks too petite to have done this all by herself.

She laughs at my implication of physical weakness. "I have been doing this since I was a child. My muscles are now accustomed to the physical demands of stone sculpting. Of course we need to work them every day, like any athlete would. But my pieces are all executed by me alone, right from the quarrying to the sculpting to the eventual display," she says.

Musandi is one of an estimated 2,000 sculptors who belong to the Shona tribe in Zimbabwe. Shona sculptors have gained international acclaim for their imagination and skill, inspiring the likes of Picasso and Modigliani.

Born in a village in Masvingo, Musandi grew up in a mud hut with no running water, the third of eight children born to her parents - also stone sculptors. (Masvingo, Musandi's birthplace, also houses the complex of ruins for which modern Zimbabwe is named - the Shona word dzimba dza mabwe meaning 'House of Stone'.)

Her stone-broke start
"Mine was a normal childhood like that of millions of other African children," she says.

"We went to the riverside to fetch water, wash and do laundry. Each child in the extended family had a piece of land where they cultivated vegetables. It was very important to tend the vegetable patch well, because that was how one earned the money for school books, uniforms and fees.

"After school, we returned home to tend the patch and sell the produce, because the money let us have an education, and education was a way out of poverty. That's how I grew up."

But tending to vegetable patches was not enough for Musandi. Appropriately enough, she was developing a rock-solid determination to succeed, that was being chiselled into sharpness by her grandmother.

"My grandmother has been one of the most influential people in my life. She is now 107, and one of the foremost Shona sculptors alive. She taught her son (my father) how to sculpt. He is now 87 years old, and he, in turn, taught me and my siblings." Musandi has passed on the same skills to her children.

"We do not have an art school or books, our art is only learned by watching and learning from our elders, so the only way to ensure it doesn't die is to teach it to our children."

Quite like the medium that she works with, Musandi's life has been an ode to resilience, the will to endure and survive the odds. She started sculpting at the age of five.

"My toys were a hammer, chisel and stone. In the evening, as we gathered around a campfire, each one of us children had to report on what we did that day. My father would listen, and his hands were always busy, working on a stone.

"People in the village would come to him, when they wanted a totem made. If my father made a sculpture for somebody, he would be given a chicken, or a rabbit, or a cow, depending on the complexity of the sculpture. It was important that we children assisted him, so we could eat and profit as well."

Many of her sculptures are stunning depictions of African wildlife. She attributes their life-like quality to a childhood spent in proximity to the bush.

"Our family compound is situated quite near the river. In the evenings, we often saw a lion make a kill if we kept quiet and watched closely. You will see this in my father's work - when he makes a totem of an animal, it is identical to the living creature.

"Wild animals were a part of our daily life in Masvingo - we saw them on (our) way to school, but knew how to respect them and they, in turn, left us alone. You have to be respectful when you meet a wild animal -  buffalo, lion, or cheetah." 

When war broke out in Zimbabwe, the Musandi family moved to the then-capital, Salisbury (now Harare). Musandi studied hard and trained to be a chartered accountant, taking up a job in the city. However, she found it a frustrating profession and ended up sculpting in the evenings after work - it was a great stress-buster.

No stone hearts in Berlin ...
In 1986, she started a small cooperative of stone sculptors, with her father Manira, aunt Mavis Mabwe and many other relatives. The biggest turning point in her life came a short time later.

As Musandi recounts, "In 1990, I was offered a chance to participate in a conference for small-business co-operatives in Berlin; the organisers promised free cartage for my sculptures. The hotel we were staying at terrified my people - it was big and impersonal.

"With the manager's permission, I recreated a traditional Shona style village and displayed my sculptures in the lobby, just so our people would feel at home in this new environment. Visitors and guests were really fascinated by the sculptures -  they had never seen anything like them before.

"People wanted to buy the pieces and I had no prices set because I hadn't thought of selling any. It had been simply a chance to visit a new place for us, with our tickets and cartage taken care of."

Eventually every piece was sold and the general manager invited her to do a show again, even helping organise a trade permit.

"Initially I thought I would continue as I had in Zimbabwe - being a chartered accountant by day and sculpting stone at night. However, my qualifications were not enough to practise accountancy in Germany, a few more years of further studies were required. I also had to learn German, of which I could not speak a word. I thought I was too old to learn so many new things, and decided to concentrate on sculpture alone."

Musandi soon packed her bags for Berlin, deciding to become a full-time sculptor. Her luggage consisted of two dresses and all the stones she could pack. She found an apartment with a small balcony which she transformed into a studio where she sat and sculpted. Once there were enough pieces, she organised a show and sold out all 36 pieces in three days.

"For the first time I my life, I began to seriously think of stone sculpting as a way to make a living. On returning home to Masvingo, our whole family went into the bush, camped for three weeks and quarried enough rocks to fill a cargo container that I shipped back to Berlin. I rented a little warehouse, that functioned as a studio and storage."

That was ten years ago. Soon, many prominent people bought her sculptures, including Boris Becker and then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. With wealth and exposure, she may have traded in some of the adzes and chisels for power tools, but at heart she remains the same girl from Masvingo.

She doesn't embrace modern technology either. While quarrying and sculpting, she still uses the same age-old tools as generations of  Shona sculptors before her.

The sculpting process starts with the selection of the stone itself. The Shona sculptor's artistic vision is shaped by the qualities of the stone before them. Stone sculpting, thus, does not become a battle of man against rock, but rather more of man listening to what the rock has to say.

"For centuries, each Shona family has a secret place along the Great Dyke where they quarry their stone. Other families do not try to investigate.

"After the stone is quarried, nothing is done to it for the first two days. We observe and try to understand what it is saying to us. It is the stone that dictates to the sculptor how his or her tools should move. Then we take a chisel and hammer and start sculpting.  We don't make any sketches or drawing," says Musandi. Once the sculptor knows the stone's colour, striations and faults, the work begins.

"It's a very simple process. You don't need to have any big art degrees from a fancy school or read fat books on technique to know about this. If you have the eyes to see and the heart to listen to what the stone is saying, then it's easy to bring out the inherent spirit."

I ask her a question that she has been asked a hundred times before. What is it that inspires her? "When you look at clouds in the sky, sometimes you see an elephant, sometimes a rabbit in their shapes. It's the same with stone. A real Shona sculptor is able to see those forms in the stone, and then shape out what he or she sees," is her answer.

Stone cold ... and successful
Does she have any regrets about the path she has chosen, of having left her children behind in Zimbabwe while she worked to establish herself in Berlin?

She prefers to answer the question partially, "Sometimes I do get homesick when the weather is foul in Europe. My busiest time is winter, so I have to unfortunately stay put. So I bundle myself in overcoats and continue working. I don't think I will ever get used to the cold. My children were happy to have learned the art in the village, much as I did. They now help me out."

Musandi's annual vacations to Masvingo are still much anticipated events, when she gets together with her extended family to sculpt.

As she describes the scene, "In the centre of the compound is our working place. That's where we meet in the mornings. It's nice to work together as a family, sculpting stone with the sun on our backs. And we enjoy our meals much more at home - the flavours are richer because it's cooked on fire and the vegetables taste fresher.

I continue sculpting the way I was trained. And that's exactly how my children have also been brought up, they have worked as my apprentices and learned the craft. My daughter sold her first sculpture when she was all of 8 years old, by sneaking in a piece she had made into one of my shows."

Stone sculpting has also been cathartic for her. When she lost her mother 20 years ago, sculpting stone helped Musandi forget her grief. "My art had helped me see places and meet people I would never have met had I continued being an accountant," she says.

Her children have also followed in her footsteps. "I wouldn't have been disappointed had they not become sculptors," she says. "But I would keep reminding them not to forget their roots. Because this is not something that can be learned in school, but only from your family."