Chris, the stone carver, and his work

Today I finally got to go to Tszingwe to see how Chris, the stone carver, does his work.  Tszingwe is a small village about 6 km. from Africa University.  He met me at the farm store, and we walked, mostly on a rough path between fields and through fallow land, to get there.  Chris lives with his wife and three daughters, and has been in this community his whole adult life.  His oldest daughter, Faith, is a boarding school student who had just come home for semester break.  The other two girls, Agnes and Ellen, live at home and go to schools nearby.

Chris and his family

When the economy was better, Chris was able to buy a small plot of land for a house, and a concrete pad has been poured for the home.  However, then the economy went bad.  Chris and his family live in a small temporary house made of vertical tree branch poles, rough wood siding, and a corrugated material for the roof.  The inside has one main room with couches and chairs and a small table.  There is a partial wall and a drape over a door opening at one end into a very small (I’d guess about 8’ x 4’) bedroom for the parents.  There is electricity hand strung across the ceiling in the home, which runs one overhead light in the main room, a two-burner cooker (without an oven) and a small radio.  There is no running water.  Water comes to this village through pipes from the nearby mountains, and women go to collect it within the village.  There is an outhouse and a very small workshop for Chris’s carving activities. 

This is taken from Tszingwe.  The rounded peak just to the
right of the road is where Chris goes to get his stone.

Chris walks about ½ hour to a nearby mountain where he can find soapstone and serpentine, the two kinds of stone he carves.  He roughs out the stone on the mountain, using small saw blades.  This is so that he has less stone to carry back home by hand for finishing.  On a good day, he can rough out five or six pieces, depending upon their size and design. 

Chris with a rough cut elephant sculpture

Chris showed me the process he uses from that point on.  He uses a file and small saw blades to finish shaping the sculptures. 

Then he uses three different grades of sandpaper and water to smooth the sculptures. 

At that point, he boils each sculpture in water.  The heat makes the substances he puts on the sculpture in the next step stick better. 

Once the rock is very hot, he applies a coat of black or dark brown shoe polish to the sculpture.  He lets that dry and the rock cool before he adds a second coat.  If he wants to bring out the natural color of the stone, he may brush it with melted candle wax first, and then add just a little shoe polish, which gives the rock a shine without coloring it deeply. 

Chris’s grandfather was known as a very good stone carver and taught Chris this trade when Chris was a young man.  He used to make a reasonable living at it when there were more tourists in this part of Zimbabwe, but now he is branching out into buying and reselling food items and hiring out his truck to carry people’s maize crops from the field because he cannot sell enough sculptures in this economy to support his family.