High
skies
Reflections of life and work in multicolour
Dr Andrew Hartnack
Development researcher southern Africa
Photo by Bart Love
I am Andrew Hartnack, a social anthropologist and development researcher working in southern Africa. Welcome to my website, where you will find a collection of my work, along with thoughts, photos and less formal items I want to share.
The name High skies comes from a poem by one of my favourite poets, the late Zimbabwean Charles Mungoshi. The final stanza is particularly poignant:
If you don’t stay bitter
and angry for too long
and have the courage to go back
You will find that the autumn smoke
writes different more hopeful messages
in the high skies of the old country.
Like other poems of his, this one explores the difficult process of going back to a place one feels alienated from. Much of Mungoshi’s work explores the difficulty educated black Zimbabweans faced (especially during colonial rule) adjusting between the traditional world of their rural homes and the more ‘modern’ urban life. In his poem Mungoshi suggests that despite this struggle, if you give it a second chance, ‘you might finally salvage something useful from the old country’.
As someone who is constantly examining, analysing and writing about southern Africa, I have seen how people get tired and alienated by places to which they have a deep connection. I saw it in my homeland Zimbabwe, how people gave up and left. I, too, had to leave to build my career. Now, I see a similar struggle in South Africa – where many are torn between their love for their country and their frustration with so many problems they feel powerless to change.
Yet, although I left Zimbabwe, it remained a very important part of my identity and story. Instead of closing the door and trying to forget about it, I returned, again and again, and continued to engage. My Masters degree research on displaced Zimbabwean farm workers, and my PhD research on the history and dynamics of farm welfare were part of this process of going back: physically, mentally and emotionally. They were a form a therapy for me. I learnt slowly that far from being a 'basket case', my country and its people are highly resilient, and there are many things that continue to surprise, inspire and offer hope. Even from a distance, I found ways to remain deeply connected and to contribute in some small way to Zimbabwe's story.
Mungoshi’s poem invites us not to be too quick to write off those places we love, nor to harden our hearts in order to protect ourselves from the pain of loss or disappointment. The invitation is to disbelieve the prevailing simplistic narrative, and instead go back, re-examine, and look with fresh eyes, to see that the autumn smoke writes different, more hopeful messages in the high skies of the old country.
This website is a space to share thoughts, stories and images from my work and other travels, to complicate prevailing narratives by providing a more hopeful perspective. There is always a different point of view if we have the courage to go back.
a lazy half-asleep summer afternoon
for instance, with the whoof-whoof
of grazing cattle in your ears
tails swishing, flicking flies away
or the smell of newly-turned soil
with birds hopping about
in the wake of the plough
in search of worms
Charles Mungoshi
Stories from my father
I love this photo of my father, taken in the 1990s in rural Zimbabwe. It reminds me strongly of the photo of me above. Both photos were taken spontaneously by friends while we were out doing our work of exploring a story.
Mungoshi’s poem was one of my father’s favourites too. I guess it resonated with him because he spent the first 10 years of his life under the clear skies of the Zambian veldt, only to spend his second decade in the damp and gloomy cold of England, where his mother took him after her divorce. They lived in a series of dingy single-room lodgings and my dad was terribly depressed. At 20 he returned to southern Africa, the only place, he used to say, in which he really felt alive.
He was also a story-teller whose subject was southern Africa. As a journalist he told particular kinds of stories. I have continued the tradition, but in a more detailed and immersive fashion.
My father took this photo of me (7) and my brother Richard (9) at the Matobo Hills in 1985, and wrote the inscription across the top.
Photo essays
Farm worker displacement in Zimbabwe
In the early 2000s widespread farm takeovers occurred in Zimbabwe when Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF government, led by veterans of the war of liberation, appropriated most of the white-owned commercial farms. By the late 1990s Zimbabwe’s rural farmland was still divided largely between two main blocks. These were communal areas, which housed most of the rural population (around 8 million at that stage) and were overcrowded and degraded, although small-scale black communal farmers still produced a large proportion of Zimbabwe’s maize and cotton crops. And the second equally sized area was large-scale commercial farmland, which was mainly owned by a mere 4,000 white commercial farmers.
Contact me
I would love to hear from you. If you would like to contact me, please send me a message.
©2023 Andrew Hartnack. Designed by Helen Hacksley