Not long ago, in the course of clearing some of the excess junk out of my studio, I came across a box I haven’t looked inside for years. In it I found several old sketch books containing a series of drawings I made in Zimbabwe, when I went back up there to visit my family in 1998.

While I will leave it to others to decide on their artistic merit, what did strike me about the Karoi ones, in particular, is how they capture a time, place and way of life that has now all but vanished.

Four of them were drawn on the spot, at my brother Peter Stidolph’s farm, Sangalolo, only a year or two before President Robert Mugabe launched his chaotic and often violent land grab which gutted the once thriving agricultural sector. Both of my brothers lost their farms even though they were legally acquired, on terms approved by the government, after independence

What adds to the poignancy of these sketches – for me anyway – is that Pete succumbed to a brain tumour just before he lost his farm. Growing up, in the then Rhodesia, I had always hero-worshipped him – strong, humourous, practical, caring, eminently sensible and a very good farmer to boot, he was a man you could always depend on or turn to in a crisis. There is another reason I am so admiring of him – it was he who introduced me to the wonderful world of birds.

His death affected me deeply. All these years later, I still can’t quite accept that he has gone.

Both Sangalolo and my other brother Paul’s old farm, Grand Parade, which is also in the Karoi district, are places I have strong feelings for and have many happy memories of. After I left the country and settled in South Africa, they became, in a sense, places of comfort for me – somewhere I could escape to when I needed to regain my bearings or wanted to recoup. It was almost as if, by going back to them, I was looking for clues to my future.

I feel the same about Bushmead, outside Masvingo, which is where my youngest sister, Nicky, and her husband, John Rosselli, built their dream house, overlooking Lake Mutirikwe (formerly Lake Kyle) before they, too, were forced to move to South Africa. Also, the Chimanimani Mountains ( where my ancestors, the Moodies, settled after trekking up from Bethlehem in South Africa) and Gona-re-Zhou in the South-East Lowveld – the subjects of my other drawings.

Like Nyangui, the Nyanga farm I grew up on, they are all places which helped shape who I am. They are a slice of my life.

Oddly enough, I have done very little outdoor sketching since my 1998 trip although living where I now do, at Kusane in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, I am beginning to think it is perhaps time I returned to the habit. Sifting through the same box of old junk, I also came across this quote which I had written down at the time because it seemed so pertinent and captured what I felt:

“A sketch is generally more spirited than a picture. It is the artist’s work when he is full of inspiration and ardour, when reflection has toned down nothing: it is the artist’s soul expressing itself freely” Denis Diderot, 1765.

Hopefully, you will see something of this reflected in these sketches. If not, I certainly think it applies to the preparatory drawings I do for my cartoons (my “roughs”), many of which have been purloined by my nephew, Craig Scott, a professional photographer, for precisely this reason…

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