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James
Maberly: Cry Freedom
Green Pebble Spring 2008 issue
Tuesday,
May 27, 1986 was a day that would change artist James Maberly forever. One
moment he was the manager of Botswana United Transport, a company which ran
a fleet of trucks between Zimbabwe and Botswana, the next he was
being accused of harbouring weapons of war.
The evidence:
Seventy-two rounds of AK-47 ammunition recovered from a trunk in his apartment.
This trunk belonged to a journalist flat-mate who, at the time of James’s
arrest, was travelling virtually incommunicado on a mule through the wilds
of Tibet. To add to the mystery, James remains convinced a disgruntled Botswana
United Transport employee was somehow involved in his arrest.
Punishment was swift. James was sentenced to five years in Gaborone Maximum
Prison and there, with little else to do, he resumed a hobby which would not
only see him through his incarceration but which would also one day provide
him with the means to reshape his life.
His art.
The son of Zimbabwean farmers, James had grown up surrounded by the elephants,
gazelle, giraffe and buffalo which would later become his hallmark. He studied
A Level art and even toyed with the idea of becoming a professional artist,
but it wasn’t until his arrest that the importance of what was hitherto
simply an enjoyable pastime became apparent.
As he explains today from his home in Suffolk, his sketches allowed him to
communicate with the prison guards. By sharing his work with them, he was
able to rise above the nameless, faceless person he felt he had become.
Not that being an artist in a high security prison was straight forward.
Leafing through a sketch book, James points to a drawing of a concrete drain.
He had been forbidden from drawing anything that could be identified as coming
from within the prison and when guards tore up a sketch of a door knob because
only the prison had such hardware, James had been forced to find more generic
items to draw. A drain was a safe alternative, he decided – surely there
had to be thousands of similar drains in Botswana, this one would not pose
a security threat?
The guards let him keep the drawing.
‘I made the drain nice and clean,’ James adds with a gleam in
his eye, ‘so that they couldn’t object.’
Over the next four and a half months James worked largely from magazine images
so that his drawings would remain easily explainable. He safeguarded the images
by incorporating pro-Botswana messages into the narrative and eventually he
built up sufficient trust that the prison invited him to design numerous posters
depicting life in Gaborone Maximum Prison. These would be used at a trade
show. In return, he was granted access to areas outside his cell in order
to paint them...
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