BY PATRICIA SIBANDA
ORGANISERS of the annual My Beautiful Home competition say they have ironed out issues and made peace with their main sponsors, amid allegations of disturbances emanating from the previous editions.
The programme, which has been running for about six years and meant for Matabeleland people to modernise their homes in a traditional way by making use of natural pigments, has sponsors among them National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo, Amagugu International Heritage Centre and Ekhaya Gaia.
Founder Veronica Atala told NewsDay Life & Style that they ironed out outstanding issues at their general meeting held at Southern Cross Estate last Friday.
“We had a meeting last Friday with other members of the project. The three organisations National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Amagugu International Heritage Centre and Ekhaya Gaia signed and agreed on the first memorandum of understanding to rule and run My Beautiful Home project,” she said.
“We discussed and agreed on the regulations and policies, distribution of tasks and budget, calendar, adjudication rules and prize-giving among other things. All is clear now, let’s work together and make it happen again this year.”
In a recent interview with NewsDay Life & Style, competition vice-chairperson Clifford Zulu said this year’s edition of the programme would start early to avoid poor planning challenges that characterised last year’s edition.
Zulu said for this year’s competition, they would increase the number of competitors by 200.
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“Last year, we had about 800 participants coming from these wards and we are targeting about 1 000 entries for 2021. From the challenges that we faced last year, we are now formalising by presenting criteria that will help the competition to judge it better, so that we don’t have similar problems that we got from last year. Some of the notable challenges were obviously the judging criteria which people felt was not fair,” he said.
“This year we are improving the competition by laying out the conditions of participating. For instance, each homestead must have a kitchen built from traditional materials and the painting must be done using natural pigments, hence that’s what we are doing to improve on that.”
Zulu said competition prizes mostly came from some of the big companies in Bulawayo.
“The competition engages the corporate world in Bulawayo for support and these are the companies which already have a market within the districts. We also have well-wishers who support the organisation’s operations in terms of fuel, meetings and venues. Those are the fundraising donors that support the competition,” he said.
“We want to see more people joining the competition because it is something that will expand into the future to other districts within the Matabeleland region. We also want to see the revitalisation of this art form, painting huts using natural pigments, and traditional architecture.”
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