Published by the government of Zimbabwe
Celia Winter Irving
4 July 2008
Harare — ONE of the wealthiest women in Israel, in a recent television interview, spoke about how wealth should be quantified.
Rather than valuing her businesses in monetary terms, in assets, in stock, or as successful investments, she looked at their indirect benefits - the value of a dam providing water for a village, the value of a construction company providing housing for the poor, the value of shoes for those whose bare feet were made for walking.
"It's the value beyond, the added value . I may have this and that, I may be this and that because of my businesses, but what matters to me is what others gain who do not have what I have."
How does this woman's philosophy apply to a Zimbabwean sculptor?
So often to the sculptor, the value of the sculpture is its sale price, determined by production costs ,the cost of the stone, the transport to the mine, the tools and the cost of building the pole and daga house or the high-density house allowing ground or a backyard to sculpt, the creative imagination and the executional skills demanded to make sculpture.
"What ?" says the sculptor will my sculpture bank roll ? "A new car, a new girl friend, an ëstablishment "in the lock of flats down the road, a rolled into one cellphone, a camera, a Blackberry, Email facility and Internet?
Does the sculptor think of the "value beyond", the added value - the pleasure the sculpture gives to the viewer?
His sculpture is of a cat, whose springstone markings blend with the Tengenenge grasses in summer, a cat who is everyone's cat yet no one's cat as are all cats at Tengenenge.
The cat "behind the cat " was a cat which came down the Great Dyke Mountains when the chrome miners left and becoming socialised learned to pull in its claws and wave its paws in the air and raid the fridge in the kitchen for off cuts of Dutch cheese -presents from Dutch buyers.
The sculpture of the cat became the cat of a man whose beloved cat did not come home from the vet, so that the man had no one to talk to, no one to play with,no one to hoist onto his knee sitting by the fire each night,no one to share his bed with and no one to love.
The man said "I will never have another cat" - but this springstone cat changed his mind.
Does the sculptor realise that his cat went to a happy home, will be preened and polished and shone each day, have a name, be admired by visitors and have pride and place in the house of the man?
Does he realise that his cat will teach this man to love again and one day make this man have another cat, a living cat to keep it company?
So the "value beyond", the value added to this sculpture of a cat was inestimable and unquantifiable.
Human happiness cannot be quantified, measured or predicted. It happens for the strangest reasons and in the strangest ways.
But one sure and unbeatable measure of human happiness is that of the person who has said "I will never have another cat" and soon after, with a twitch of its whiskers, another cat arrives.
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