Is Zim’s stone sculpture art or craft?

produced craft form or is it simply a touristic souvenir today?
My reply was that the definition of this art form has become so illusive to the untrained and uninitiated that it could fit all the latter descriptions, depending on how much one knew about contemporary Zimbabwean art.  It was also dependent on who was selling it you and under what guise.
It is an open secret that from Cape Town to Lusaka, Maputo to Lubumbashi and from Namibia to Dar es Salaam, cross-border craft peddlers are selling stone crafts under the guise of “Shona sculpture” or the brand “Zimbabwean contemporary sculpture”, depending on what brand name sounds more sophisticated or may yield quicker sales.
Regrettably, even our own undiscerning and undiscriminating local gallerists, curators and arts community sales people such as Tengenenge, Penhalonga Arts and the ilk, are selling mass-produced, un-durable replicas of popular masterworks and popular craft pieces, such as “Dancers”, “Lovers”, “Mother and Child”, “Beggars”, “Street Children”, which are endowed with pitiful sentimental titles in order to appeal to the soft heart of unsuspecting armatuer foreign art collectors and gullible tourists. It is only after a buyer compares notes with experienced collectors that they realise that they have been duped and bought worthless trash without provenance.
Suffice to say Contemporary African Art should not be allowed to degenerate to a curio-fare or attempt to be accommodated within the European traditions of curatorship. An indigenous African creative production which has long been subject to foreign eugenics about ownership and quality control should be reversed.
Far too often unlettered indigenous artists and unlettered collectors make for a volatile and combustible combination, who between themselves are erroneously defining an erroneous measure of standard for Zimbabwean art.
Commercialism, export trade and vulgarities in crafts ought to be discouraged and an institution regulating quality control be set up. Credulous art and cultural brokers and gallery curators are to blame for the proliferation of mediocre stone crafts passing as art. Entrenched in their conceptualisation of art, is an uncritical stereotyping of artistic production from Zimbabwe, particularly stone sculpture.
Design Verses Invention
According to aesthetic principles genuine art is essentially “invention”, combined with intellectual and sensory stimulation that separates the artist from the craftsman. In Zimbabwe stone carved products clearly aligned with decorative crafts are passing for contemporary Shona sculpture, without the formal components of sculpture andits ideology, which transcends mere design.
Later day unschooled, indigenous Zimbabwean art and cultural brokers and curators are restoring the old misinformed colonial discourse in their own aesthetics and discourse. The truth is that craft can never be art and never the twain shall meet.
Zimbabwean  academic artists, cultural scholars and writers need to challenge the way the discipline of art production, distribution and history is being constructed by foreign market forces and incompetent African art administrators.
Therein lies the problem of Zimbabwean stone sculpture!