Aeroset

Saki Mafundikwa is a visual communicator, design educator, author, filmmaker and farmer, dedicated to sharing Zimbabwean culture through design, film, and education. At the core of his work is the belief that, “Afrika has to find Afrikan solutions to her problems otherwise we will always be colonised by others.”

Mafundikwa currently leads workshops and lectures in universities throughout the world, helping designers create a new visual language by understanding their own culture. “It’s my personal goal to transform global awareness of typography, symbolism, and design culture,” he says.

D&AD President Rebecca Wright, who selected Mafundikwa to be awarded the special prize this year, said of her reasoning: “For over 30 years, Saki’s exceptional contribution to design and design education has expanded the definition of design through his foregrounding of and vision for Afrikan design and his education and nourishment of generations of creatives who have been empowered to draw inspiration from their cultural roots, through his writing, teaching and talks.”

Upon learning that he was the recipient of the award Mafundikwa said: “I am touched by this honour and accept it with gratitude and the humility that has personified my work for the past 37 years. Once I discovered that there was nothing in the world I enjoyed more than teaching, I never looked back – I first taught as a TA in grad school, then as an adjunct at The Cooper Union in New York City and finally returned home to found ZIVA in 1999. ZIVA was a labour of love, I never made any money in the twenty years that I ran it. It was like a canvas on which I was free to put into practice all the different ideas I had about design education, always centering Afrika and the Afrikan diaspora. I was an early proponent of “Decolonization” although that word had not been coined then. I also believed strongly in the cross-cultural exchange between the North and the South – learning from each other as equals. It is beautiful when one is honoured by his peers for service to their field, I accept this Award for that recognition.”