Conclusion

A tree and a chair made out of decommissioned weapons, described at the start of the book, illustrate how artists and religious leaders in Mozambique chose to imagine a world that was not defined by violence. These sculptures point back to a land devastated by civil war and point forward to communities working towards peace. Both the Tree of Life and the Throne of Weapons act as idiosyncratic war memorials that commemorate not the ‘heroes of the armed struggle but those who suffered at its hands, including thousands of child soldiers’. ¹ Both objects silently bear witness to the suffering that violence can bring. As memorials rich in symbolism both pieces have acted like cultural magnets, attracting extensive journalistic interest and curatorial attention. Chris Spring, curator of the British Museum's African Galleries, bought the Throne and later commissioned the Tree of Life for the British Museum. The Tree was given pride of place in the Museum's Great Court for the Africa 2005 season. It is ironic how some of the weapons of war created and sold in the West have now been brought back to their birthplaces as powerful artistic symbols of peace. The Tree of Life and Throne of Weapons were not produced in a vacuum. They are emblematic of a broader creative and imaginative response to a land and a people broken by an imported war. The experiment to exchange arms for useful tools, and then to turn some of the arms into art, originated not among the political elite but among local religious leaders and local artists, who were supported by Christian Aid and local Mozambican churches.