THE recent visit of Zulu performers to Brecon has inspired a local artist’s latest work and to revisit his own tribal connections.

Journalist-turned-painter and print maker Robert Macdonald is exhibiting his latest works at the Tower Gallery in Crickhowell.

The 82-year-old, who lives at the Penpont estate, near Brecon, where he also has a studio, said the visit of a Zulu dance troupe in August reawakened his fascination with all things tribal.

After seeing the Zulu musical ‘King Cetshwayo’ at Theatr Brycheiniog he began a series of paintings based on Zulu dance and these are displayed alongside some of the artist’s earlier work relating to the Maori people of New Zealand.

Robert has connections with both tribal groups. As a young veterinary surgeon his father went out to Africa and travelled for years through the bushveld of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, taking part in a colonial government campaign to eradicate foot and mouth disease in cattle owned by African herdsmen and white settlers alike.

His African companions taught him to become a fluent speaker of Ndebele, the language of the Matabele people – a branch of the Zulu nation. They also kept him safe from the lions which sometimes followed them.

In Rhodesia his father met and married Robert’s South African born mother, and although Robert was born in Britain he grew up enthralled by his parents’ tales of Africa – to such effect that when years later he became a journalist in Fleet Street he specialised in writing about Africa.

In the 1960s he covered Africa’s independence struggles and travelled widely on the continent.

The Macdonald family emigrated to New Zealand when Robert was 10 and he lived on the far Northland Peninsula where there was a vigorous Maori presence. The first original art Robert saw was the carving on Maori meeting houses. “For me tribal cultures have always had a powerful fascination,” he said. In 1984, on a return visit to New Zealand after working in Britain for many years, Robert became an honorary member of the Tainui tribe.

He accompanied Tainui leaders on a political march lasting several weeks to draw attention to Maori political demands.

As assistant to the Tainui tribal leader Robert Mahuta he was asked to write out depositions which were presented to the government and Crown by the Tainui. Later these led to major changes in New Zealand government policies.

Robert described these events in his book on New Zealand, ‘The Fifth Wind’. Published by Bloomsbury, it also contained the author’s own linocut illustrations. By this time Robert had moved away from daily journalism and studied at the Royal College of Art. In his forties he also took a printmaking diploma at the London Central School of Art.

Much of ‘The Fifth Wind’ was written and illustrated in an isolated cottage in the Brecon Beacons, and after the book was published Robert continued living in the Beacons and began, as an artist, to study the landscape and farming life around him. The exhibition at Crickhowell also features his more familiar work relating to local Usk Valley landscape and legend.

His Welsh-born wife Annie first brought him to Wales but he is now a fixture on the local artistic scene and is both president of the Royal Watercolour Society of Wales and a past chair of the Welsh Group, the senior association of professional artists in Wales, as well as being a director of the Swansea Print Workshop and a Trustee of the Brecknock Art Trust.

In his Penpont studio he created over a very short period a group of large mixed-media paintings in which he tried to capture the excitement of the Zulu dancers.

The Crickhowell exhibition also contains prints relating to the Highland history of the artist’s own family.

“The Scots Highlanders were the last truly tribal people in western Europe,” he points out. My Macdonald forebears fought the English and took part in the last ever Highland Charge, at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. That’s not such a long time ago.”

The exhibition was opened earlier this month by Brecon and Radnorshire AM, and Welsh Government cabinet secretary for education Kirsty Williams who spoke about the important of the arts in children’s education.

The exhibition at the Tower Gallery, Crickhowell runs until November 4.