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CHERYL RODRIGUES Cheryl Rodrigues was born in 1956 in Harare, Zimbabwe and showed a flair for art and music from a very young age. She started playing the keyboards by ear at the age of 5 and at the age of 14, acquired a piano accordion which she learnt to play by ear. She studied art at school up to first year "A" level but other than that, had no formal training in either art or music. She married Johnny in 1974 and together they had 3 children, Lorraine, Brigitte and Shane. Up until 3 years ago, Cheryl specialized in pastel portraits, supplementing
the family's income. In 2001, her husband Johnny formed the Zimbabwe
Conservation Task Force which was initially comprised of a group
of concerned Zimbabweans who decided to do something positive about
the unacceptable levels of poaching of wildlife in Zimbabwe. As
a way of raising money for their anti-poaching patrols, Cheryl started
painting wildlife in oils and donating the proceeds to the wildlife
fund. |
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SHANE RODRIGUES Cheryl and Johnny's long awaited son Shane was born in 1983. By the age of 5, he was astounding everybody with his three-dimensional drawings. At this early age, he would sit on an old tyre at his father's garage and stare for hours at a truck or a car or some engine parts and then when he went home he would reproduce what he had seen on paper in perfect detail. He drew everything down to the last nut and bolt and he was able to draw subjects accurately from any angle in three dimensions. Shane achieved distinctions at "A" level in art and technical graphics at school and won several awards for these subjects throughout his school career. Not to be outdone by his sister, at the age of 16, he won the Zimbabwe National Flame Lily poster competition. More recently, wanting to assist with funds for the Zimbabwe Conservation
Task Force, Shane began doing stunning pencil sketches of African
wildlife. He is currently studying computer graphics at the Zimbabwe
Institute of Digital Arts. |
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LORRAINE RANDALL Lorraine is Cheryl and Johnny's first child, born In 1975. The family was pleasantly surprised to discover that Lorraine also displayed an artistic flair at an early age and helped her develop her talent. Cheryl gave Lorraine full use of her expensive art equipment and allowed her to "help" with any art work she was busy with before she was old enough to read and write. This of course meant that Cheryl spent a lot of time correcting mistakes on the quiet, but it gave Lorraine a feeling of importance and confidence to be allowed to put her mark on her mother's paintings. She has now become an outstanding artist in her own right. At the age of 14, she won Zimbabwe's National "Flame Lily" art competition and was presented with a certificate by Sally Mugabe. Lorraine is using her talents to assist her father's organization
by doing oil paintings of wildlife, also donating the proceeds to
the wildlife fund. In 1994, Lorraine married Gavin Randall and in
1998 their daughter Kylie was born. Kylie is also displaying strong
artistic tendencies. |
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JOHNNY RODRIGUES Johnny was born in Santa Cruz, Madeira in 1949 and moved to Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) at the age of 5, where he grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe. He became fluent in the African languages and fully conversant with the African customs at a very young age. By 1974, the liberation war was under way in Zimbabwe and Johnny was asked to join the Selous Scouts. He remained with them for the duration of the war. When Robert Mugabe won the elections in 1980, all the Selous Scouts were told to leave the country immediately and the South Africans took advantage of the situation by recruiting them for their Special Forces to assist in their war. Johnny and Cheryl and their two small daughters, Lorraine and Brigitte, moved to the army camp in Phalaborwa, South Africa where Johnny served the South African army for the following 5 years. Their son, Shane was born in South Africa in 1983. By 1985, they heard that things in Zimbabwe had calmed down quite a bit and being homesick, they decided to go home. Johnny started a garage in Zimbabwe, repairing vehicles and the business thrived for the next 10 years, enabling him to educate his children and keep food on the table. However, the economic situation in Zimbabwe started deteriorating in 1995 and the business was suffering so he decided to buy a 30 ton truck and start a transport company. In 2000, Johnny had a spate of bad luck. Although the company was doing quite well, it was not doing well enough to pay the exorbitant insurance premiums on the trucks so when one truck was written off in an accident and another was hijacked in South Africa and never recovered, he was not able to replace them. Around that time the land invasions began and he started hearing about the slaughter of the wildlife. He was extremely concerned that one day there would be no animals left in Zimbabwe so he started the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force to try and preserve the wildlife. Johnny has been running the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force since its inception in 2001, using donations from concerned people to relocate animals under threat, to buy veterinary medication, to remove snares from animals and to expose the ongoing atrocities to the rest of the world. He is in desperate need of funds to continue with this work. |
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BRIGITTE RODRIGUES |
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