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It reminds me of the conflict in Sierra Leone, where lots of boy soldiers were involved. Soldiers as young as 8, 10, carrying Kalashnikovs, almost as tall as they were, trained to kill. I recall as Head of Peacekeeping Operations touring Sierra Leone with some of our peacekeepers and trying to see how we redeem these boys, and put them through training, prepare them for a life after this conflict.

There are a couple of things which are absolutely essential if a society is going to deal with the past. They need to be able to work on reconciliation. You also need to look at the society and ask the questions, ‘What happened?’, ‘How did we get here?’, ‘What can we do to ensure that this horror is not repeated?’

The main challenge in Mozambique was to decommission the millions of surviving guns and to equip the former soldiers and their families to rebuild their lives. The Throne of Weapons became an inspirational element in this recovery process. It was made as part of a peace project called Transforming Arms into Tools, which is still going today, and in which weapons once used by combatants on both sides were voluntarily surrendered under amnesty, and in exchange the people who gave them up received practical and positive tools – hoes, sewing machines, bicycles, roofing materials. Surrendering the guns was an act of real bravery on the part of these ex-soldiers and one of enormous significance for their families and the whole country. It helped break the addiction to the gun and to the culture of violence that had afflicted Mozambique for so many years. Since the beginning of the project more than 600,000 weapons have been relinquished and handed over to artists to be disabled and turned into sculpture. In the words of the project’s patron, Graça Machel, widow of Mozambique’s first independent ruler Samora Machel and now wife of Nelson Mandela, the aim was ‘to take away instruments of death from the hands of young people and to give them an opportunity to develop a productive life’. The guns themselves were to be turned into works of art. The project was started in 1995 by the Anglican Bishop Dinis Sengulane, of the Christian Council of Mozambique, with the support of Christian Aid:

The purpose of the project is to disarm the minds of people and to disarm the hands of people. Why should this world have hungry people? Why should this world have a shortage of medicines? And yet, the amount of money which can be made available almost instantly for armament purposes is just amazing, and I would say shocking.

I felt I should be part of shaping that peace. And of course we find the Book of Micah and the Book of Isaiah in the Bible, where it says they will turn their swords into ploughshares, and people will sit under their trees and nothing will frighten them.

We discovered that many monuments were a glorification of war, and we know that monuments are made by artists. So we invited artists and we said, ‘What about using your skills to glorify peace? We have got these guns – could you see whether you could convey a message of peace by using the bits and pieces of these guns?’ It was in that context that artists began to make different works of art. And one of the items produced was the Throne of Weapons.

The throne was made by a Mozambican artist known as Kester. He chose to make a chair and call it a throne, which immediately makes a particular statement. Chairs, as distinct from stools, are rare in traditional African societies, reserved for tribal heads, princes and kings; they are ‘thrones’ in the truest sense of the word. But this is a throne on which no one is meant to sit; it is not for an individual ruler but is intended as an expression of the governing spirit of the new Mozambique – peaceful reconciliation.

This piece seems to me to have a very special pathos, precisely because it has been made in the form of a chair. When we talk about chairs we always speak as though they were human beings