Women, Beadwork and Bodies: The Making and Marking of Migrant Liminality in South Africa, 1850–1950

Abstract

Migrant labour practices in southern Africa pulled large numbers of men into the cities and onto the mines, leaving women at home to tend the fields, bring up the children, care for the elderly and, most importantly, to keep cultural identity alive. At the same time, migrant labour provided cash for those left behind, facilitated the passage of trade goods from cities and trading stores into rural settlements and thus saw to the transformation and sometimes the death of local traditions of making. The introduction of increasingly large quantities of glass beads into southern Africa from the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of new forms of dress and regalia, made by the women left at home in rural villages, and worn by men and women as forms of indigenous dress. Although beads were used as a currency by the Mpondo peoples and were highly desired by many other East Coast peoples, they were, in fact a luxury, very expensive, and could from the 1850s only be acquired with cash. This article looks at the emergence of particular techniques, designs and forms of beadwork in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of an emerging code of dress. Using photographs to establish the swift emergence of a hybridity in the dressing of the body among South African black peoples, the article, nevertheless, maintains that beadwork was something particularly associated with the rural home. It argues, in relation to selected items of men's beaded garments, that, in their use of imported beads, thread and needles provided by traders, and objects brought home by migrant workers, or obtained with the cash provided by them, women created beadwork forms that are now considered ‘traditional’, but which were equally ‘modern’ in their engagement with the wider contexts of migrant labour. In their hybridity and modernity, the beadwork items allowed indigenous cultures to establish modes of resistance in new ‘traditions' that challenged dominant, particularly western, controls of dress and appearance.

Key words:

• beadwork
• migrant workers
• Zulu
• Xhosa
• women

Acknowledgement

The research for this article was made possible by a grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa.

Note on Contributor

Anitra Nettleton is Chair and Director of the Centre for Creative Arts of Africa at the Wits Art Museum (WAM). Her research has encompassed topics in historical and contemporary African arts. Her present research runs in two strands; the relationships between histories and modernity as manifested in beadwork and ‘traditional’ sculpture: a project on modernisms manifested in works by artists of the 1963/4 ‘Amadlozi’ exhibition and by rural artists of Limpopo and Mpumalanga in the 1970s and 1980s.

Notes

1. See David Hammond-Tooke (1985) and Gavin Whitelaw (2001) for wider analyses of African cattle culture and settlement patterns in southern Africa.

2. The hut tax had been imposed earlier in the colony of Natal by Theophilus Sheptone in October 1849 (Guy 2013).

3. I use these ethnic labels here as a convenient shorthand, mindful of their inaccuracies and problems of identification, some of which will emerge later in this article.

4. McLintock (1995:254) claims it thus: ‘ … the homestead was based on the systematic exploitation of women's labor and the transformation of that labor into male social and political power’.

5. The dates for the beginning of the use of seed beads in such quantities differ in different parts of the sub-continent. Ludwig Alberti (1968 [1807]) illustrated examples of ‘Xhosa’ clothing that made use of such beads, and they were being imported into northern Zululand from Delagoa Bay at the same time.

6. The intricacies of who could make beadwork for whom were embedded in social relationships and customs of respect (Zulu hlonipa). So, in most cases a young man could not wear beadwork made by his sisters, but could wear pieces made by his mother or elder female relatives in his own lineage. Among Xhosa-speakers, married men often accumulated large collections of beadwork made by their girlfriends, wives and mistresses.

7. Some of this is addressed in the work of Joan Broster (1976), Frank Jolles (1993), Ivor Powell (1995), Eleanor Preston-Whyte and Jean Morris (1994), Gary van Wyk (2003) and Sandra Klopper (1992, 2000).

8. There is a large literature on southern African beadwork, not all of which acknowledges these basic factors. On the side of those that gloss over the history are Dawn Costello (1990), Broster (1976), Hilgard Schoeman and Alice Mertens (1975), Mertens and Broster (1973) and Franz Mayr (1907). More historically nuanced accounts include Van Wyk (2003), Klopper (2000), Marilee Wood (1996), Carol Kaufmann (1994), Andrew Proctor and Sandra Klopper (1993), but even these do not attempt to establish base lines for techniques, patterns and identities.

9. There is not sufficient space in this article to deal with these developments. I have been researching them through the visual records and through early acquisitions of beadwork into European museums – see Anitra Nettleton (2012) for some of this research.

10. Other major beadwork traditions among the Tsonga, for example, are also under-researched, but certainly date back to the nineteenth century. Some were published in colour plate drawings by Muller and Snelleman (1892). See Nettleton (2007).

11. Issues of how to understand the position of women in precolonial society in Natal are complex and much discussed. A good overview of some of the arguments is given by Klopper (1992:146–167), and by Klopper and Rankin-Smith (2004) in relation to isiZulu-speakers. Redding (1993) does a valuable analysis of the effects of the imposition of hut and poll taxes on women of Xhosa groups in the Transkei and Guy (2013) addresses the same question in relation to the Zulu of Natal. As Philip Bonner puts it: ‘One issue which men of all classes and races in South Africa agreed upon was the desirability of keeping African women confined to the rural areas' (2004:94).

12. Bonner (2004:95) shows that the number of women migrant workers on the Witwatersrand was tiny by comparison with the number of men – men were more numerous even in domestic service, except in nursery duties.

13. In discussing these contexts in generalisations, there is inevitably some fudging of the issue of whether all southern African groups followed strict agnatic lineage patterns in their living arrangements. See for example Hammond-Tooke (1985) and Guy (1987). Jane Guyer's (1981) discussion of lineage and household as categories is useful for understanding their impact on African women's status. Redding (1993) also records the ways in which some women in Xhosa communities could become relatively wealthy and independent.

14. Assuming a more or less even split between men and women in African polities, and given that wealth was unevenly spread and that young men had to wait in line to obtain bridewealth, the idea that any other than a relatively small minority of men in these polities was able to have more than one wife, let alone more than two, is hardly tenable. This issue is important because we have some strange notions about divisions of labour: in a household in which there was only one wife, she would have had to do most of the agricultural work herself on the land which had been apportioned to her and her husband. Until her daughters were old enough there would not have been anyone to whom she could delegate such responsibilities.

15. The trade in beads in southern Africa dates back before the advent of European traders on the coast, having occurred between African peoples as recorded by Shaw and van Warmelo (1988), Peires (1981:97) and Guy (1975). They were traded in small quantities however, and often made up part of chiefs' regalia, as was the case of the Venda rulers' ‘beads of water’ (Stayt 1931:26–27) See also Sharma Saitowitz (1994).

16. See the account by RG Cumming, published in 1850, of his hunting and trading exploits in South Africa from 1843 onwards. He lists the goods he took on his first trip including ‘three hundred pounds of white, coral, red and bright blue beads of various sizes' as well as ‘thread, needles and buttons', i.e. everything one might need for beadwork.

17. Eugene Casalis (1965 [1861]), for example, specifically mentions returning Sotho migrants' use of their wages to acquire clothing.

18. Most famously the images in George Angas (1849) but also seen in Joseph Shooter (1857 frontis, plates III, IV). Mayr (1907) still distinguished between what he called ‘skin Zulu’ and ‘blanket Zulu’ as a means of separating two putative periods in which Zulu-speakers either used indigenous elements of clothing besides beads, or imported cloth. In fact this distinction is not tenable. Further securely dated evidence is offered in a photographic album belonging to Arthur Spring of 1865 (Oxford: Pitt-Rivers Museum, 1998.67).

19. In an extended study of nineteenth century photographs of black people, particularly in the colony of Natal and in the Eastern Cape, I have been able to identify the same, or very similar, beadwork items worn by different people in different photographs from the same studios. Where the items are exactly the same, the probability is that these were not owned by the sitting subject of the photograph. This research is still to be published, but see Nettleton (2014).

20. Some of these may well have ended up in collections deposited in museums, especially in the United Kingdom, where no differentiation between them and those made for indigenous use would have been reported. The money Cetswayo received for these items, he spent buying shawls and other things in Cape Town (Samuelson 1929:118).

21. This is the caption to one of these images in the album belonging to Arthur Spring of 1865 (note 18 above). The image in Figure 1 is undoubtedly of the same vintage as the one in the Spring album, and is one of many reproduced in a variety of forms over the next 12 years at least – it reappears in drawings made as illustrations of the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 in the Illustrated London News. See Klopper (2010) for a discussion of these hairstyles.

22. While totalising histories of beadwork such as that implied in this claim are acknowledged as being problematic, because there are too many variants in practice not only between ‘ethnicities', but within them, specific instances can be demonstrated with reference to individual objects or specific object types over a long time span.

23. This can be seen in an illustration (Fritsch 1872:fig 8) made from a photograph taken by Gustav Fritsch in 1865/6: the picture is reproduced by Dietrich and Bank (2008), but copies are also housed in a number of different archives.

24. Somerset was governor of the Cape from 1814 to 1826 and the engineer of the 1820 settlement of English emigrants. These dress restrictions have been discussed by a number of authors vis-à-vis the Natal towns (see, for example, Klopper 1992), but less fully with regard to the isiXhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, possibly because most Xhosa-speakers wore more skin clothing than their northerly Nguni relatives, and the skins were early replaced by cloth.

25. Inanda Seminary was established by ‘Mrs Edwards' (Tyler 1891). There are many other examples: one was at St Cuthbert's mission at Tsolo in Mpondomise territory (Callaway 1936).

26. Again division of labour varied from one ethnic group to another. See also Klopper (2012). Shaw and van Warmelo (1988:536) date the change to the use of cloth skirts among isiXhosa-speaking women to 1820.

27. Beinart (1982) and Peires (1981) both address the structural changes in homestead power relations in the Eastern Cape Xhosa-speaking polities caused by migrant labour, but Beinart especially, does not really consider the women's point of view.

28. The organisation of young men (and women) into regiments in the Zulu kingdom meant that young men in particular could be away from their family homesteads for long periods (Laband 2001). This system was replicated in many other polities. Among Xhosa-, Sotho-, Ndbele- and Tsonga-speakers young men would be absent from some time during their initiation into manhood, and sometimes on hunting or cattle-raiding trips, or in times of war.

29. That this is still the case is seen in the return of many urban dwellers to rural family homesteads for ceremonies involving the exchange of bridewealth, marriages, introduction of children to communities and the like.

30. Paulina Dlamini (1998:22) recounted to Revd Filter, from her experience, that beadwork with ‘requisite symbols' had to be taken by young women who were placed by the families in King Cetshwayo's isigodlo, after which they were no longer part of their paternal families.

31. Klopper's (2012) discussion of why men returned home from the mines on a regular basis does not consider these, more spiritual, elements of the question.

32. Klopper (1994:31) suggests that there is a binary operating among Eastern Cape peoples between the women who stayed at home invisibly making the beadwork that men wore publicly, but the photographic evidence suggests that women wore beadwork sometimes almost as lavish as that worn by men. This is also clearly the case for the Zulu-speakers of Natal and the Ndebele- and Tsonga-speakers of Limpopo province. The particularly white beadwork worn as a special marker by isiXhosa-speaking practitioners of healing and divination could be made by male and female ritual specialists themselves.

33. See Martens and Broster (1973) on the Xhosa: they distinguish between the various isiXhosa-speakers more carefully than other writers. Schoemann and Mertens (1975) offer some examples of regional differences in Zulu beadwork, as does Preston-Whyte and Morris (1994). Powell (1995) gives an overview of Ndebele beadwork, and Nettleton (2007) of Tsonga beadwork.

34. Alfred Duggan-Cronin whose photographs follow this kind of distinction, started out photographing people on the mines dressed in ethnic costume: this led him to explore rural areas and photograph people in their apparently ‘pristine state’. The published photographs appeared in a series called The Bantu Tribes of Southern Africa over the period 1928 to 1939. See for example Duggan-Cronin (1935).

35. Archives such as that at MuseumAfrica and at Iziko Historical Research Centre do not offer any such photographs. Some of the publicity images for mine dances from the 1930s onwards include some beadwork, but the photographic archive does suggest that beads were largely associated with rural bodies rather than urban ones.

36. See, for example the photographs by Katesa Schlosser (2004, 2006) and Alice Mertens (Mertens and Broster 1973; Schoemann and Mertens 1975).

37. Costello (1990:77) further suggests that these items were considered amongst the most desirable forms of beadwork that a woman might make for a man.

38. This image appears in Stevenson and Graham-Stewart (2000) labelled as ‘Zulu Warriors' a postcard published in 1907, but its earlier iteration, in this case housed in the MuseumAfrica archives, does not bear the inscription, and it corresponds closely to other photographs taken in the same location in the 1890s.

39. There has been a great deal of ink spilt about the meaning of such love letters. Despite recent attempts to codify the language of colour and pattern in so-called ‘Zulu’ beadwork, there is no clear syntax and no clearly established vocabulary that allows for any standard reading of any of the beadwork. All ‘meanings' were entirely contextual: see Marie-Louise Labelle (2005) for a measured rebuttal of such claims.

40. There are voluminous numbers of such group photographs, made for the postcard industry, in collections and museums in South Africa and abroad. See Virginia-Lee Webb (1992) among others.

41. Examples include gaskets from boilers that were beaded, decorated with woollen pompoms and worn as collars, beaded sunglasses, tennis racquet frames, bottles and many others: see Nettleton, Charlton and Rankin-Smith (2003).

42. They too, have come to be regarded ‘traditional’, used in excess on many items, functioning as ornaments not fasteners, their whiteness and shine referencing ancestral presence and general coolness, but also acting as indices of modernity.

43. Other forms involved the making of skirts and aprons for younger women, or for wrapping around longer skirts of married women from store-bought cloth and covering them with highly textured beadwork that was particularly favoured in the Greytown/Maphamulo districts in the 1950s (Findlay 2004), but were not based on indigenous precedents.

44. See for example Mertens and Broster (1973); Schoeman and Mertens (1975); Elliot (1970, 1986a, 1986b). In the latter Aubrey Elliott claims that the ‘origins of beadwork are uncertain’ (1986b:n.p.) and notes that the Zulu, Xhosa and Ndebele excel at its making which may explain why they were the only groups that figure in his book on Tribal Dress (1986a). The only example of this kind of book produced by a black photographer was Peter Magubane's (1998) problematically titled, and multi-authored volume Vanishing Cultures of South Africa, again arranged according to tribes, with all Xhosa-speakers lumped together in a single, unsatisfactory chapter. Interestingly, Magubane's photographs of Sotho initiates emerging from seclusion (1998:110–111) reflect very clearly the continuing impact of migrant labour and its rewards in the dress of the initiates up to the end of the century.

45. Scott (1985:29) enumerates these as including ‘false compliance’, ‘feigned ignorance’, and ‘sabotage’. The beadworkers' ability to construct garments that kind-of complied with western propriety is still seen today where young women in ‘tribal’ dress wear beaded brassieres that shield from view a part of the anatomy formerly easily and openly displayed by young black women in the rural homestead, with materials and forms that call to mind ‘tradition’, but reinvent it. In a sense this form of clothing is a ‘false compliance’ with western norms, but it also sabotages traditions in various ways.

46. That the residue of these attitudes is deep and ensnaring is clear from the conformity to the western-style suit worn by politicians, business men, lawyers and just about anyone else in the modern global world, even when the climate is not conducive to the physical comfort of the thus be-suited body.

47. A particularly important example of the invention of ceremonial costume that is completely hybrid is to be found in the uniforms used by members of the churches that derive from that founded by Isaiah Shembe. See Carol Muller (1999), Robert Papini (2002, 2004) for fuller discussions of Shembe beadwork.

48. Other photographs taken by Schlosser (2004, 2006) in Natal show how completely integrated beaded and western items had become by the middle of the twentieth century in this region,