Tapestry, ideology and counter voices in Southern Africa during apartheid

ABSTRACT

In 1963 a tapestry-weaving project was established at Rorke’s Drift, South Africa, by left-wing Swedes. This poverty-alleviation initiative targeted rural black women affected by the National Party regime’s oppressive apartheid laws. Further centres evolved from this enterprise, including Khumalo’s Kraal Weaving Workshop in KwaZulu-Natal and Thabana li Mele in neighbouring Lesotho. It is little appreciated that tapestries from these workshops might have interrogated the government’s exclusionary racial policies. In uncovering some of the weavers’ agencies and iconographies, the author shows how perceptions of these tapestries have been shaped by apartheid-era narratives, even in contemporary scholarship. Their works are almost invariably represented as the outcome of foreign initiative, and collectivised as obedient iterations by women reconciled with their marginalised status. In a new reading the author argues that these artists not only exercised their individual agencies, but at times even targeted the enormities of apartheid. It also exposes the potentially catastrophic consequences of nationalist ideology and expediency on the tapestry domain itself. Ironically, while the authorities harassed those at Rorke’s Drift, they publicised the Centre’s achievements as a triumph of apartheid policy. Yet as the needs of the Centre and the regime were to some degree aligned, the relationship between them was complicated.

KEYWORDS:

• Tapestry
• ideology
• Southern Africa
• apartheid
• erasure

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Notes

1. Respectively, the Population Registration Act (30) of 1950, Group Areas Act (41) of 1950 and Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act (67) of 1952.

2. Their enterprise was fostered in an anti-apartheid context, in which the Goweniuses were contracted by the Svenska Kommittén för stöd åt afrikanskt konsthantverk (Swedish Committee for the Support of African Art and Craft), co-financed by the Church of Sweden Mission (CSM). It was under the aegis of the latter that the couple were given access to rural black communities. Their venture was also endorsed by the anti-apartheid coalition, Svenska Sydafrikakommittén (Swedish South Africa Committee) (SSAK).

3. This region incorporates the Zululand “reserve” (later Kwazulu “homeland”) and the former province of Natal.

4. Tapestry is a form of weaving in which short lengths of thick coloured wool are generally interlaced through alternate sets of thinner warp strands supported by a rigid loom. As colours can be assigned to selected shapes in the work, this technique lends itself to the weaving of figurative imagery.

5. In the Afrikaans original, “nie-logiese aard van primitiewe denke.”

6. In the Afrikaans original, “botsing tussen onversoenbare waardestrukture op die menslike gees toegeskryf word.”

7. However, records do suggest that some members of their Committee in Sweden were impressed by Harrania works (Gowenius 1963).

8. Popular in its day, The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich, for example, declared that “ … the Greek masters went to school with the Egyptians, and we are all pupils of the Greeks. Thus the art of Europe has a tremendous importance to us” (Gombrich 1972, 31).

9. Our interviews took place over a series of visits to Sweden, in Växjö, Arild and Hjö, on May 14–22, 1998; July 26–29, 2001; June 1–6, 2016; April 23–28, 2017 and June 4–9, 2018.

10. The South African Wool Board was an official organisation, through which white Afrikaans women could assert their influence in the weaving industry, not least by means of its sought-after wool mark.

11. For a fuller discussion of the politicising of the Swedish teachers and the role of the weavers in this, see (Hobbs 2019, 181).

12. By removing the right of Africans to own land outside the increasingly overcrowded “reserves” the authorities set aside for them, the Natives Land Act (27) of 1913 forced nearly one million black people into itineracy or serfdom on the land they lived on.

13. There is little doubt that South African agents in Stockholm were aware of the anti-apartheid activities of the Swedish Committee members like its Chairperson Signe Höjer who was a founding signatory to the SSAK. As recounted to me by numerous individuals formerly at Rorke’s Drift, police intimidated the Centre’s staff and their African Lutheran hosts, raiding their files, questioning them, and abducting Peder Gowenius.

14. Having woven hundreds of tapestries, Majozi cannot clearly remember making the image. Records suggest that Ester Nxumalo, Joyce Khosa and Elsaphina Zondi may have worked on it too.

15. The Commissioner’s decision not to close the centre might have been possible because it was located just inside the border of “white South Africa,” qualifying it, in principle, for the regime’s plan to retain a pool of black labour as a “border-industries” resource for South African industry (Lislerud 1962, unpaginated).

16. Differences in Swedish opinion on the matter are revealed in Svenson (1967) letter to Jytte Bonnier.

17. There were about 50 South African officials in Lesotho in 1969, all loyal to the South African government that sponsored many of them (Winai-Ström 1986, 89).

18. Among other sources, this statistic is noted by (Losell 1970, 16) in Utblick and the minutes of the CSM meeting in Uppsala, on February 26, 1970.

19. In “Konst från Afrika” (Art from Africa) (Liedholm 1970), her identity was withheld, probably to protect her from South African informants in Stockholm. The whereabouts of this tapestry are now unknown.

20. Sing. sefela. This term originally referred to Christian hymns but was later applied to the chanted poems of migrant labourers, performed in the first-person singular.

21. Established in 1918, the Broederbond, a secret organisation, worked to advance male Afrikaner influence in white South African life, such as government, industry, agriculture and education.

22. For a detailed account of Ndebele’s influential role, see Hobbs (2019, 85–92).

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Notes on contributors

Philippa Hobbs

Since 1993, Philippa Hobbs has authored or co-authored articles and books on marginalized artists, notably Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints (2003). In 2019 she completed a PhD at the NRF South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture, University of Johannesburg, on tapestries made by women at Rorke’s Drift. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the same institution.