from Adornment to Art

South East African Beadwork

The DO Ubuntu Orphan Bracelet Campaign started a beading program in the Natal and Transkei regions. The  program provides employment and 100% of the profits go back to the Orphans, villages, mothers etc. 

The beaded pieces provided by this program are taken from North Nguni beadwork made by Zulu-speaking women in the Zulu kingdom and the Colony of Natal, dating back from 1850 to 1910. Little is known about beadwork from this region. "Traditionally" pieces, such as beadwork, which are not made entirely from indigenous material tend to be neglected. However efforts are being made towards sensitizing art historians, collectors and curators to the extraordinary breadth of the field and the complexity and nuances in the designs of late 19th- and early 20th centruy beadwork from south-east Africa.

Historical Perspectives *

Beads were a primary means of exchange in southern Africa prior to the large scale European colonization of the region. Beads consequently played a significant role in the ever-changing relations between earlier Arab, and later European traders and the black communities they encountered throughout the region. In the late 19th century travelers, missionaries, colonial agents also collected beadwork produced by these communities as curios and souvenirs.  Thus explaining the social and aesthetic interests of those that made them and those who acquired them.

A gradual reclassification of beadwork from "curio to artefact" happened and now a reclassification from "artefact to art" is gradually happening. In the 1970's widespread interest in the beadwork traditions emerged in Johannesburg, initially focusing on pieces easily displayed as art - such as large, flat beaded panels and blankets produced by the Ndebele women.

The Changing Fortune of Beads

After the 1780's the value of beads depreciated so much in the Eastern Cape that they lost their importance in underlining difference in status and power, caused in large part by the arrival in the area of large numbers of European traders. In 1830 the market became flooded with beads due to lifting of a trade embargo between the Cape COlony and neighbouring Zhosa-speaking communities. Xhosa-speakers working for missionaries were generally paid in beads. During this period the bead trade was so lucrative that some of these missionaries actually chose to abandon their commitment to the church, becoming traders instead. 

Further north the Zulu-speaking community living beyond the borders of the Zulu kingdom had direct access to the European traders who settled at Port Natal in the mid 1820's. By the 1830's the bead market in and around Port Natal had become so saturated that most of the local Zulu speaking communities were unwilling to barter their fresh produce in exchange for beads.

More north, in the Zulu kingdom a different situation prevailed - at least from 1850's. The Zulu king Shaka had an extreme aversion against anything like commercial traffic, and forbade it among his people. As a result the European traders had a hard time exchanging beads for food etc. when dealing with heads of ordinary homesteads. NO subject was permitted to receive or possess beads, unless received as a gift from the king. After Shaka this pattern continued, until in the 1830's when Dingane, the then zulu king with an obvious desire to display his wealth to foreigners, satisfied his desire to know where the beads came from.  Rumours had it they came from the bottom of the sea. Talking to European traders Dingane soon found out they were manufactured abroad.  Subsequently he was anxious to find out if the art of bead making could be taught to his own subject and would it be possible to 'get a beadmaker to live with him"?  

10 years went on with little changes, until gradually the king's control over beadwork depreciated. Traders streamed into the kingdom and beads nonetheless remained a highly valued commodity for some time thereafter. In 1855 it was noted: "a calf could still be bought for a cotton blanket, while a larger blanket and a couple of strings of large red beads could purchase a "very fine cattle".  Until the destruction of the Zulu kingdom in 1879 it was therefore the more affluent homesteads, with sufficient cattle to exchange for large quantities of luxury goods like beads.

Fashion versus the Symbolic use of Color

Lack of oral evidence severely hampers our understanding of the symbolic significance of 19th century bead colors. In the Zulu kingdom beads were mainly used to articulate difference in status and significant symbolic importance was attached to the use of specific colors, especially red.  In the Zulu kingdom red had various important functions: Red ochre was used to dress the tufts of hair of married women, it is the color associated with fertility. The beads were knows as umgazi i.e. blood. It is unfortunate that our ability to reconstruct the color meaning is limited. Evidence in other communities shows that the interests in colors, was of a fashionable new and unusual color kind. 

We can conclude that in various regions styles and colors were shortlived and many of them do not necessarily attest to an particular symbolic concern.

 The Creative Role of Women

The unpredictable spread of beadwork styles can be atributed to newly married woman moving away a couple of kilometers from their parent's homesteads. In some cases this lead to adoption of different motives and colors in a number of different places at a given time. Plus creative interactions between the incoming and already established probably encouraged the development of hybrid bead styles in some areas.

On the other hand in the Zulu kingdom women were not necessarily responsible for decisions on beading colors and styles.These styles were generally dictated, amply demonstrated by by the fact that at the annual first fruits ceremony - symbolizing fertility, during Dingane's reign, some girls from the king's royal enclosure "wore only white beads, others only blue other another color. It is unclear whether successive 19th century Zulu kings also controlled other aspects of beadwork design. It is likely that changes were in response to growing availability of bead and the development of new techniques among groups to the south of the Thukela river, where the creative skills of women were not constaint by royal restrictions. These changes lead to an extraordinary flowering of beadwork production in the second half fo the 19th century. 

Proud Owners in the late 20th Century

In the late 1970's, in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising of 1976 and the emergence thereafter of the Black Consciousness Movement, various student and other leaders called for a rejection of Western forms of dress. Similar statements of protest against South Africa's white minority government continued throughout the 1980's, but it was only after the unbanning of various political organizations in 1990, and the assumption of power of the African Natoinal Congress in 1994, that the country's new black elite began actively to embrace indigenous froms of dess and to adorn themselves with beadwork items similar to those worn by rural traditionalists. 

The traditional beaded pieces are often reclaimed locally and framed behind glass and displayed as art on the wall of countless politicians and business executives. These pieces of adornment have finally been transformed into pieces of art - a meaning that would have been unimaginable to their original producers and owners. 

About the DO Ubuntu Beading Project

The traditional beaded pieces offered by DO Ubuntu Orphan Bracelet Campaing are adornments made by women who learned the art of beading from their mothers and grandmothers. All pieces offered are carefully checked for accuracy and quality by local experts before export.