Asking for Eyes: The Visual Voice of Southeast Africa: Selections from the Sana Foundation

African Arts, Spring, 2006 by Barbara W. Blackmun

This section demonstrated that until the late twentieth century, many women of southeastern Africa continued to use distinctive hats, clothing, and ornaments through which their ethnicity, age, and marital status could be identified. The craftsmanship of generations of these unsung women artists was especially revealed through their intricate beadwork. Colorful patterns of Zulu courtship panels communicated messages between young men and women, but their personal variation allowed for privacy of interpretation. Beaded dance staffs were constructed by Zulu adolescent girls for individually designed betrothal performances. Apronlike "front skirts" such as lighabi, isiphephethu, and ijogolo were constructed with impossibly dense rows of tiny beadwork to proclaim each stage of an Ndebele woman's life from childhood to old age. Ndebele brides wore long, white nyoga wedding trains that their mothers and aunts wove entirely of beads on threads, without cloth backing. These bridal garments contrasted sharply with multilayered isikoti wedding capes created by Zulu women, on which each brilliant layer of cotton cloth was bordered with a different beaded pattern. Xhosa wives presented their husbands, fathers, and sons with impressive ensembles of up to seventy beaded ornaments to enhance their male full-length cloth attire.

The exhibition's Personal-Social Sphere also demonstrated that the individualistic artists of southeast Africa have made imaginative use of materials for at least the past century. Over time, varieties of the distinctive disk-shaped inhloko headdress of Zulu women have been fashioned from a range of fibers that has included ochred wool, human hair, and crimson polyester thread. Throughout the region, European factory cloth, buttons, safety pins, wire, metal studs, and vinyl asbestos disks have been effectively employed in artworks, as each generation has discovered local uses for exotic imports.

Therefore, this section blended easily into the handsome presentation of the final Global Sphere, which the wall text introduced through the Xhosa proverb, "A bird builds with other birds' feathers." It was evident in this gallery that in marketing commodities internationally, creative southeast African artists have reached beyond local tradition. Their trade dolls, both old and new, could be clearly distinguished from the abstract child figures of the Ancestral-Personal sphere because representational characteristics have added to the export appeal of the dolls. Food containers offered for trade have also taken on unaccustomed European forms. One of the most graceful artworks included here was a delicate Zulu pedestal plate from Charles Newberry's Prynnsberg collection, woven of slender wires of steel and copper (Fig. 4). At San Diego State University, it was displayed next to two brightly patterned baskets created recently in plastic-coated telephone wire by Elliott Mkhize, a contemporary artist in Durban (Fig. 5). Perhaps a century ago, the woven pedestal plate was designed for secular markets far removed from southeast Africa, demonstrating that imported wire has long been an artistic medium in Zulu trading history. While extensive cultural interaction seems more visible here than elsewhere in the continent, we were reminded in this gallery that international marketing is not new to sub-Saharan cultures.