The Art of the Winterveld’ Women


Re-vision - the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
(Adrienne Rich)


The discussion in this article focuses on the Mapula Embroidery Project, situated in the Winterveld. The context and reasons for the Project are explained and shifts that have taken place within the Project, are examined. Because this concerns the creative production of black South African women, the question of how black women artists have been represented, in this country, in literary terms, emerges. But, due to the focus of this article and the complexity, this issue cannot be ‘fully reviewed here, except though to consider a few points.

Not much in the way of art criticism has been published in this country to begin with, and art writing, generally has followed a more orthodox western approach. Cohn Richards2 (Deepwell 1997:73), for example, claims the current writing on art is largely ‘a relatively underdeveloped, undifferentiated discourse of criticism’.

Because of previous patriarchal educational systems, the majority of women have been excluded not only from basic learning centres, but from art education. A materially dispossessed black woman, is often not given ‘affirmation of critical thinking and writing about art’ (Hooks 1995:117). Black people who may have wriften on the art of black women in the past may have come from a privileged class location.3

False perceptions about femininity and masculinity are often seen as a reason to discourage both black and white African women from exploring themselves as literary and creative subjects. Basic needs of food, shelter and clothing become more pressing for materially dispossessed black women, compounded by ideas of gender derived from familial and cultural traditions that have not undergone growth and change.

In referring to the creative production of black people, male and female have been lumped together as ‘black art’ in such a way as to homogenise artistic and gender experiences. Statements, critical of western racism apply to the majority of South Africans, male and female. For example, David Koloane (Deepwell 1997:69—72) refers to the black community as being ‘denied the basic human right of choice as to what type of education they preferred’. But, at the same time, the experience and the perspectives that black women artists have, are subsumed under what generally applies to black men. The idea of ‘Africanness’ has also tended to refer to the work of black male artists.4

For example, E J de Jager (1992:4) writes:

Man and the human form are the focus of African art. These innate values and accents, derived from their indigenous African heritage, are strengthened and intensified by the Black artist’s contemporary experiences in his unique South African social circumstances.

Similarly, issues such as cultural infantilism, anti-intellectualism, alienation from language and indifference of institutions seem to infuse mainline art criticism (Deepwell 1997:79—83), whereas the issue of economics and problems facing black South African women artists are subsumed under ‘Black Art’ or ‘African Art’.

As a result South African black women artists, and in particular working class women, did not and, to some extent, still do not have a primary or equal voice in shaping black female aesthetics. From this it looks as if black materially dispossessed women are not meant to have a relationship to the mainstream art world. Writing on black South African women artists, therefore, demands a set of viewpoints or criticality different from black and white male South African artists and white South African female artists.

I invite the reader to journey to a stretch of land, dominated by dry earth, transience, fragility, survival, goats and courage. It is here where the Mapula women gather each week to tell their stories with coloured thread.

The Mapula Embroidery Project, based at the Sisters of Mercy,5 Nthathe Adult Education Centre, is situated about forty-five kilometers north west of Pretoria. The area was first known as ‘Jackson’ and the ‘Jackson farm’. It got the name Winterveld from its being grazing land for cattle during the dry winter season. Under the Smuts government, the land was divided into smallholdings.6 Prior to 1994, places such as the Winterveld, were marginalised. However, in a changing society, the term marginal 7 becomes relative. What may be marginal one day may become a central point of focus the next, and vice versa.

The Winterveld community is a diaspora of people. There are the local people who have lived there for many years, and those who were removed by force from ‘white’ South Africa, in the sixties and seventies. According to a recent study by Maxine Reitzes and Sivuyile Bam (1996),8 another ‘flow of “outsiders” ‘(Reitzes and Bam 1996:10) came from Bophuthatswana. Not regarded as fully- fledged Tswanas, these people were rejected by the Bophuthatswana government. Other groups came, in the early seventies, from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, mainly to get jobs so they could take money home.9 Due to their having spent most of their lives away from home and the conflict in Mozambique, these people could not quality for pensions in their home countries and therefore stayed on in the Winterveld.

Prior to 1994, these different groups lived in relative harmony. Both immigrants - grigambas, makwerekwere - and the locals considered themselves as residents of the Winterveld (Reitzes and Barn 1996). They participated in local politics and many were encouraged to vote in the 1994 elections. However, after the elections, the community became dissatisfied and restless. Reitzes and Barn (1996:15) state: the frustration of their efforts to achieve representation of interests which they perceive themselves as holding in common with other individuals and groups; and the unkept promises of party and government officials who previously assured them of ‘insider’ status; all serve to deny them engagement with the state.

The resultant negative effects of this situation have, in the past few years, undermined freedom of speech and movement, making these people, especially women and children more vulnerable and unable to participate in civil society. According to recent research, since the elections differences between the newcomers and the locals have become more marked. Disputes arise between landowners and tenants and taxi violence flares up occasionally. The recent volatility though, according to some, may not be any different to anywhere else in the country at this particular time. Due to the policies of the previous South African government and the now-defunct Bophuthatswana government, the question of the ‘unwanted’ people, especially those more vulnerable to violence, remains. For many, the situation has not changed, people are still poor and uncared for.

On the one hand, the compacting of different cultures into one area can lead to destabilisation, compounded by false expectations and internal disputes. On the other, the diversity can generate a cross-current of energy, weaving a vibrant social tapestry and making for rich reservoirs of creativity and fresh experience. It is with this later, more positive perspective, influenced by my interaction with the Mapula women, that I ap proach this article on the Mapula Embroidery Project.

Craft community10 projects in southern Africa are intended to address situations of social breakdowns, oppression and helplessness among marginalised women. The craft projects, many of which began in the seventies, were an attempt to empower black women under apartheid. At this time black women were discriminated against from within and outside their own culture, due to apartheid. ‘On a broader level, they have hardly been recognised as creative productive forces in society, they are deprived of social awareness, education, participation in political activities and decision-making at every level’ (Morrison 1987:12—28).

In contemporary thinking and in post-apartheid South Africa, values are undergoing change. The emphasis placed on community projects, as a democratisation of the arts, indicates the degree to which the majority of people have been alienated and excluded from the mainstream cultural field. The Ministry for Arts and Culture is committed to ‘ensuring that women are central’ (Mabandla 1996:11) and that women’s groups will receive attention. In the new Constitution women’s economic independence is promoted through encouraging self-initiative and creativity, But the transformation process can be slow. In a still predominantly sexist society, women largely remain a marginalised group. In areas such as the Winterveld, women have less access to jobs, training, property and resources. These women struggle to reconcile activities outside the home with traditional roles and have little or no voice beyond the household. In marginalised regions, preference is often given to educating sons (Sadik 17 1995:26). Struggling to make ends meet therefore becomes doubly worse for these women.

A changing political climate, together with active parlicipation regarding the accessibility and revisioning of arts and culture, has resulted in increased interaction between institutional and popular or grassroots arts. The White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (1996:26) actively promotes access to arts, culture and training ‘to develop individual talents and skills through the transformation of arts education within the formal school system and the development and extension of community- based arts education structures’. This has led to an increasing blurring of dominant ‘high’ art11 and ‘oppositional’ cultures (Van Robbroeck 1992:51), and to a depolarisation of ‘low’ and ‘high’ art.

In 1991, the Soroptomists International Pretoria, 12 gave support to the idea of a community embroidery project, initiated by Karin Skawran, herself a Soroptimist. Reasons for the project centred around ideas of economic enfranchisement and creative development for women living in the Winterveld. Because of the relative uniqueness of the Project, (explained in the course of this article), and the trial and error of breaking ground, the initial stages presented a mixture of attitudes and perceptions. The women themselves saw and continue to see the Project purely as a means to feed, clothe and educate their children. Due to the transient nature of life in the Winterveld, men are often away looking for jobs in the city, leaving the women behind to run households and be bread-winners. For some of the women, the embroideries earn supplementary money but for many they are the sole source of income. For the Mapula embroiderers, then, the Project is first and foremost a means of economic survival.

Initially, for some of the Soroptomists, to teach the women was seen more as a form of cultural ‘upliftment’, coalescing with the Western notion of development.13 Because of material and contextual differences, intentions can and do easily collapse into ‘culturally biased’ ones. These do not reflect the pragmatic reasons for the work, experienced by those directly involved in the running of the Project or the women themselves. However, these tendencies, pertaining primarily to the initial stages of the Project, have since been far out-weighed by many redeeming aspects. Patronising aspects of the Project are outweighed by its character as a self-help scheme in which self-sufficiency is encouraged.

The name, Mapula, chosen by the women, means ‘Rain Goddess’ or ‘mother of rain’ and is derived from the mythology of the region itself. It signifies a sense of community often intrinsic to matriarchal indigenous traditions. One of the intentions of the Project is to hone in on whatever local skills the women can bring to it. While some of the women already had sewing and embroidery skills imparted by their mothers and grandmothers, many had to be taught.14

In the Mapula embroideries, emphasis on the local is found in some of the recurring images. These range from everyday street scenes, goats and shrubbery, to local markets, houses and self portraits (1). There are some that favour more traditional images, such as women carrying bundles of wood, animals, men working the fields, or traditional houses. Local topics and pertinent national events are popular, such as the Bafana Bafana soccer team; images of Mandela, De Klerk and the Union Buildings, especially as they appeared in 1994 (2). During the mad-cow disease scare, an image predominating was the ‘cow of London’ (3).

1 Cushion covers, left: Rossinah Maepa (drawn by Antoinette du Plessis) (1994).
Embroidery on cloth,
40 x 40 cm.
Private Collection.

2 Polinah Dibakwane (1995).
Embroidery on cloth, 40 x 40 cm.
Private Collection.

3 Selinah Makwana, Cow of London (1998).
Embroidery on cloth,
90 x 136 cm.
Private Collection.

The emphasis on ‘current experience’, as opposed to something distant, is evoked in Selinah Makwana’s recommendation inscribed in her work, ‘Be proud of your work’. In other words do not think someone else’s paradigm is better, just because it comes from a distant dominant source. This inability, together with Western ideas of ‘development’,15 often denies the wealth of what is already there. Makwana’s embroidered text demonstrates an attempt to explore precisely the wealth in the local backyard.

Not only because of the legacy of apartheid have women been divided, but in artistic, economic and class structures, divisions between privileged and underprivileged women are linked to eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Simone de Beauvoir (1988:19) states that women ‘live dispersed among males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men — fathers or husbands — more firmly than they are to other women’. An example of this dispersion of women would be the homogenising and sometimes coercive cultural and class differences applied to black women living in marginal and disenfranchised areas, such as the Winterveld, and the black and white enfranchised women living in an over- technologically developed suburbia.

The Mapula Embroidery Project began through the efforts of both academically trained women and the local women of the Winterveld, The academically trained women brought their organisational skills, as well as artistic abilities to the group.

Janetje van der Merwe, previously involved in an embroidery project in Giyani, known as ‘Chivirika’ (begun by Jameson Maluleke in 1986), gives her expertise in the area of marketing. As marketing co-ordinator, she constantly evaluates the work produced, keeps a check on the marketability and understands the process of making an embroidered product, on the one hand, and then selling it, on the other. She knows what sells and what doesn’t. The trained fine artists give their input, while simultaneously taking care to allow the work to emerge spontaneously (4). Organiser, Janetje van der Merwe, speaks of the initial stages of the Project: ‘We jealously guarded the women’s creativity against any imposing interference’. 17 She also remarks that as soon as the women realised they could generate income from their own creative resources, the outpouring of the ingenious and unique products began, developing into what the works are today. Antoinette du Plessis, a trained fine artist, sketches out some of the images used by the women. Her concern has been to place the embroidered product in the field of contemporary African visual production, keeping in mind the marketability, saleability - keeping the product viable in a competitive and expanding market (Interview 1998).

Their own life skills and creativity were what the local women brought to the Project. The teaching skills of local women, such as Emily Maluleka or ‘Mapula’, as she is known to the women, are instrumental in the running of the group. Mapula’s main concern for the group is equality: the needs of every one of the seventy-odd members are met and sustained. She speaks of her job as helping those who can’t understand the drawings, showing the women how to 5 Embroiderers Beauty and Julia Makwana, members of the new break-away group. 4 Janetje van der Merwe, co-ordinator, marketer and the driving force behind the Project, on the left. Antoinette du Plessis, involved with the Project since its inception, sketches preliminary motifs. The input of different skills and experlise are essential to the life force of the Project. embroider, helping those to budget the money, to use the machines and to sort out their problems (Interview 1998).

Collaborative or communal aesthetics involves a sharing of the cost of materials, resources and equipment. Through this interaction, the necessity for travelling the distance between place of production and urban markets is circumvented. Marketing and distribution of the work are made easier and more efficient than if each individual were to go to town, The women involved with the project organise the buying..and selling of the works. Collaborative aesthetics and the working together of ‘different’ women not only challenge the notion of ‘art’ but the artificially created divisions of class and culture.18

In rural projects,19 many women are aware of the difficulties of economic survival and therefore become engaged in re-visioning structures, skills and ways of working together. Community projects of southern Africa therefore mean women working together as a means of economic survival. Further, a post- apartheid society has opened the way forward for more open interaction between black and white, privileged and underprivileged women. In the Mapula Embroidery Project, women are working together because of political and social change in the country and to meet economic needs. This makes the involvement of women from different contexts and areas of expertise, an integral ingredient.

Working together though, is not always harmonious. Recently a small group of women felt constricted by the running of the group. Not all the women embroider at the same pace, for instance. These particular women like to embroider full time, often late into the night, having to rely on candlelight or kerosene. Disputes arose between these women and ‘Mapula’. These differences, together with shifts in market trends, resulted in the formation of a smaller group called ‘Group Ten’.

This break-away group began making the larger and fuller works, already referred to as ‘tablecloths’ (5). Personal imagery and stories began to surface. For example, Rossinah Maepa’s favourite image of a house became a house within a house and formed part of a whole seething landscape of organic life. Selinah Makwana has used the image of a double-headed fish from the commemorative Khanga cloths. This motif dominates the cloth,

6 Selinah and her work at the graduation ceremony last year. Selinah Makwana. Double-Headed Fish (1998). Embroidery on cloth, 95 x 137 cm.

while allowing for a complex visual arrangement in which fantasy and reality interweave around it (6). This break-away group now operates from home. For marketing co-ordinator, Janetje, this may mean a detour, yet the enthusiasm and creativity of this small group is an inspiration to all involved. The confidence and risk taking on the part of these women, to start their own group, is an occurrence rarely recorded in the history of this country, let alone in the field of creative textile production. The Project therefore expands to embrace entrepreneurial spirit and individual expression but, at the same time, the function of the organisers is to see that the needs of the group as a whole do not come second place. With inventive imagery and a new ‘language’ emerging, a whole new direction is evolving in the aesthetics of the group.

Shifts between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art are manifest in the Project. Initially the Mapula embroideries, were sold primarily in an urban market context. They are exhibited, along with other hand crafted textile community projects such as Kaross, Chivirika, Twananani and Pakhamani, at major Craft galleries such as at the Durban African Art Center and at the FNB Vita Craft Now Exhibition (they won the group merit award in 1997), Not intended to enter a mainstream art context, none the less, the embroidered cloths have become part of permanent art collections and have been part of such exhibitions as Embroidered Impressions Exhibition (4 November-10 December 1995), held at the Pretoria Art Museum, As part of this exhibition they were exhibited in 1997 in Naxos, Greece. Recently, six large ‘tablecloths’ have formed part of an international exhibition, titled Women’s Voice.2°

Entering the international art market is not without problems for the community Project. In the Project, the needs of each member is as important as the next. Can a community Project therefore be represented by selecting only a few works? Should one member of the Project become elevated above the others? Communal aesthetics, comprising of collaboration, inclusivity, survival economics and functionalism operate very differently to that of the European art market and may be forced to fit an international mould, often dominated by a Euro-American paradigm of art. The entry of locally grown art projects and female aesthetics, into an international context, needs to be thoroughly examined. At the moment support and sponsoring of the arts in South Africa is an opportunity to give back and to give opportunities to artists from Africa as opposed to the usual Asian, European and American artists. International exposure can broaden the experience for black and white women artists but they also run the risk of being tapered to fit a romantic picture of rainbowism. 21

The Mapula embroideries are generally sold under their group name. Individual names, written on paper, are attached to the embroidered cloth purely for payment purposes. However, names do appear on many of the cloths and, in the recent creative innovations, the name of the maker is often inscribed boldly in between or as part of the embroidered images (7). In the traditional Tsonga minceka, the maker also often names herself22 (Becker 1995:50). The name plays with the tensions between the individual and the group. Therefore collaboration does not happen on each and every level of the Project.

7 Inscribing names into the ‘text’ (detail). Selinah Makwana, Coke is it (1997).
Embroidery on cloth.
95 x 137 cm.
Private Collection.

8 Irene Methae, 1998.
Embroidery on cloth,
100 x 100 cm.

In this Project there is more openness to initiatives taken by the women and the participatory atmosphere links to other craft community projects in the norhtern Transvaal such as in the Twananani and Tiakeni groups. This approach can go back to the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre of the sixties and seventies in which Allina Ndebele started as an interpreter for the white Swedish initiators, Peder and Ulla Gowenius, but soon became a master weaver, training others (Sack 1989:20).

While market demands are met, the creative aspect of the Project is stressed, maintaining freshness, as well as the character of the embroidery group. Antoinette du Plessis states, ‘in order for the imagery to remain fresh and to preserve a flow of experimentation, it is essential to balance repetition and innovation’. Often a theme or image catches on in the group - something the women identify with and want to embroider (Janetje van der Merwe: interview 1998). An important task of the organisers is to maintain the delicate balance between marketability and creativity. Well-known motifs are sure sellers, but very often the same customers buy again and again, therefore a measure of innovation is vital. Also the products of Mapula lend themselves to the ‘collector’s urge’ or to a decorative purpose, where more than one item is displayed (Antoinette Du Plessis: interview 1998). The level of creativity differs to other community Projects. For example, the images and designs of Chivirika and Kaross keep within easily defineable boundaries and are more repetitious. Irma van Rooyen of the Kaross Workers, employs fifteen women to embroider on a part-time basis (van deçMerwe 1995:8) and is therefore run more like a business. In the Tsonga Textiles employees earn a fixed wage (Amato 1997:13). In contrast, a significant aspect of the Mapula Project is that new ideas and practices are continually being tried and evaluated,23 resulting in dynamic shifts taking place.

Another aspect of the work is that the image is always hand produced. It is created through reproductive modes of embroidery, repetition, copy and eclecticism. In one work (8), for example, a stencil was used to outline the two sets of rhino and horses. The two sets of trees have also been repeated. It is only the different coloured threads and interweaving patterns that set up a dialogue between the idea of a copied and an authentic image. Easy consumable images of an idyllic arcadia untouched by Western influence, occupied by noble savages and beasts, made purely for the tourist trade, evoke the African mystique. The conception of what African is, becomes distorted and ‘Africa’ remains un-i changed, fixed in the past. The unchanging picture fitted into popular colonial images of the domestic and tribal life of South African ‘natives’, helping to preserve it unchallenged. In the art of black South Africans, there was an attempt to keep artists ‘unspoilt’ by Western influence. The concept of the authentic image carried a prescriptiveness and a desire to keep the artist ‘tribal’ and untainted by outside influence ... .

The desire to keep artists ‘unspoilt’ is a recurring theme throughout the history of the art of black South Africans (Sack 1988:10—li), In this context, African artefacts, seen as authentic, ‘evoked a sense of the traditional’. They were therefore treated as a form of ‘native art or craft’ (Sack 1988:12). In other words, the whites had a history and the history of art; the blacks had a timeless tradition (Hillebrand 1990:9) and more specifically black women beaders, weavers, pot makers or painters. A pan-African narrative and the tendency to read ‘African’ into all the works of black women artists, becomes an essentialist practice.

But in assessing the art of black South African women, how much neglected material should be re-contextualised as belonging to tribal or African heritage. On the one hand, ‘Africanism’ idealises. On the other, it could provide a challenge, oppositional or rejection of white male supremacy and Western art paradigms. Rediscovering indigenous traditions means not only rewriting art history but black history. Africanisation, linked to Black Consciousness, is part of resistance culture and liberation. John Picton, for example, strongly associates Africa and textile production (1995:11). He claims it is ‘impossible to consider life and art in Africa in the absence of textiles’ (Picton 1995:11). Embroidery though, in Africa, evaluated by Picton (1998:187) is more of an additional ornament to weaving. It comes from Islamic people in West Africa and partly from indigenous sources such as in embellishments found in Hausaland (Picton 1998:187— 189). Most of this embroidery is done by men.24 In much African cloth production, the meaning of cloth is often tied heavily to spiritual and social status and identity.25

In contrast, cloth community Projects, in southern Africa, primarily aimed at empowering black women, clearly differ in intent and context to textile production done in the rest of Africa. Even though embroidery, in the rest of Africa, is rarely done by one person, this does not resemble the collaboration between black and white women, found in the Mapula Embroidery Project of the Winterveld. In the rest of Africa, Africans are generally black people. Africans, in a South African context, are black and white. Further, given the number of cloth-related community projects, in southern Africa, embroidery cannot exactly be considered as an ‘addition’, as appears to be the case in the rest of Africa. It is along these lines that the ‘African’ frame of reference, often prescribed for black South African artists, should be questioned.

In his view of African textiles, John Picton (1995:11) points out that there is no ‘traditional’ essential African practice. ‘Texere’ is to weave and the idea of context alludes to social environment, Therefore ‘Africa’ as context implies a sense of ‘configuring the narrative within temporal and social contexts that imply process and entail at least the possibilities of development’ (Picton 1995:11). At the same time, while there can be no essential Africanisation of embroidery and textile production, the huge impact textiles have had in the visual arts of Africa, cannot be denied. African textile production has served both as aesthetic and functional object. Cloth is used as clothing, for warmth as in the kikoyl and blankets, as decoration, status and identity, seen in commemorative cloths, flags of Ghana and in the colourful Tsonga minceka. Often practical use and decoration is combined. In the Mapula project the embroideries have been used in clothing, to make cushion covers, table mats and the larger ‘tablecloths’. These also offer the makers a wider creative choice.

Smaller scale items are the ‘bread and butter’ of the group while the larger cloths allow for a more intense creative engagement, resulting in a flow of spontaneous story telling over the textile surface. Within the range of embroideries, various combinations of decorative and creative expression are manifest. Sometimes the work leans towards the decorative, at other times — in particular in the case of the ‘tablecloths’ - a more profound sense of creativity comes to the fore. Whatever the case, the wide range of uses and combination of the aesthetic and function, problematise the modernist and romantic ideas of art and Artist.

The production process of the Mapula embroideries, the outcome of combined input, results in an eclectic spread of imagery. Local, national and personalised narratives reveal an awareness of social and cultural change. In the tracing out of imagery, for example, family members are used and even help with embroidering. There are some embroiderers who do draw but for the most part the women rely on others for drawing. Once the images have been embroidered, the original sketch is completely transformed and bears no resemblance to the original source material. Images from wild life magazines, colouring books and art books are brought to the Project and used as reference. Successful embroidered images are also referred to again and again.

The mixed or eclectic approach gives the embroideries mobility to operate in both art and craft contexts. The mixture can be seen in the cultural make up of the Winterveld itself. It is neither urban nor rural. The women come into town to sell their work and buy. They live a consumerist life, subject to the same economic shifts as everyone else (Antoinette du Plessis, interview 1998). The desires of women in Wintenield are for basic essentials lLke running water, electricity, clothing, food, transport and schooling for their children.

The more popular images in the Mapula works are birds, crocodiles, monkeys, fish, trees and leaves. These are associated with traditional African imagery. But over the years stranger images have cropped up, including Western comic heroes, such as Captain Hook placed in local Winterveld setting, a rabbit in a speedboat and a mermaid with a transistor radio. Images of nature and technological gadgets interweave in unexpected juxtapositions that resist an essentialising reading of authentic Africa. Houses, wild life, urban scenery, angels and fragments of banal domestic life, such as washing-lines and vacuum cleaners, combine in kaleidoscopic patterns, mythical animals roam local street, angels sit on rooftops, a baby peers upside down at life.

Furthermore, traditional Western images of a religious nature,26 such as the crucifixion, saints and angels, are juxtaposed with traditional African animals and local themes. This is seen in the tablecloth work by Selinah Makwana (9)27 in which she depicts a yellow Christ on the cross, reminiscent of Gauguin’s The Yellow Christ(1889),28 supported by two angels holding jugs to catch the stream of blood. The assimilation of Western traditional art images into textile traditions and communal aesthetics is demonstrated here. Accompanying these traditional, authentic references are mass media images of a couple, limbs intertwined, sipping coke from straws in a bottle, next to the commercial catch phrase. ‘Coke is it’. In another work, the maker inscribes ‘J C le Roux’, an obvious reference to a local champagne. An awareness of tradition itself as changing and of the influence of new technologies become part and parcel of the work.

10 Beauty Makwana, Clean the kitchen (1998).
Embroidery on cloth,
112 x 107 cm.

9 Selinah Makwana, Coke is it(1997).
Embroidery on cloth,
95 x 137 cm.
Private Collection.

Makwana’s narrative includes an old-fashioned car and an old woman bent over double, hobbling on a stick. She inscribes her own name on the work and has the phrase, ‘I like Jesus’ embroidered across the cloth, as if it were its title. The verbal cliché contrasts with and highlights the spontaneity of the images, while simultaneously revealing cultural and social awareness. Makwana also breaks with the traditional Mapula cushion-sized, black29 cloth, by selecting, in this case, a larger, white format. The emphasis on detail and the careful sewing of seams and edges reflects traditional textile ideals and challenges directly perceptions that non-Western sewing and crafts are raw and unrefined.

The openness to all dimensions of life — sometimes bizarre - prevent the repetition of only certain kinds of images, but at the same time, allow repeated motifs to be reworked with ever-renewed spontaneity and vitality.

The eclecticism or mixture presents a complex picture. Recognising some of the images as Western might be considered ‘eurocentric’. The mix might also imply - ‘a merger of traditions’ (Van Robbroeck 1993:50), in which African culture, suspended between tradition and Western modernity, between rural and urban and between past and present, becomes an unequal party. In the present post- apartheid South Africa, the mixed picture is likely to be associated with rainbowism. And equally unacceptable is categorising South African artists into either African or Western parameters.

In looking at the Mapula embroideries, the mixture, for example, seen in Selinah Makwana’s religious and traditional imagery infuses the authentic with local knowledges and perspectives. This eclecticism, combined with bold, colourful imagery, collaboration and hand production, demonstrate an all-encompassing creative process which cannot be the same as the ‘unchanging’ picture of ‘Africa’. Nor can the eclecticism of the cloths be aligned to the avant-garde modernist tradition and the notion of the Individual Artist. More relevant though would be the idea that black women artists are engaging with Western tradition as a way to play with, control and shape ‘images of whiteness’ (Hooks 1995:167). Black artists today, states David Koloane (1997:70) are expected not to assimilate Western influence. They are expected to make something ‘African’.

The issue of a female syntax or reading becomes equally relevant in the Mapula embroideries, A female syntax means for women to speak a language that is not conditioned by social convention and dominated by the universal paradigm, Man. This, according to Luce Irigaray (1985:134—135), is also where the difference between subject and object collapses: a ‘speaking-among- women’ or a ‘between women’ culture occurs. Female derived artistic traditions can be a reaction to the oppressive condition of the Individual Artist, a paradigm almost exclusive to the modern white Western male artist, and is a positive critique of it. These practices can powerfully express women’s experience and, as Luce Irigaray puts it, female ‘economies’. Adrienne Rich (Ostriker 1986:235) clarifies the revisioning of women’s writing, but her statement is equally pertinent to art making: Re-vision - the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction — is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of suriival.

The practice of ‘different’ women collaborating in the Mapula Project could be considered as a feminist strategy and as a positive interaction between differences. Reproductive and gender experiences offer women artists a specific tradition to work in and at the same time, a female centred/decentred language can resist patriarchal conceptions of identity. Many elements of their work, could suggest a reading ‘through’ the image, as concurrent with their own experiences as women. A phase of the Project emphasised centralised motifs. These often took the form of a tree or animal enclosed within a decorative border. Centralised images were seen by some early feminists as representing the female body. Images of transformation, a principle often associated with the feminine, would support the idea even more. In the Mapula works these are manifest in images of nature and earth’s cycles of growth, decay and rebirth. Water, stars, spirals and colourful energy patterns, contrasted against the black cloth, further suggest a female reading. However, the decorative border was more or less a prescribed format and therefore did not evolve spontaneously. In the same way, adaptations of the border and its eventual removal from recent embroideries was also a conscious move (du Plessis). This aspect would indicate that the centralised format, although relative to a female aesthetic, would not be innate to it, or a natural given.

At first glance images of wild animals, trees and plants may well evoke the feeling of the exotic ‘garden’, innate to the work of black women and a popular colonial theme. It also refers to the ‘first Eden’, or the ‘garden of God’ and fuses with a prelapsarian state in which wild plants, animals and human beings are harmoniously interrelated, In Beauty Makwana’s cloth, however, in the middle of a garden, a house emerges (10), amidst a monkey, cow, birds, spirals and stars. A pair of lovers embrace, not stripped bare as in the garden of Eden, but in a large house inhabited by other people in which a woman is using a very specific vacuum cleaner - an ‘Electrolux’. References to domestic housework, such as cleaning, washing and hanging up clothes are in direct contrast to the romanticised garden theme. Housework is the most deadening form of work. It is an endless cycle of cleaning done in service to the family. In the gender construct, Woman, these activities are regarded as natural extensions of all women and are confused with mothering, caring and emotional capacities. Woman are associated with these functions, while men are aligned with capacties for action in an alienated, cultural external world. The real production of women is concealed in the process of gender construction, denying women their position as active historical subjects. Housework, ironically, is often the only employment available to the women of Winterveld. Many work as domestics in nearby urban areas in the houses of more privileged women.

From a contemporary feminist view, the full range of both natural and gender experiences is considered as part of female experience. Advocates of this view, Parker and Pollock (1987:261) state:

All feminist strategies aim to transform women’s relation to art practice. They are based on assertions that woman is no longer the mere object of art but its producing subject, and is so as a woman. This could take the form of practices which claimed to express an essential female creativity. It can also imply that within a sexually differentiating society all our experiences are shaped more or less by socially determined gender positions.

In Beauty Makwana’s cloth, experiences derived both from myth and a growing awareness of social and gender constructs, infuse the work. These are seen in the eclectic use of figures, the housewife and consumer, street-wise women and mothers. It would be possible therefore to consider some of the works as feminist, yet the eclecticism resists an innately paradigmatic female syntax. Another point to bear in mind, is that the Mapula women’s main intention is to sell their embroideries. They do not intend to enter into a serious art discourse or to consciously set out to uncover a female aesthetic. New directions of the Mapula cloths as a whole, although not consciously intended, appear to manifest a more open, richer articulation of women’s experiences, both as embodied, mythic subjects and as Woman, the construct. Through mixing traditions the cloths have shifted to a more complex vision. The later cloths have also taken place without the assistance from formally trained artists. The Mapula Project works, sold on local and overseas markets, can no longer serve as emblems or symbols of a primitive tradition, re-endorsing ideal and romantic pictures of an unchanging ‘Africa’. In their topical and local themes and events, these dynamic embroideries depict the images of a changing society. Although art made by black South African women and the relationship to art criticism remain largely unexplored in terms of academic writing, the above discussion may be part of a shift in the changing nature of intellectualism, At the same time, it may serve the ever changing needs of the community.



NOTES

1 The geographical place in the title suggests a specific context and does not intend an aesthetic common to all the women who live in the Winterveld, of which there may be thousands.

Cohn Richards is a local art critic and artist. According to Bell Hooks (1995:109) black Americans who do write on black American female artists, are often privileged themselves and can be as hierachical as some of their white American counterparts.

4 Ten percent of artists mentioned in E J de Jager’s Images of Man (1992) are women. 5 A Catholic mission.

6 As it was one of the few pieces of land owned by black people under apartheid, it became a significant safe haven for them, prior to 1994 (Reitzes and Barn 1996:10).

7 If disenfranchisement is a mainline issue, previous marginalised areas would become mainline, in turn making urban space, marginal. ‘Marginal’ is a relative term, shifting both edge and centre areas. It may refer to any group of people, including white males, who have been systematically denied access to resources. In post-apartheid spaces previously marginalised areas are beginning to establish their own centres. Previously marginalised areas have been ‘homelands,’ ‘townships’ and semi-rural areas.

8 A project for the Centre for Policy Studies, an independent research institution. cps@wn.apc.org.

9 Some ex-Zimbabwians were salt miners and the Mozambicans worked on platinum mines in Rustenburg.

10 There are, according to van Robbroeck (de Arte specifically those of the women embroiderers in the Winterveld. 23 1996:49—57) a variety of definitions of the term ‘community’. Most of these describe the activities undertaken while missing the political ideology underpinning community arts. She states there are no two community centres the same but irrespective of the individual differences, they all take democratisation of the arts as their starting point. Community arts offer an alternative approach to art but is not a complete reformation of traditional Western art practices. Community arts are generally more informal and have a broader difinition of what art is, therefore being more inclusive than mainstream culture. Mainstream culture is that which is fashioned on traditional Western art practices and paradigm of the Individual Artist.

11 ‘High art’, defined by Borzello (van Robbroeck 1992:56), may be that which includes ‘old masters, contemporary art and everything contained in the phrase “arts of the heritage”’. ‘Popular’ arts include environmental and community arts, crafts and amateur art.

12 The Soroptomist organisation continues to lend financial support to the Mapula Project when it comes to gross expenditure for machines, irons or training for members.

13 In Western style development those living in so- called marginalised areas are perceived as ‘poor’ and therefore in need of improvement. Instead of being seen purely as a material lack poverty is perceived, in the Western notion of development, as a ‘culturally biased project’ (Shiva 1990:197). This aftitude means a rejection of what resources are already present and reflected in colonialism.

14 Embroidery in the region can be indirectly linked to the embroidery found on the local minceka of the Tsonga-speaking women of Northern Province.

15 Conceived as the accumulation and harnessing of indigenous resources, local knowledges and natural economies, ‘development’ is a post- colonial project derived from Western based ideas of progress and civilisation.

16 She too is a member of the Soroptomist Society, Pretoria.

17 By ‘imposing interference’ she means requiring the women to produce craft stereotypes like ‘boere baroque’, the ‘Biggie Best’ ideal and colonial craft clichés.

18 A capitalist mode of production exists in the permanent division of labour, between one who controls and does not produce and one who produces but does not control.

19 For example, Tiakeni and Twananani Textiles and Chivirika.

20 The Women’s Voice Exhibition is sponsored by Daimler Benz and tours Germany for a year.

21 Part of post-apartheid discourse manifested by falsely coloured pictures of collective cultural fusion.

22 In the embroideries of a community project, Shangaan Motifs, the desiner Diana Mabunda includes her name as part of the design.

23 This aspect distinguishes the Mapula group from most other textile-based Projects, where often the main emphasis is on an easily consumable product.

24 There are apparently the rare cases, in the muslim African context, when men have embroidered women’s clothing (Picton 1989:192).

25 For example, red, worn in Benin ceremonial dress, signifies anger, blood, fire and wards of evil (Picton 1989:11).

26 Partly due to the influence of the Sisters of Mercy who provide the venue for the Project.

27 Selinah Makwana, (1997). Embroidery on cloth, 95 x 137 cm. Private Collection.

28 Paul Gauguin, The Yellow Christ (1998). Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm. Buffalo, New York, AIbright-Knox Art Gallery (Werner 1967, fig 6).

29 The choice of black cloth has mostly been market related, as other colours have not sold as well. There are exceptions though.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amato, H 1997. Women’s art in The villages of the Northern Province. Unpublished document. UN ISA.

Arnold, M 1996. Women and art in South Africa. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Beauvoir, de S 1988. The second sex. Translated by H M Parshley. Great Britain: Picador.

Becker, P 1995. Clothing and Identity in Southern Africa in The art of African textiles technology tradition & lurex by J Picton. London: Lund Humphries: 49—50.

Deepwell, K (ed). 1997. Art criticism and Africa. London: Saffron Books.

Hillebrand, M (ed). 1990. Art in Perspective Southern Nguni. Port Elizabeth: King George VI Art Gallery. (Catalogue for exhibition in 1990).

Hooks, B 1995. Art on my mind. Visual politics. New York: New Press.

Irigaray, L 1985. Speculum of The other woman. New York: Cornell University Press.

Koloane, D 1997. Art criticism for whom’? in Art criticism and Africa, edited by K Deepwell. London: Saffron Books pp 69—72.

Mabandla, B 1996 in White paper on arts, culture and heritage. Pretoria: Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology.

Moffat, R 1942. Missionary labours and scenes in Southern Africa. Engravings by G Baxter. London: J Snow & Paternoster Row.

Morrison, C 1987. The craft of rural black women with specific reference to the Tiakini and Twananani Organisations. de Arte 35, April: 12—28.

Parker, Rand Pollock, G (eds & intro). 1987. Framing feminism. London: Pandora Press. Picton, J (ed). 1995, The art of African textiles: technology, tradition and lurex. London. (Catalogue for exhibition held at Barbican Art Gallery, 21 September 1995-10 December 1995.)

Picton, J & Mack, J 1989. African textiles. London: British Museum Press.

Reitzes, M and Barn, S (assisted by Paul Thulare) 1996. One foot in, one foot out. Immigrants and civil society in the Winterveld. Research report no 51. The Centre for Policy Studies, Gauteng, South Africa.

Richards, C 1997. Peripheral vision: speculations on art criticism in South Africa in Art criticism and Africa, edited by K Deepwell. London: Saffron Books pp 73—87.

Sack, S 1989. The neglected tradition: Towards a new history of South African art (1930—1988). Johannesburg. (Catalogue for an exhibition held at Johannesburg Art Gallery, 23 November 1988 to 8 January 1989.)

Sadik, N 1995. Population and Empowerment in The right to hope. (Catalogue) Great Britain: Earthscan Publications Ltd.

Shiva, V 1990. Development as a new project of Western patriachy, in Reweaving the world. The emergence of eco feminism, ed by I

Diamond and G F Orenstein. San Francisco: Sierra Club: 189—200.

Van der Merwe, J & Offringa, D 1995. Embroidered Impressions. Pretoria: Pretoria Art Museum. (Catalogue for exhibition held at Pretoria Art Museum, 4 November to 10 December 1995).

Van Robbroeck, L 1992. The ideology of community arts. de Arte 46, Sept: 49-57. White paper on arts, culture and technology, 1996. Pretoria. Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technolgoy.

Interviews

du Plessis, A 1998 Maluleka, E 1998 van der Merwe, J 1998