I guess they wanted us to do our research
The Glory of African Beadwork
Written by Ettagale Blauer and photographed by Jason Laure;
The desire for personal adornment appears to be universal, dating to at least 25,000 years. African beadwork not only serves as decorative jewelry but as a complex introduction into the colorful web of traditional life.
utward appearance is the surest way to differentiate one person from another, and the desire for objects that can decorate or distinguish the individual appears to be universal. In fact, the practice of personal adornment is at least twenty-five thousand years old. Evidence found in Stone Age graves and domestic sites includes objects that are recognizable as jewelry. Ivory beads, necklaces made from fish vertebrae, and other objects are frequently uncovered in such locations.
Wearing distinctive apparel and adornments conveys specific personal and social information. Indeed, the physical expression of a culture is made as evident through ornament and dress as it is through ritual and ceremony. The form of decorative objects depends, of course, on the materials at hand. Historically, these were either local products or things acquired in trade. So it is with the beadwork of Africa. Beaded jewelry is a rich tradition in African culture but one with fairly recent origins. Curiously, it is a tradition dependent on imported European beads, trinkets brought to Africa as objects of trade.
Beads have become powerful elements in African life. Their use offers insight into hundreds of cultures. The jewelry worn by East Africa's Masai and Samburu people incorporates specific and different patterns, forms, and shapes. But both use the same basic building blocks: tiny glass or porcelain beads. The Zulu, Ndebele, and Xhosa of South Africa also use these small beads to create culturally distinctive forms of jewelry. Ornament literally is used to delineate the unique identity of each culture, and most of the beadwork found in eastern and southern Africa is worn by all members of society. But in West Africa, in the Yoruba culture of Nigeria and Cameroon, beadwork is reserved for members of royalty.
On first encounter, outsiders might think that traditionally garbed people--such as the Masai, Samburu, and Ndebele--have dressed up for some special occasion. This is not the case. Although some jewelry is made so that it can be donned at particular moments--such as for marriage or circumcision ceremonies--most pieces are worn throughout an entire stage of life. For example, indicating her increasing wealth and her place in life, a married woman amasses beaded necklaces as she grows older. Each piece of jewelry, in its shape, patterns, and colors, speaks of the wearer's culture. People within that culture can read a woman's exact status--her age-set, marital status, even whether she has given birth to a son--by observing her beaded jewelry.
Jewelry and symbol in East Africa
Arab traders, sailing down the East African coast in dhows (sailboats), introduced a variety of goods in exchange for ivory and other treasures. The earliest known Masai and Samburu beaded jewelry items, dating from around 1850, were assembled from large red beads originally made in Holland. But the specific look of jewelry in East Africa, particularly among these two peoples, was transformed about one hundred years ago. Traders introduced tiny, colorful glass beads--uniform in size and hue--that had been imported from what is now the Czech Republic. These beads, already drilled with precise center holes, could easily be strung on threads or sewn onto leather. Their variety meant they could also be arranged in contrasting colors and geometric patterns. This revolutionized the look of ornament in East Africa and other parts of the continent.
A whole mythology grew up around the beads. Symbolism based on existing Masai beliefs about the natural world remains valid today. Blue represents sky and embraces the Masai belief in Nkai (God). Green represents grass, a sacred element revered because it nourishes the cattle that play such a central role in the cycle of traditional Masai and Samburu life. Red and white are the life-sustaining colors. Red represents the blood of the cattle, and white stands for their milk. These are the basic Masai foodstuffs. (Masai only slaughter cattle for meat to provide for ceremonies marking stages of life. Cattle hides are used for clothing and material for pouches, slings, and straps.) The imported beads enabled the Masai to spell out the essential beliefs and elements of their lives in their dress and personal adornment.
A Masai man counts his wealth in his cattle, but a woman wears hers in the form of her jewelry. Often a woman will earn the money to buy beads for herself or her daughters by selling an animal from her own herd. (Her cattle are kept separate from those of her husband and sons.) Girls begin to amass their distinctive, flat, circular necklaces from an early age. Each necklace has a different circumference. When worn together, they form a wide visual display, the layers touching each other. Necklaces may cover a woman's upper body from her neck to her shoulders and partway down her torso.
Samburu women are readily distinguished from Masai by their beaded necklaces. They favor single strands of red beads, piled one upon the other in a massive show. As the strands vary in diameter, they seem to merge into one massive neckpiece. The Masai avoid symmetry in their beadwork and appear to feel an innate need to create a balance from different elements. Single rows of beads are strung from headbands and draped across the cheeks, drawing attention to the face. In earlier works, beads were sewn onto leather or separated with "spacers," narrow strips of leather. Contemporary beads are usually strung on wire. In the past, red and blue were used almost exclusively, but today's palette is far more varied and individual.
Candidates for circumcision (which marks a boy's transition to his young adult life as a moran, or warrior) wear special beads that signify their status. Following the ceremony, the boy gives these beads to his mother. Her status is thus enhanced. Although there is no longer a real place for a moran in modern East Africa, the rituals are maintained (though they have been adapted and downsized).
The use of beading extends beyond jewelry. Long leather skirts, rarely worn in today's society, are enhanced with rows or patterns of colored beads. Small leather bags, decorated with beads, are made. Masai women use them to carry other beadwork in progress. To keep their kangas (cloth wrapped around the body like a sarong) in place, men wear a beaded leather belt. It also serves as a sheath for their short knives.
Kenya has more than forty tribal peoples, although lines are sometimes blurred through intermarriage and overlapping territories. Such is the case with the Rendille, a tribal people who live just south of Lake Turkana and closely resemble the Samburu. Their distinctive beadwork features larger beads, most of them bright red. The unmarried Rendille woman wears a combination of necklaces: one large draping collar combining more than a dozen rows of beads strung on wires, set off by small, flat white and yellow beads.
Turkana women, living in the severe desert conditions of northern Kenya, bedeck themselves with strands of brightly colored beads massed around their necks and shoulders. Pokot women, members of a small and exclusively rural tribe, wear a distinctive large, flat necklace made of doum palm and edged by red and yellow glass beads. Circumcision ceremonies for Kamba girls (now rarely carried out) were highlighted by the presentation of an elaborate beaded belt, worked around a core of natural fibers. These belts are now considered collector's items. Even the tiniest tribe in Africa, the El Molo (who number just 440 people and live around Lake Turkana), maintain a tradition of beadwork as evidence of their distinct cultural tradition.
Cultural emblems in southern Africa
The Zulu are the single largest tribe in southern Africa, numbering about eight million. They were first forged into a coherent people in the early nineteenth century under a leader named Dingiswayo. Small, brightly colored, imported glass beads had already been introduced to the region through Portuguese trading posts along the Indian Ocean coast. Dingiswayo valued beads so highly as a medium of exchange that he claimed their trade as his personal privilege. This monopoly was continued by Shaka, his nephew and eventual successor, and by later Zulu kings.
After the Zulu were subjugated by British colonial forces, much of the material evidence of their culture was suppressed. Missionaries vigorously campaigned to end many Zulu customs, including the use of beadwork in ornamentation and the use of traditional clothing. The traditional married woman's hat, for example, is made of tightly woven fibers dyed red. Beadwork bands ornament the base or crown of the hats, according to the region and the wearer. Different types of capes, cloaks, belts, and aprons are worn in various regions.
Traditional Zulu beaded garments also include skirts or girdles worn by unmarried girls and beaded aprons over leather skirts worn by married women. Some sport beaded sections on fabric skirts. Capes or cloaks are worn by married women. Men and unmarried girls may wear beaded bands across their chests. Beads were sewn onto leather or wrapped around tightly coiled lengths of grass, bound up with cotton. Tubes of cotton were also used to support beadwork fashioned into neck rings.
Despite the pressures of increasing westernization, beadwork has been kept alive, especially in more far-flung rural communities. In contemporary society, tourism has become a significant support for traditional crafts. It creates a market that encourages young women, living in kraals (village homes) located close to South Africa's main cities, to learn beadworking skills from their mothers.
Tourism certainly has an influence on the look of Zulu and other tribal crafts. Despite adaptations made to attract tourists, specific attributes and meanings are assigned to certain colors, and every teenage Zulu girl knows them. Blue is for loneliness: It means "I will wait for you." Green is for grass and means "I will wait until I am as thin as a blade of grass." White is for purity: It says "My heart is clear and pure and I am waiting for you." Red is for love and means "My heart is bleeding for you." Yellow is for jealousy: "I am jealous but I shall still love you." Finally, in our list, pink is for poverty. It means "You are wasting your money and have no cows to pay for my lobola (bride-price) and I don't love you."
Because the colors of the beads carry such specific meaning, they were used to carry messages, known as ucu, a Zulu term that translates loosely as "love letters." These beautiful, silent messengers can tell the state of a romance. Specific beadwork also identifies a sangoma (healer and seer). Sangomas are often women and wear distinctive beaded headpieces, which obscure their faces behind a veil of beads.
Items made for sale to tourists are sometimes worn by the tribal people themselves, a continuation of the acculturation process that occurs whenever two peoples come into contact. Beaded fertility dolls, known in only one area of Zululand, have become a very popular item for sale. The version made for the tourist market may have facial features; authentic dolls do not. This difference is likely to be lost as the lines between authenticity and imagination continue to blur over time.
The Xhosa are the second-largest population group in South Africa. They live in territories in the southeast, in regions along the Indian Ocean and reaching one hundred miles inland. Divided by the Great Kei River, these areas were known as Ciskei and Transkei. The same glass beads used by the Masai and Samburu were imported--by the ton--by these regions. Demand was widespread. Organized trade was documented as early as the 1820s, when merchants in Cape Town imported European beads. Wholesalers, supplying outposts in Ciskei and Transkei, often dealt directly with missionaries and other travelers who carried the beads inland. The language of beads became an integral part of tribal cultural tradition. Beadwork came to be one of the visible elements used to distinguish who was Xhosa, Zulu, or Ndebele.
Although some missionaries helped carry beads into the interior, others were determined to end their use. Beads were not deemed "proper" dress for a Christian convert. Because missionaries often offered the only chance an African would have to learn to read and write, many people surrendered their beads to gain the powerful weapon of literacy.
In 1962, Nelson Mandela wore Xhosa beads at his sentencing in the Johannesburg courthouse. An attorney, Mandela usually dressed for court in impeccably tailored business suits. On this occasion he chose to send a powerful signal. By wearing the beaded clothing of his tribe, Mandela broadcast an implicit message of defiance: a warning to those who would crush African culture and its expression. Thirty-two years later, Mandela would take office as the first black president of South Africa.
Plastic and the marketplace
Traditional Xhosa beadwork is made by stitching small glass beads onto backings made from cowhide and goatskin. The beads were sewn with sinew before women had access to commercially made thread. Xhosa beadwork has been documented as early as the 1820s. Because beads were expensive, their use distinguished the wealthy from the mass of Xhosa society. Beadwork came to represent a woman's dowry.
Uniquely, it is Xhosa men who amass and wear quantities of beadwork (made by female admirers). Men and women both wear beaded openwork bib collars that have the look of lace. Tremendous individuality reigns in Xhosa beadwork design. Unique pieces include headdresses made from thousands of white beads, some of them supporting dense drapes of single strands of beads. Beaded circles are worn around the waist in profusion.
There are also ritually specific pieces, such as the necklaces worn by a woman who is nursing, and practical pieces such as beaded blanket pins (used in place of buttons). The traditionally dressed Xhosa woman wore a blanket, usually red or yellow, as her outer garment.
White is the predominant color in Xhosa beadwork and has always been closely identified with the culture. The pieces have the feeling of fabric and drape around the body. Openwork designs enable the creation of an article that covers a considerable area using a relatively small number of beads. The most typical beaded object is a tobacco bag, worn draped over one shoulder. Beaded motifs, often in the form of "love letters," are stitched onto a goatskin backing with beaded tassels attached at the ends.
Xhosa men and women both smoke tobacco using pipes with beaded stems. Women prefer long- stemmed pipes, it is said, to keep ashes away from nursing children. The elegant beadwork keeps pipestems cool enough to handle.
The tradition of making beaded objects has survived into the twenty-first century, but its days are clearly numbered. Young women are more likely to want the current Western fashions than to be sitting at home, sewing tiny glass beads onto leather or fabric.
The exposure to tourists is changing the very shape and even the materials of beaded jewelry. At the annual Grahamstown festival in South Africa in 1999, Xhosa women offered beadwork made of plastic beads instead of glass. (Ironically, Xhosa chiefs used to trade ivory for beads with merchants at Grahamstown.) The work retained ingenuity and a sense of style, but the plastic was disconcerting. Significantly, plastic beads are unlikely to last as long as glass. Still, the women prefer the new beads, which are cheaper to buy and lighter and more comfortable to wear. The cultural connections grow thinner as the older generation fades away. Africa's glorious beadwork may have had its time in the sun.
, that was an incredibly interesting foray into the history & meaning of what looked like, simply, a beautiful piece of art.
I just know I bought early enough to be a founding member.
