Jubilee Dandies: Collecting Beadwork in Tsolo, Eastern Cape 1897–1932

Abstract

This paper deals largely with a single photograph in relation to an unusually coherent collection of beadwork from the Eastern Cape (South Africa) in relation to collecting practices. I explore these beaded forms as aesthetically loaded parts of a particular material culture which has been detached from its original setting, working with and drawing from Appadurai (1986), Edwards (2002), and Poole (1997, 2005) in understanding the ways in which objects are assigned different and contingent meanings. Although I also acknowledge the beadwork in question as a form of creative praxis in its making and wearing, I use the term “material culture” here as a catch-all, because my purpose in this paper is not to argue an art status for beadwork. Beadwork, as I examine it here, is understood primarily a means of “clothing” the body, and throughout most of human history clothing has been, like the other objects we now term “art” in Africa, undifferentiated from other forms of material culture. The collection examined in this paper is in the stores of the British Museum, where it has resided for nearly eighty years without ever, to my knowledge, having been placed on display. Viewed simply as collection of beaded items in a museum store it has very little meaning. When a single piece was published, in full color, by John Mack (2002),1 its isolation from the rest of the collection, and thus its historical context, ensured its appreciation as an aesthetic object, possibly as a “masterpiece,” but any other elements of its potential signification were not fully explored. Yet beadwork in general has a relatively long history in South Africa and this object has a genealogy: not only are beads recorded as part of Southern African material culture from the earliest survivals of human selfdecorating activity, but beadwork using glass beads can be traced through at least four centuries of imported materials and their indigenous uses (Huffman 2007, Wood 2008). In the nineteenth century, the art of making pieces of body adornment or clothing and other accoutrements using imported glass beads expanded exponentially on the east coast of Southern Africa2 and, by 1862, constituted a major form of aesthetic expression among Nguni-speaking peoples south of the Tugela River, and possibly among Tsonga-speaking peoples in the vicinity of Delagoa Bay (Muller and Snelleman n.d. [1892], Nettleton 2007). This paper investigates some aspects of such beadwork as clothing for the body, as a site of not only aesthetic expression and identity politics, but also of resistance to colonial norms, and ultimately as a site of residual curiosity when viewed as a collection. The collection from Tsolo was put together at a mission station and I explore the irony of beadwork’s appeal to missionaries as collectors in the Eastern Cape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century via evidence offered by three photographs emanating from the mission. In trawling European museums for evidence of Southern African objects over the past thirty years, the frequent presence of missionaries as collectors emerged from the information on many acquisitions. In 2007 I was asked to identify an ochered cloth skirt for the Glasgow Museums. The information on the donor provided by the curator of World Cultures at the Museum, Pat Allan,3 reads as follows: