Women, Beadwork and Bodies: The Making and Marking of Migrant Liminality in South Africa, 1850–1950

Abstract

Migrant labour practices in southern Africa pulled large numbers of men into the cities and onto the mines, leaving women at home to tend the fields, bring up the children, care for the elderly and, most importantly, to keep cultural identity alive. At the same time, migrant labour provided cash for those left behind, facilitated the passage of trade goods from cities and trading stores into rural settlements and thus saw to the transformation and sometimes the death of local traditions of making. The introduction of increasingly large quantities of glass beads into southern Africa from the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of new forms of dress and regalia, made by the women left at home in rural villages, and worn by men and women as forms of indigenous dress. Although beads were used as a currency by the Mpondo peoples and were highly desired by many other East Coast peoples, they were, in fact a luxury, very expensive, and could from the 1850s only be acquired with cash. This article looks at the emergence of particular techniques, designs and forms of beadwork in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of an emerging code of dress. Using photographs to establish the swift emergence of a hybridity in the dressing of the body among South African black peoples, the article, nevertheless, maintains that beadwork was something particularly associated with the rural home. It argues, in relation to selected items of men's beaded garments, that, in their use of imported beads, thread and needles provided by traders, and objects brought home by migrant workers, or obtained with the cash provided by them, women created beadwork forms that are now considered ‘traditional’, but which were equally ‘modern’ in their engagement with the wider contexts of migrant labour. In their hybridity and modernity, the beadwork items allowed indigenous cultures to establish modes of resistance in new ‘traditions' that challenged dominant, particularly western, controls of dress and appearance.