(d)urban(a)

First Days in Durban

Although yesterday (Wednesday) was technically my first day in Durban, after going to the Woolies (Woolworth’s, the more expensive but better quality grocery store) for food in the early afternoon, I slept most of the rest of the day.  Today (Thursday) was my first full day around the city.  This morning around 9:30 I went with J, my landlady, to a local art gallery and café to meet up with her friend N for some coffee.  Both J and N are immigrants to South Africa, entering the country from Scotland and Bulgaria, respectively, about two decades ago at a time when immigration (at least from certain areas) was more encouraged by the government.  The gallery also housed a fair trade shop, which reminded me a bit of being back at 10,000 Villages in Champaign.  Most of the crafts were from within SA, but they also had some items from various artisan groups in other African countries.  I bought a wonderful beaded doll made by Monkeybiz South Africa, a group that supports craftwork made by disadvantaged people in the townships of Cape Town.  The practice of beaded crafts predates colonialism in SA, unlike most needlework crafts, which arose amongst women after its introduction by (mostly) British missionaries (more detail on needlework and British missionaries later).  After the gallery J took me to a shopping mall to obtain a cell phone to use while I am here.  They are pervasive in Durban so I was able to find one for R350.  Unfortunately I can’t use the phone in the US so as much as I can save it as a souvenir or possible future use here or in Europe, it will likely end up adding to the technological waste-pile, even after disposing of it “properly” (as in, not just chucking it into a trash can).

In the afternoon I visited the University of KwaZulu-Natal, which is located along the same ridge where I’m staying.  The view of Durban’s harbor was so beautiful from outside of the library - it is cluttered with industry compared to the wide, empty expansiveness of the beaches but Durban's port is one of the ten busiest in the world.  The sky was so blue and everywhere the verdure landscape filled my views with intense greens.  There are dandelions here too!  Since their bracts are shaped differently from the species I am familiar with, I had to take a picture.  At the university I visited the library and spoke to the very friendly officer in charge of the special collections whom I hope to see again in the future after I have set up my affiliation so I can use materials there.  For the rest of the afternoon I sat at a table in the library and looked out at the view of harbor as the sky darkened somewhat (thunderstorms were predicted but never arrived – only overcast skies and cool winds that made the walk up the ridge a lot easier).  I read some of Modikwe Dikobe’s poetry (from Dispossessed) and then started a novel, Second-Class Taxi, by Sylvester Stein.  The latter was one of the first satirical books written about apartheid; it was first published in 1958 but promptly banned in SA.  I’m reading them in context with Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums and will have much more to say about this soon.

After the library I walked along the ridge and passed where I am staying to walk down Moore Street to the Glenwood Shopping Centre.  I browsed a fabric store (nothing caught my interest and I’m still a bit confused at how to order fabric here anyway since it’s certainly not by the yard) and then shopped for some food and supplies to take back home at the SuperSpar grocery store there.  I still haven’t tired of wandering the aisles of the local grocery stores to note the persistence of originally US brands of foodstuffs and also to note differences in food tastes.  I knew things were going to go well culinarily speaking when I spied the Russian rolls behind the bakery stand.  It’s a hot dog baked within a seasoned bun that has melted cheese on top – and all for less than $1 US!  It was so savory and made part of a great dinner.  I also discovered something else that I am looking forward to trying – “Mince Mate” – much like “Hamburger Helper” except you “just add mince,” which is seasoned textured vegetable protein.  The produce here is so fresh and very reasonable compared to the US so I bought mangoes, nectarines, sweetcorn, and baby marrows (squash).  I caught the Mynah bus back up the hill (public transportation in Durban is not ideal so I am lucky to be staying right next to the Mynah line, which runs from Entabeni Hospital on the top of the ridge where I am all the way down to the beachfront, where I will be working).  Tomorrow I spend my first day at Create South Africa’s offices where they store the archive of cloths.  I look forward to writing about it afterwards – so far as I know now, I will be photographing the cloths for my research use but also assisting in editing the English translations associated with the cloths.   

As much as I am here in Durban, I wish everyone I know in Urbana to be safe and well with the impending snowstorm that has been predicted for Friday.

Create South Africa

Although I wrote earlier about Create South Africa's quilt project with the South Africa Parliamentary Millennium Project, I finally feel more prepared to write about my involvement with them so far.  In November of 2006 while writing a review essay on "material rhetoric," I included a catalog from the exhibition "Weavings of War:  Fabrics of Memory" in my consideration of "material" engagements with the public sphere.  In that essay I argued that a rhetoric of material insists textiles and clothing possess materialized agency, like Alfred Gell's notion of a secondary agent in Art and Agency or the notion of an actant in actor-network-theory.  In positing a rhetoric of material, we can challenge the Western depth ontology that devalues surface and expand the possibility of what may count as rhetorical engagement, as well as the types of cultures and actors who can produce rhetoric.

Part of the "Weavings of War" exhibition included the "memory cloths" created through one of Create South Africa's workshops.  These embroidered quilt panels disrupt expectations for craft work - they negotiate between invention and commonplaces within embroidery and quilt practice.

This panel, created by Pamela Grootboom in the Western Cape in December 2007, illustrates what I mean.  In the lower part of the panel, Pamela depicts two young people on the street exchanging drugs for money.  Above them she illustrates two young people making soup as part of a soup kitchen that Grootboom started in her township.  Both show relationships between people, the former damaging to the township community near Cape Town where Pamela lives and the latter benefiting the community and giving its young residents a safe place to go to help provide meals for themselves and others.  Most of us don't expect textiles or embroidery to approach subjects like drug use and the creation of soup kitchens and for that reason, these cloths arrest our attention more than merely reading a written account of the drug and poverty problem in Cape Town's informal settlements (or in economically depressed areas anywhere).  Besides, many of the participants in the program don't have the facility in writing English to be able to reach audiences outside of their townships anyway.

Reading about the project and seeing a few digital image reproductions of the cloths, however, was not enough for me to get a sense of how the project operates on a daily basis.  My curiosity about this particular nongovernmental organization (NGO) was embedded within a broader interest in handicraft NGOs operating within the "global South."  My previous experience with such an NGO was volunteering for the local 10,000 Villages fair-trade shop in Champaign, Illinois, but that was a comfortable retail shop with several new computer stations to assist management and volunteers in product information and location.  I think that was why I was so surprised when I went to the Create South Africa offices for the first time last Friday - there was such a difference.  The CAS office is located on Palmer Street - basically an alley that mostly houses auto body repair shops - in Durban's relatively crime-ridden downtown area.  The commercial building that houses the cloth archive is bare and the organization uses two PCs and a copy machine that are all nearly a decade old.  During the summertime, the office can grow warm, even with the circulating fan and the breeze coming in from the large window that lights the space, especially on a day like yesterday when M and I spent some time ironing and steaming the cloths before photographing them.  After the first few days I guess what I came to realize is that no matter how small or seemingly insignificant an infrastructure (economically and technologically speaking) - productive work (rhetorical and otherwise) can still happen.  I look forward to writing more about the work that happens during a week-long workshop when the cloths are made and I will have the opportunity to participate (assisting in embroidery and sewing instruction) during the next one in March here in KwaZulu-Natal.

Sewing Project

On Tuesday afternoon after I visited the Mayville police station and made all of the calls and emails that I could think to do at that moment, I started a sewing project.  I was too addled to read and too restless just to stare at the television and I started thinking about manipulating fabric in a way I had not tried before.  Using an unbleached cotton (very close to muslin, but with a higher thread count and softer hand), I cut four identical panels out about 2 feet long and 1 foot high.  I started smocking the first panel, using a navy blue thread for contrast (so the cause behind the contortions  are obvious) to gather the cotton together.  I wanted the smocking to be violent and uneven rather than the neat, uniform smocking one thinks of decorating the front panel of a young girl's dress.  I continued working on the piece yesterday when I woke up - my eyes were so scared and worn yesterday morning compared to how happy they felt (and I felt) by the evening time after my day out with J and M. 
Today I appliqued the smocked panel to one of the other, flat cotton panels.  My next step will be to begin embroidering on this joined panel, using colored embroidery floss.  I have an idea already about the design and texture I want to establish and what it means, but for now I'll keep posting pictures of its progress.  This type of needlework is different from what I have created before - it's uglier really, less finished and less joyously colored and patterned, but purposely so.  In terms of the texture for the smocking, I have been inspired by a wonderful book I've had for many years now and brought with me on my trip, The Art of Manipulating Fabric, by Colette Wolff.

Ardmore Ceramics in the Midlands: Problematic Positioning of "Zulu Artisans"

Today J and I drove to Pietermaritzburg, a city of about 500,000 that is the capital of the KwaZulu-Natal province.  The city hall (rebuilt in 1901 after a fire destroyed the original 1893 building) is the largest red-brick building in the Southern Hemisphere and the largest Victorian building I have ever seen.  In the city we dropped some materials off at the Minister of Culture offices and we picked up V, a painter and fellow Phd student before driving out to the Midlands.  The area lies beyond Pietermaritzburg but in the lowlands before the Drakensberg mountains.  The area attracts tourists for arts and crafts and fresh farm foods produced in the area. 

After we had lunch, we visited Ardmore Ceramics in the Midlands.  Established about twenty years ago by Fe'e Halsted-Berning, the ceramics studio is the largest in South Africa.  The sculptors and painters who work at the studio are all Zulu women and men from the area who have studied under Halsted-Berning or her previous students on Ardmore Farm.  The pieces are striking and beautiful - overwhelmingly the individual pieces for sale represented animals and flowers, but several pieces in the permanent gallery depicted religious scenes, memorialized past Ardmore artists, and promoted HIV/AIDS awareness.

The marketing rhetoric that surrounds the ceramics, however, reinforce an unexamined division between Western and African art practice and suggest the presence of a white, cultural intermediary was necessary for the Zulu artistic talent to be cultivated.  The studio follows a practice common to artists' collectives situated in the "third world" or "global South" - attached to the artistic pieces are biographies of the artisans that attest to their neediness and how the ability for them to produce art within this particular outlet has uplifted their previous living standard of poverty.  The biographies of artists on the website repeatedly invoke the term "good fortune" to refer to the luck these artists have had in landing at Ardmore Farm.  The biographies seem to exist less to explain the creative inspiration and themes the artists explore and more to fit into an act of consumption for the conscientious consumer, appealing to neoliberal "structures of feeling" (to borrow an expression from Raymond Williams) regarding economic uplift.   The biography of Halsted-Berning is even more telling:

Fe'e's merging of western ceramic technology with African art is only part of the story of Ardmore.  Of even more significance has been her encouragement of their imagination based on nature, Zulu folklore and tradition.  Fe'e has been described as 'a creator of artists'.  [...] As she says:  'The Zulu people have a wonderful sense of colour and rhythm and a gift for design and balance, all they needed was opportunity'. (emphasis added)

According to this passage, any agentic capacity the artists' possess seem to originate with their "creator," Halsted-Berning who provided the "opportunity" for the [western] art world to see these ceramics, which will be forever coded as Zulu/ethnic arts.

Zamukuziphilisa Community Centre, Umbilo Temple, and Several New Projects For Me

This morning J, M, and I drove to an interior design firm to pick up a couple hundred fabric sample books the firm donated to CAS.  The sample books range in size and contain about twenty to thirty squares of high-quality, upholstery and decorator fabric in each one.  From Durban, we drove south to the Umlazi Township - the second-largest township in South Africa with a population of about 750,000 people in the area.  Decent living conditions and health care for many residents remains a challenge, although the area has had recent construction of more primary and secondary schools.

When we arrived there we dropped the fabric off at the Zamukuziphilisa Community Centre, a "self-help" sewing and beading center for women in the area.  I met the director of the center, Mrs. Gambushe, and we spoke about marketable sewing items we could make from the fabric in the books.  I will return to the center next Tuesday with M and we'll work with interested women on sewing things with the fabric.  Certainly we could make throw pillows or quilted blankets from the cloth, but if anyone else has any additional ideas, I welcome suggestions.  In the past I used fabric from sample books to make a lined, patchwork skirt as part of a larger collection I created for a fashion show I organized for a charity event held at Fais Do Do in Los Angeles (this was in 1999 when I was still in fashion school at LA Trade Tech - I can't believe it has almost been a decade!).  I plan to check some crafting sites online (like craftster.org) for additional ideas on things one can make out of smaller pieces of cloth.  In the sewing room at the center they have three industrial machines (Singers), one industrial overlock, about fifteen home sewing machines, and two home overlocks (or what the home sewing industry calls sergers).  I can't wait to get back to sewing on an industrial machine!  I will post pictures of the sewing room after I return next Tuesday.

Later in the afternoon, J and I visited the Umbilo Temple, which is in Mayville, a suburb close to where I am staying in Glenwood.  It is hard for me to use the word "suburb" to describe Mayville because the connotations I associate with that word evoke mental images of white picket fences and comfortable, family houses.  Mayville contains a large informal settlement with shack houses that cover the hillside and few water pumps and toilet areas that the residents are forced to share.  At the end of January, a local newspaper published the horrible news of a baby in Mayville who died from a rat bite he received in his shack.  Further down Bellair Road from these shacks, the third iteration of Umbilo Temple stands, nestled amongst green trees in the hillside.  The first Umbilo Temple was established in 1875 and was the first Hindu Temple in Africa.  Because of the expansion of Bellair Road, the national government under Apartheid forced the temple's move.  The first temple is submerged by dirt underneath the freeway because the road construction workers could not break the stone of the temple.  The temple's style and decoration represents traditions of temple styles found in Southern India, with the exception of a smaller shrine influenced by Northern Indian style.  The temple complex consists of a large courtyard area filled with trees, marigold bushes, and one smaller temple next to the central one.  I have included a picture of the smaller temple, which is the "Mother's Temple" and its purpose is to honor women.  The other picture comes from within an area of the larger temple - these deities represent the planets in our solar system, with the Sun in the center. 
We visited with the caretaker of the temple who explained its purpose and meaning for the community and invited us back to the Fire Walking Festival on March 30th (which I'm looking forward to).  After we told him about CAS he also told us to return Saturday morning to collect some cloth that has been donated to the temple that he would like to reach women sewers affiliated with CAS.  Also, by chance, we met his colleague E who leads a senior citizen's group for Indians in the area - he invited us to speak to the group (he said it is mostly women) at their community center on March 5th about CAS's cloth production projects.  M and I will attend and show them examples of the cloths women have made and talk about how they construct personal histories of South Africa.  After our presentation we will invite anyone interested in making a memory cloth and arrange a time for a workshop.  J said she will look into funding for this, as their convention is to give each person who produces a cloth a token of R120.  If members of the group are interested in participating, this would mean the first cloths that CAS will collect to represent the Indian perspective of South African history!  Especially since this group is older, many may remember or want to recount their experience under Apartheid, including past forced relocations and the riots and police violence that occurred along Bellair Road where the Temple is located.

The apprehensions I had yesterday about my involvement with CAS and my lack of a "critical distance" (something I've never particularly cultivated anyway) went out the window for me today.  I came here with a background in sewing/garment production and writing and I'd just as soon apply it.  So while I'm completing my dissertation prospectus and collecting research (using the CAS and Univ. of KZN archives and eventually conducting formal interviews), I've also committed myself to work on the following projects:

• Parliament Millennium Programme/Amaswi Abesifazane "What Does Democracy Mean to Me?" Project (one-week workshop in March in a Northern Province)
• Zamkuziphilisia Sewing Project (once a week in Umlazi)
• Umbilo Indian Community Center Senior Group Presentation (March 5th and possible workshop to follow)
• Proposal/Grant Writing (M and I are going to try to work on proposal/grantwriting to apply to some new funding sources for CAS projects)
  

The Little Travellers of the Hillcrest AIDS Centre

Located outside of central Durban, The Hillcrest AIDS Centre is a "faith-based ministry" addressing the local impact of HIV/AIDS "in a practical and holistic way.  The mission of the organisation is and always has been to show unconditional love in a practical way to all infected and affected by HIV/AIDS."  Until I got here, I hadn't realized the specific ways stigma towards those with HIV/AIDS manifests itself in South Africa, particularly when perceptions of stigma make those possibly infected/infected avoid activities that Hillcrest or I would identify as "practical ways" to attend to the disease and complications relating to it (such as getting tested or beginning a course of anti-retroviral treatments).  The Durban Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition of photographs, garments, and craft items created by some of the Centre's members and I got to see the display earlier this week.  The Little Traveller (pictured here in a photograph I have used from Hillcrest's website without explicit permission) has become an iconic craft object for Hillcrest - each traveler comes with a "passport" and the traveler is attached to a safety pin so whoever it travels to can attach it to their clothes, bag, etc.  They sell here for R15 (just a little over $2 US) for the basic travelers but the project has expanded to include other kinds of travelers and information relating to them (on t-shirts and a DVD).  They loosely resemble small versions of some more traditional Zulu dolls I have seen (at least in the use of dark fabric in combination with different colored beads to accentuate features of the doll's body).  Each traveler is unique and some specialty travelers include Rastas, Zulu warriors, and Sangomas (this is a Zulu shaman/medicine man).  The proceeds from the travelers and the other craft projects produced at Hillcrest's craft collective go to fund several projects at the centre, including HIV/AIDS Counseling, Nursing Services and Home-Based Care, Horticultural Production and Nutrition and Nutrition Education, and contributing to School Fees for children in the area.  I'm really interested in this idea of the traveler and how the Hillcrest AIDS Centre crafters have connected the concept of HIV/AIDS to the global movement of people.

Isishweshwe: Threads of Colonialism and Global Exchange

Known as isishweshwe, shweshwe, or shoeshoe, this popular fabric here, now produced most famously in South Africa by De Gama Textiles, has a history in South Africa that reaches back to  the mid 17th-century and highlights the connections between global exchange, colonialism, textile production, and development. 

A spotty timeline of shweshwe:
- 1652:  indigo cloth arrives at the seaport established in the Western Cape.
- 1850s:  German Protestant Settlers bring printed indigo fabric known as German or Jeruman print with them to South Africa.  The cloth was popular with workers in Central Europe because of its relative inexpensiveness.
- 19th Century:  Indigo cloth imported primarily from India and Holland.
- 1890 German factory develops a synthetic indigo dye still in use today.
- 1930s:  Imports of indigo cloth predominately come from Lancashire at this point - the Three Cats brand comes out of Manchester.  The fabric is used for garments in South Africa that are worn by slaves, Khoisan, Sotho, Xhosa, and Voortrekker women.
- 1940s:  French missionaries  present King Moshoeshoe I of Lesotho of printed indigo cloth.  This is one of the "origin" stories for how the fabric got its name of "shoe shoe."  The other origin story attributes the name to the Xhosa name from the swishing sound it makes when the wearer walks.
- 1982:  Production of shweshwe begins in South Africa when UK company Tootal invests in De Gama Textiles, trademarking their version "Three Leopards," which was their version of Manchester's "Three Cats."  Two new colors, red and brown are added using the same design prints.
-1992:  De Gama Textiles purchased the sole rights to own and print the Three Cats range of designs.  It still produces the original German print.

Production Process:
The process has remained the same since the 19th century.  First, cotton fabric is woven (plain weave) to a width of 90cm.  The fabric is dyed with an indigo paste (originally natural, now synthetic) and a discharge agent is applied with a copper roller (also with 90cm widths) to remove the indigo and reveal a pattern.  When De Gama purchased the exclusive rights to produce the fabric, the copper rollers were shipped over from Manchester.  The designs were often intricate small series of dots or geometric motifs.  Starch is applied to the fabric - originally used to preserve it on the voyages from the UK to SA. 

Because of the starch used, genuine shweshwe has a characteristic stiff hand upon purchase and a pleasant oily smell.  After you purchase the fabric, you wash it before your begin sewing with it.  Like indigo denim, the fabric will remain relatively stiff and gradually soften with each wash, eventually achieving a buttery hand but retaining its strength.  In the picture above, I've shown some samples I have already purchased:  the primary example in the  is a genuine piece produced by De Gama in one of the Three Cats designs.  The cost for a little over a meter (I purchased it by the amount of panels, as much of the shweshwe is printed with line guides, where four or five panels = an A-line skirt since that is one of the most popular garments made from it) was R30 (a little over $5 US).  The two patterns cutting across the top left of the photograph are actually imitations made from cheaper cotton and a standard cotton printing technique.  These two prints cost only R5 (less than $1 US) per meter, but will likely fade quickly upon repeated wear.  I suspect I will use these second two for quilting projects. 

The history of textile production and exchange is also the history of the industrial revolution and global exchange.  Economist Petra Rivoli, among others, identifies massive textile production as the key to first Britain and then the United States' industrial and economic development and even argues that Japan's textile production 100 years after the United States (in the early to mid 20th century) contributed to its development as an economic "powerhouse."  As much as my research interests align with textile production and conceptions of economic development, I'm reticent to believe this direct correlation and the simple causality it suggests is as  direct as Rivoli argues.  For example, the shift back to textile production in India in the 1940s forward hasn't necessarily translated into massive industrial development.  Over the past twenty years, cotton growth in the Eastern Cape here in South Africa, has helped the country begin to develop its own substantive textile industry.

There have also been fascinating connections made between the development of synthetic dyes in Germany and economic development (in particular in the work of sociologist Andrew Pickering).  My friend C, a chemist and researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has agreed to fill in the gaps of my knowledge and provide some additional background on indigo - he will post it in the comments section.

Sewing Project 2

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I started the embroidery for the first project I posted about previously - I'm experimenting with some different smocking stitch designs and I topstitched the shredded fabric panels with a variety of basic embroidery stitches (I'm a big fan of cross-stitch).  I also started a new project this weekend - when I was at Woza Moya (at the Hillcrest AIDS Centre), I purchased a denim bag made by one of he sewers in the craft collective.  It is relatively simple and unadorned except for a zipper pocket on the side opposite to the one depicted.  Yesterday I started embroidering a design on the plain denim side.  It is directly inspired by a Zulu beaded bedspread I saw at the Phansi museum.  The insect, bright colors, and repetition of circles instantly attracted me to the large panel.  It was also one of the only examples of Zulu beaded embroidery on a light background I have seen - for the most part, the Phansi's holdings are nearly all beaded panels on indigo fabric.

The Zulu bedspread was specifically made by a woman to be used after her marriage, at a time in her when she would change bedding type (moving from a woven sleeping mat to a large, raised bed with beaded pillow shams and a large bedspread) and begin to sleep with her husband.  During apartheid, these married women's bedspreads gained a new function - apartheid's widespread installation of men's hostels during the institution of migratory/distance labor (mostly to the mines, but not exclusively).  Basically, married women were required to stay in the "homeland," and were not allowed to enter the urban areas in which their husbands worked and were even restricted from visiting them in the townships anchored around cities.  The women were allowed to visit their husbands only two weeks in the year and they had to stay with the them in the same hostel room where as many as seven other men also lived.  So the bedspreads were used to hang up and divide the tiny room to provide more privacy for the married couple.

Archival Moment of Joy!: Finding Connection Between US Bureau of Indian Affairs and SA Bantu Authority Policies on Craft Production

I am not embarrassed to admit that I grinned widely and even joyfully gasped aloud today when I found a concrete connection between the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bantu Authority's policies on craft production.  Since early 2006 I have been collecting research on craft production as a form of economic sustainability sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs with a focus on the historical and contemporary production and reception of Navajo woven textiles.  This particular focus grew out of an August 2004 visit to a Navajo Craft Fair and Workshop in Flagstaff Arizona and after meeting Alisse Portnoy when the UIUC Center for Writing Studies sponsored her talk about her book, Their Right to Speak:  Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debate (2005).  I have written critiques of institutional archival practices for Navajo textiles in their tendency to devalue innovation in design and other contemporary practices not deemed "traditional," and also the related archival practice of periodization that effaces influential events on Navajo groups and textile production.  For example, most large institutional collections of Navajo textiles fail to mention the 1864 internment of Navajos and Mescaleros at the Bosque Redondo military reservation, which both limited access to standard weaving materials (such as the churro sheep used for home-spun wool yarn and plants used for dyes) and inspired Navajos to depict the conditions of their internment thematically (now known as the "Fort Sumner" motifs) with the crappy commercial yarns they had access to.  Instead, these very important and disruptive designs often get lost within the broader categorization of the "transitional" period (where I suppose "transitional" is supposed to stand in for and euphemize "forced removal/internment/marginalization").  I was also recently inspired by Jane Simonsen's amazing book, Making Home Work:  Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919 (2006). 

As I began to read about the craft policies advocated here in South Africa both by missionaries and later by Bantu authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries, I noticed strong similarities between the governmental and institutional rhetoric surrounding the function of craft, craft production and marketing for Native American groups and "Bantu" groups.  My concern in making an argument connecting them, however, was that it may wash over the very specific, local conditions and situation of two very large indigenous groups and two very different forms of settler colonialism..  So maybe you can understand why finding a concrete connection today to support my argument was a near-cartwheel-inducing moment for me.

I was rifling through the eight files the Killie Campbell collections holds of J.W. Grossert's papers and notes - Grossert was the Organizer of Arts and Crafts (Division of Bantu Education/Department of Native Affairs) in the mid-twentieth century.  In one of the files, on delicate pieces of onionskin, I found a typed report to the Carnegie Corporation Grossert composed upon the completion of his travel grant to the United States and Canada from July 1958 to January 1959.  In the report, Grossert describes and applauds the Bureau of Indian Affairs' craft programs and advocates the establishment of similar programs in "Bantu rural communities."  In the same file, there is even a typed speech that Grossert gave to the Pietermaritzburg Rotary Club on 26 March 1959 where he compares Bantu and Indian education practices and describes the burgeoning "big business" of "various Indian tribes" craft industries.  I can use this 1959 date (which represents a known point of intersection), then, to look at Bantu Authority's policies prior and subsequent to this date to consider the development of craft programs in South Africa and how the Bureau of Indian Affairs' programs may have influenced their development.

* Terms such as "bantu" and "Indian" and their use have been thoughtfully contested - my use of them in this post accords with their use by Grossert and other US and SA governmental authorities during the particular 20th century moment to which I am referring.

Shweshwe Skirt Examples

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Here are two examples of skirts made with shweshwe.  R is modeling both of them - the first is one that M brought in, which she said is characteristic of a Sotho shweshwe skirt.  The shweshwe cloth is from De Gama's "Three Cats" series, and the brown applique accents were created by using the reverse side of the print.  In some areas you can make out the Three Cats proprietary imprint.  B, who I have been sewing with at the Zamu center, made the second skirt.  It is also made from Three Cats shweshwe, but is an example of a two-color print (yellow and brown) that is really popular.  Again, the reverse of the fabric has been used for accents on the hem, waistband and tie, and the patch pocket tops.  The  bias tape trim tends to be popular, especially on the full-length dresses made with shweshwe.  Sometimes the skirts or dresses will have ric-rac as an accent instead of bias-tape.  The movement of this skirt is lovely -  the bottom portion of the skirt has been softly pleated into the skirt's yoke giving this skirt a different sense of movement and fullness from the first one.