Jewelry has been a cornerstone of human culture for centuries, with each civilization leaving its unique mark on the art of adornment. African jewelry has a rich and diverse history that cannot be summed up singularly.
Many South Africans like to talk about their traditions, and their cultures, as specific to their particular ethno-linguistic group (for example Zulu, Xhosa, or Pedi). Yet many also feel them to be general enough (if they are black South Africans of indigenous African origin) to be considered “African”. Many traditions are invoked, in the face of supposedly “western” modernity, as restoring or upholding a sense of a pre-colonial, pre-modern African identity and heritage.
Traditionalists claim that their customs are ‘age-old’, and thus authentic. However, such claims are hard to substantiate when subjected to scrutiny under the light of recorded facts, indigenous oral history included. That confronting documented history might shift, in uncomfortable directions, people’s inculcated sense of ownership of the materials and designs that constitute traditional forms, does not, however, excuse ignoring history.
Beadwork is an ancient and fascinating craft African cultures have practiced for centuries. Beads are among the most intriguing and important symbols in African culture, past and present. It involves using beads to create intricate designs that are not only beautiful but also have cultural and symbolic significance.
The oldest African jewelry ever discovered was recently found, in 2004, in the Blombos cave on the southern tip of S. Africa. They are estimated at being over 75 000 years old and are pea-sized, mollusc shell beads that had been pierced.
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Here is an overview of key aspects of South African jewelry history and traditions:
Ancient Adornment
In African societies in the past materials of many kinds could be strung together to be worn around the body. Such practices of adornment may possibly have started as early as 50000 years ago, when the inhabitants of Blombos Cave in the Cape bored holes through shells, decorated them with ochre and strung them together.
Over time, and across the world, humans fashioned beads from stone, clay, bone, shell and other organic materials. Everywhere humans made beads they employed them strung together in modes varying in complexity, primarily to adorn their bodies. People in subSaharan Africa did not make use of the kind of faience (glazed baked clay) used for bead production in Ancient Egypt, and gemstone beads were in limited supply. Small quantities of gold beads found in archaeological excavations at Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Thulamela are undoubtedly of local manufacture. At these sites, large numbers of imported glass beads were also found, indicating that the inhabitants acquired glass beads from at least 800CE onwards.
The Role of Beads in South African Culture
Beads are unique and symbolic to different tribes in Nigeria.
In South Africa, beading is deeply intertwined with cultural and social practices. Different tribes, such as the Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, and San, have utilized beadwork for communication, storytelling, and adornment. Beaded items carry symbolic meanings, serving as markers of status, marriage, initiation, or spiritual beliefs. They also represent a connection to ancestral heritage and provide a visual representation of one’s cultural identity.
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For example, in some African communities, women adorned themselves with waist beads during their first menstruation as a rite of passage into womanhood. The beads symbolize a young lady’s fertility, developing body, and sexuality. Other cultures adorned chiefs and their wives with beads to indicate their wealth and status.
The geometric beaded designs of the Ndebele people, for example, are said to reflect their cultural identity, as well as play various social functions.
It is almost impossible to establish what kinds of body adornment the peoples of these zimbabwe-style civilizations made with the glass beads, but the likelihood is that they were generally reserved for members of the upper classes. This was certainly the case with the blue and green tubular glass beads, called ‘beads of water’ (vhulungu vha madi) worn in bunched strings by members of Venda, Lobedu and some North-Sotho royal families. Similarly, only members of the favoured groups by the ruler’s decree in Shaka’s Zulu Kingdom (ca 1800 CE) were allowed to have bead adornments.
Traveling from Europe to Africa, bead traders took three routes: one across the Sahara using pack animal transport, the second down the East coast on small Arab vessels, and the third, from the 14th century onwards, down the African West coast and round to the East coast on larger European boats. Not only was it much easier to transport large numbers of glass beads on the latter, but once cargoes were landed in Southern African ports they were transported, from the early 1800s, by ox-wagons into the interior.
Not only traders, but also missionaries, increased distribution of glass beads. The increasing numbers of black Africans pressed into wage-labour from the 1850s onwards, particularly in Natal, formed a ready market for these items, especially in those spaces where sumptuary laws were not in force. It is thus to the beginning of the 19th century that one has to look to find the start of the traditions of beadwork that South Africans like to think of as age-old heritage forms.
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Exactly what triggered the ‘bead rush’ that continued throughout the two centuries between 1800 and 1980 (with still-lingering echoes) is difficult to establish.
In almost every ethnological museum in South Africa, and in the colonial heartlands of the United Kingdom and Europe, there are collections of South African beadwork. Their constituent pieces were made by women who spoke different languages, and the museum staff therefore identified them as “Zulu”, “Xhosa”, “Ndebele”, “Tsonga-Shangane”, “Swazi” or “Sotho”. Sometimes these broad ethno-linguistic divisions are further broken down - for example in the “Xhosa” category, “Mpondo”, “Mpondomise”, “Thembu”, “Gcaleka”, and “Mfengu” (among others) are distinguished from one another - to reflect some of the historico-political nuances hidden by broad ethno-linguistic classification.
Similar collections are now housed in some South African art museums, emphasising the aesthetic praxis that beadworking represents rather than its broadly “cultural” use as an identity marker. Together, items in museum collections - mostly invisible, buried in storerooms, but also splashed as images across coffee-table books and online - constitute physical evidence of the beadwork traditions of the region.
Much of the beadwork photography used to illustrate the publications on beadwork traditions display the item/s against neutral backgrounds, emphasising their art-ness, their sheer technical and aesthetic qualities. Displaying them like this enables the identification of formal styles, colours and designs, techniques and execution. But it also denies their essential link to the bodies of the persons who wore them. In the past, South African beadwork was never made as something abstracted from bodies. Beadwork items were worn in varied ways, marking and masking, emphasising different aspects of the bodies they adorned. Both in the way they were worn, and in the patterns they used, beadwork items were important visual markers of the social roles and positions of its wearers, creating communal identities and politico-religious units.
All imaging of black South Africans wearing beadwork has, until very recently, been produced by white colonial agents, visitors, or settlers. Among the earliest published visual images of beadwork made and worn by black people in Southern Africa are engravings in Ludwig Alberti’s (1968) account of his travels as an official among isiXhosa-speakers in 1807, originally published in German in 1810. They were followed by the images in Gardiner’s (1836) account of his missionary sojourn in Natal and, notably, by George Ffrench Angas’s images from his travels in 1849. These sources offer evidence of uses to which South African women put imported glass beads at the start of the new tradition of beadwork.
While Angas’s published images are based on drawings and subject to inevitable distortions via the colonial lens, many details there are corroborated by collected items of beadwork, the hard evidence, so to speak. The latter, material forms and designs, can only be securely dated from the 1850s onwards, when colonial officials, missionaries, adventurers and traders began to collect them.
The early collections of beadwork from particular geographic locations show diversity in colour, pattern and technique. This minimises the possibility that beadwork was clearly linked to ethnic identity from its beginnings. Through the 19th century, beadworkers seem to have experimented with patterns and colours without the need to conform to particular local trends. It is thus very difficult to establish whether some pieces were made by and for isiZulu or isiXhosa-speakers, for example.
The mid-19th century beadwork pieces are documented largely from the coastal peoples, whose contacts with European traders, and access to beads, pre-dated that of other, inland groups. Sometimes it is clear that mid-to-late 19th century studio photographs which present young persons dressed in multiple layers of beadwork, have been labelled so as to identify the person and beadwork as being ethnically identifiable. But close comparison of these with images said to represent persons of another ethnic affiliation, often unravels these classificatory attempts. The same type/patterns of beadwork appear on people said to represent different ethnicities, or the same persons wearing different beadwork, are then said to be of a different ethnic origin.
Clearly identifiable ethnic patterns in beadwork emerge only in the early 20th century, parallel to the increasingly strict and generalising ethnic divisions of people under the colonial regime. Clear lines that start to be drawn, in the years leading up to and following the Land Act of 1913, separate Zulu from Xhosa, Tswana from Sotho, Ndebele from Ntwane, with Venda and Tsonga-Shangaan out on a limb. At the same time they incorporate under the term “Zulu” people who do not feel they belong there, or under the term ‘Xhosa”, Mpondo and Mpondomise people who, throughout the 19th century, had been named as separate from other isiXhosa-speakers.
Some forms of beadwork are made only by particular ethnic groups, but others are shared across many. On the other hand, lace-like collars which are most closely associated with isiXhosa-speakers, are amongst the earliest forms collected in Natal, as is the case with one in the British Museum which was displayed on the International Exhibition in London in 1862. Similar collars using a net-stitch or looping lace technique have also been made by isiXhosa-speakers since at least the 1890s, but in predominantly blue, pink and white beads, sometimes with additions of black. These collars are sufficiently distinctive to have an ethno-linguistic identity, and yet they are not unique. siNdebele and seSotho-speakers make their own versions.
Because bodies are the anchor to which all beadwork traditions in southern Africa are firmly attached, many of the techniques used are linked to forms which will fit the body. Yet there are also distinct differences in approach among different Southern African societies. Among isiXhosa-speakers, where imported cloth started to replace skin clothing from the early 1800s onwards, beadwork was largely limited to beadwork fabric forms that could be worn on the exposed parts of the body, or over cloth garments. siNdebele-speakers and isiZulu-speakers developed techniques which included older forms of body enhancement. For example, in the form called umbhijo, isiZulu-speaking artists wound strings of beads round cylindrical grass ropes already used in a variety of traditional ways. Early examples of the technique are visible in Angas’ (1849) images of isiZulu-speaking men in the vicinity of Natal. Here the ropes are joined together to form the upper part of back aprons covering the buttocks, a technique also seen in the belts of girdles from late-19th century collections.
It is important to understand that the development of beadwork traditions in South Africa were part of a global cultural phenomenon in the 19th century. Beadwork flourished in Europe, spurred on in England for example, by the mid-19th century relaxing of a sumptuary tax on glass that enabled the importation of large quantities of beads from Italy and Bohemia.
Black African recipients of beads, like their colonised counterparts in many other parts of the world, seized this new material and exploited its potential to create new and essentially modern traditions. Through the use of beads to replace or complement older forms they could both modernise their own and resist European cultural impositions. Yet the traditions thus created were, and still are, also subject to consistent and calculated change, something which a comparison of early beadwork and its photographs against contemporary equivalents make quite clear.
Understanding fluidity - the kinds of global flows that Appiah (1996) suggests define modernity - and the impossibility of fixed and essential identities will enable South Africans to see beadwork as neither just ethnic accoutrements for ceremonial occasions, nor as hallowed and fixed traditional forms. The traditions of which they are part are malleable; they have histories and they have present iterations. Whether they ‘belong’ to anyone exclusively is open to debate.
Techniques Used in African Beadwork:
- Peyote stitch
- Brick stitch
- Loom weaving
- Stringing
- Embroidery
- Wirework
- Bead weaving
The Maasai colors and its meaning
Contemporary Jewelry in South Africa
Contemporary jewelry practice in South Africa is experiencing a revival, as artists draw inspiration from the country’s rich natural, cultural, social, and political landscapes. South Africa, often referred to as the “Rainbow Nation” due to its diverse racial and ethnic groups, celebrates its cultural variety in all forms of art.
Recently, efforts have been made to address the limited exposure South African contemporary jewelry artists face as they strive to establish their unique style in the post-apartheid era. To understand the current approach to contemporary jewelry in South Africa, it’s crucial to consider its historical development.
Before the 1970s, there was limited documentation available regarding the practice of contemporary jewelry in South Africa. However, it’s noteworthy that the inception of contemporary jewelry in South Africa was largely initiated by skilled immigrants. These goldsmiths, primarily from countries like Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Austria, arrived in South Africa during the 1950s to seek adventure and establish their jewelry workshops. Most of these workshops catered to the commercial jewelry industry, which had been well-established in South Africa since the 1900s, driven by the country’s gold, platinum, diamond, and precious and semi-precious stone reserves.
The early 1970s marked a significant period in the history of contemporary jewelry in South Africa and can be referred to as its “golden age,” albeit a brief one. This was mainly the result of the establishment in 1973 of the Goldsmiths Guild of South Africa, in Johannesburg, by a group of South African goldsmiths, led by Peter Cullman. The objective of the guild was to promote South African contemporary jewelry through national and international exhibitions, to raise awareness of contemporary jewelry practice in South Africa, and to foster the exchange of information regarding innovative designs and techniques applied in this field. Despite its initial success and ambitious mission, the guild encountered challenges in the late 1980s that eventually led to its discontinuation. The primary reasons for this decline were a lack of government support and the prevailing political instability during that period.
Many of the guild members developed training programs to address the need for more skilled jewelers and to stimulate the growth of the jewelry industry. Private and tertiary institutions contributed to an increase in locally made jewelry pieces, as well as the emergence of contemporary jewelry designs.
Many of today’s South African contemporary jewelers are products of the country’s tertiary training institutions. The first local generation of South African contemporary jewelers, most of whom graduated during the 1980s, include Errico Cassar, Verna Jooste, Liz Loubser, Kitty Schneider, Marchand van Tonder, Chris de Beer, Carine Terreblanche, Beverley Price, John Skotnes, and Nanette Veldsman.
This group of artists began to, perhaps subconsciously, shift away from a predominantly Eurocentric aesthetic in their work. Subsequently, they can be seen as the pioneers who embarked on a journey to develop a more distinctive South African design identity, focusing (though not exclusively) on translating local cultural motifs, naturalistic motifs, traditional crafts, personal narratives, and social comments in their work.
From as early as the 1950s, South African jewelers applied various motifs, mainly derived from cave paintings, from the indigenous tribes known as the Khoi and the San. These motifs were interpreted from a Eurocentric modernist approach to create the first identifiably South African jewelry.
Today, South African contemporary jewelry continues to incorporate cultural motifs. For instance, one of South Africa’s leading contemporary artists, Beverley Price, subtly integrates textures like chevrons and dots in her neckpiece, Mapungubwe Re-mined. In contrast, Khanya Mthethwa takes a more personal approach to interpreting South African cultural motifs, using the image of a cow in her latest works. In the collection Echoes of the Past, Mthethwa seeks to confront the effects of colonialism by using symbolic elements like cow skulls to defy erasure and to celebrate the role of the female figure. Mthethwa’s artistic vision centers on the reclamation and celebration of indigenous narratives, achieved by blending her Zulu heritage with ancient Greek symbolism, drawing inspiration from Greek gods and goddesses whose statues were historically important forms of cultural documentation.
Local contemporary jewelry artists have incorporated various botanical and wildlife themes since the 1950s, drawing inspiration and materials from the rich natural offerings of South Africa. This trend continues today. However, the way these motifs are expressed has evolved, sometimes taking on metaphorical interpretations. For instance, Marlene de Beer uses porcelain thorn tree branches in her neckpieces, titled Thicker than Water, In Sickness and in Health, and Until Death Us Do Part. Another example of botanical influence can be seen in the work of Liz Loubser, who meticulously reproduces the indigenous fire sticks plant (Euphorbia tirucalli) as metal brooches. Loubser’s motivation stems from her fascination with biomimicry, and she uses her passion for plants and handcrafted jewelry to explore these concepts.
Crafts appear to be the paradigm South African contemporary jewelry is most closely associated with in terms of the techniques and materials used. In the initial years following the end of apartheid, many contemporary jewelers, much like the early immigrant goldsmiths, drew inspiration from indigenous crafts to shape the elusive “South African” identity in their creations. Sam Vincent’s neckpiece, titled Gathered, serves as an example of South African crafts redefined within contemporary jewelry. Traditional Zulu beadwork, which customarily communicates identity and social status, was incorporated into the design. Vincent’s intention reflects a distinctive approach by substituting traditional Zulu bead motifs with PC motherboard patterns. Through this, Vincent demonstrates how crafts can be reinterpreted in contemporary jewelry when the validity, meaning, and properties of the materials are explored and redefined.
Any form of political commentary and social criticism was censored during the apartheid era. With South Africa’s new democracy, artists now have the freedom to question various aspects of the state. In the brooch titled First World Problems, Eric Loubser comments on the issues faced in South Africa and Africa compared to developed countries. The polluted pond on the brooch’s back represents how adopting Western lifestyles has led to problems like pollution, prompting consideration of how Africa might differ without colonization. Artists can also now more freely express social commentary through their work. Chris de Beer reflects on his spirituality and questions the precious materials associated with various religious artifacts in his work titled Brooches for the Week.
While making a living as a contemporary jeweler can be challenging, the abundance of local inspiration, materials, and techniques has inspired the work of a small group of South African jewelry artists who are carving a name for themselves locally and internationally. As our international contemporaries are aware, this is no easy feat. Neither is creating a unique identity in contemporary jewelry that is synonymous with post-apartheid South Africa.
Despite multiple initiatives aimed at increasing exposure for South African contemporary jewelers, such as events like the Contemporary Jewellery Forum, held at the University of Johannesburg in 2017 and 2018, and the South African Contemporary Jewellery Awards, hosted in 2018 and 2019, the contemporary jewelry movement in South Africa lost its momentum after the COVID-19 pandemic.
At Shiny Rock Polished, we have a passion for South African jewellery, and we are proud to offer a wide range of high-quality gemstone jewellery available for purchase online.
Where to Experience South African Beadwork:
- Visit local craft markets and fairs across South Africa.
- Explore cultural villages and museums.
- Engage with community-based tourism initiatives.
- Explore art galleries and contemporary craft stores in urban areas.
- Attend cultural festivals and events.
The Enduring Legacy
African jewelry is seldom just ornamental; religion, rituals and ceremonies play a large part. Found objects are often included and can carry personal and symbolic meanings for the wearer.
Traditionally African jewelry has been used to adorn necks, ears, arms, legs, toes, hair and waists and can be pierced, strapped or sewn on.
The history of beading in South Africa is a testament to the profound cultural significance of this craft. From its ancient origins to its role in resistance and cultural preservation, beading has served as a visual language, connecting individuals to their heritage and fostering a sense of community.
