Mdukatshani - Fifty Years of Beading

Our campsite at the top of the cliffs above the Thukela river

MDUKATSHANI But time was running out on us. By 1974 we knew the lease on Maria Ratchitz mission would not be renewed. We had a year to pack up and go. We were facing closure when a new site for the project was discovered on the Weenen-Msinga boundary- three farms known collectively as Mdukatshani. The Chairman’s Fund of the Anglo-American Corporation helped to raise the money to buy the land, and by June 1975 we had settled into a life in tents. It would be a year before the first stone and thatch buildings were completed, a year we juggled long distance visits to Springvale, while struggling to keep in touch with Lucy Twala when neither of us had a phone. Eventually the African Arts Centre agreed to take on the grass mat project at Springvale, but nobody wanted the beads. The difficulty was the weighing involved, the hours spent at the scale. Every packet handed out had to be weighed, and weighed again when the finished work came in. A loss of ten grams might seem insignificant but multiplied over the course of the year could leave a big hole in the bank balance. We camped with the bead boxes covered by a leaky old tarpaulin. We would deal with them later, after the move. They were not important. They could wait. But we had forgotten to take account of our teacher, Bathulise Madondo. Living in a pup tent had done nothing for her temper, and within two months, long before we were ready, she was teaching a bead class under a tree. Bathulise had come to us from Springvale, an unmarried woman who demanded respect and was going to be trained as an organiser. She would never be easy to manage. She was tiny, fierce and temperamental, a tough teacher, sure of her gifts, who tended to terrorise her students. Anything they could do, she could do better. Spinning wool, weaving, or threading beads. Her students were willing to humour her for they could come and go as they liked. The classes were informal and a novelty. An occasional hour of entertainment in a day. Not real work, like digging a field. It would be years before we had a disciplined group of crafters who could be trusted to meet a deadline on time.

The corner of the farm looking across the Thukela river to the Mthembu tribal area of Msusamphi

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Mdukatshani – Fifty Years of Beading