Mdukatshani - Fifty Years of Beading

We had a lot to learn about the valley we now called home, with its old scars, and its invisible structures, and its guns. The guns were part of the sounds at night, scattering the moonlight, echoing off the cliffs, speaking a language we couldn’t understand. Not yet. Literacy would come gradually, learning the calibre, the direction of the shots. But it wasn’t information we wanted. We had come for other reasons. We didn’t want to get involved. It was background noise, but hard to ignore when it disrupted the details of our lives. It was always there, asserting reality, forcing us to cope with crisis. In time we would learn there were no clear lines of separation. What we came for, and what we were asked to do – they merged into something simpler. A test of the limits of love? The beginning was easier. We put up tents in a beautiful place, overwhelmed by the landscape and people. We were living among the Mthembus and Mchunus, tribal people with a sense of independence that had grown out of poverty and being ignored by the world. They offered us a watchful neutrality. We were living on land they considered their own. Whatever the outward appearance of things, they would set the rules of the engagement. We were not entirely strangers. “Don’t you remember us?” the women asked, pointing to rooftops up in the hills thatched with grass gathered at Maria Ratchitz. We used to open the farm to thatch cutters every autumn, and they had been among the regulars. The grass was free, they had a place to sleep, and there was a daily ration of amasi (sour milk). The woman giggled. The grass cutting season had become a holiday. “In fact we didn’t go back to cut the grass we went back for the taste of your amasi !” The woman were beautiful with ochered hair, wooden earplugs, and arms full of heavy silver bangles, their pleated leather skirts flounced when they moved, so climbing up a path could look like dancing.

Bathulise Madonda came from Springvale, a strict and temperamental craft teacher who taught the first beaders at Mdukatshani. Here she looks after a student’s child.

The first women to join the Mdukatshani bead group were the two wives of Sweliswe Dladla, Divane Ndimande (pictured) and Jaji Khumalo. The family was close, but destitute, and in the 1980s the father, mothers and all 12 children would be treated for TB. Divane spent six months in hospital, her four-year-old daughter, Zephi,was there for four. Both women are still doing beads today. Divane Ndimande then … and Divane Ndimande today, 40 years later

Mdukatshani – Fifty Years of Beading

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