Mdukatshani - Fifty Years of Beading

The Learning Centre was built in 1992 with a grant from the Equal Opportunity Foundation. Because the boys’ massive rock was too heavy to be moved up to the building, it came to rest to form the main step at the entrance.

A HOME FOR THE BEADS The beads had spent 15 years in a rat-infested cellar when they were moved to the Learning Centre in 1996. No more snakes in the boxes! Or not quite as many. When the cellar was built in 1981 it had been intended as a permanent home for the beads, a fireproof storeroom, half underground, that would soon become notorious for its cobras. Nobody entered without a stick, ready for close encounters. It was a place of solitude, invisible to the world, with a single patch of light in the open doorway. The beads were stored in sturdy wooden shipping crates which had once done duty as furniture. They had been used as benches in the waterwheel building before it burnt to the ground. Nobody would ever forget the date. Friday the Thirteenth, July 1981. It looked like an act of sabotage, and although the evidence suggested a group of militant right-wing whites, finding a suspect didn’t mitigate the loss as we sifted through the ash of lost documents. Our history had gone, and so had the beads, melted into lumps of coloured rock. The cellar was built in response to the fire, a hollow in the hill dug out as a refuge and given a roof of cement. It was dark, damp and fireproof – but never designed to hold a flood. There were going to be two, nine years apart, the first in September 1987, when the flood also took the waterwheel, and submerged the house. The staff had just retreated from trying to save the beads when a wave caught the cellar and a cobra swam out, still gripping a rat in its mouth. There were cheers and laughter as as it was swept downriver. Bye bye Mfezi ! Bye bye! There was less to laugh at with the second flood, which rose in the night in January 1996, and left us with months of drudgery. Both floods were considered a once-in-a-hundred-year events, which was of little comfort to the clean-up teams who had to clear out the mud, wash the beads, and rebuild the walls.

It had been a bet. The boys said they could do it. Everyone scoffed. It was going to take them two months in 1989, working every afternoon, to move this rock two kilometres down the hill from Koornliver using poles as rollers. The rock would eventually form a massive main step to the building. The boys are, from left to right: Mpikayipeli Sithole, Nkosi Sithole, Zwelithini Mbatha, Nqakide Sithole and Mabuku Dladla. At the time all were refuges from fighting in their home areas and were living at Mdukatshani.

The Learning Centre gardens are spacious, and crafters sit in the winter sun when it is too cold to work inside. Here Fikisile Duma and Monica Lamula wind copper wire off a reel for the bowls they will weave at home.

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Mdukatshani – Fifty Years of Beading