Mdukatshani - Fifty Years of Beading

The homestead of Mcineni Dladla and his two wives, Buzukuthini Mtshali and Xinile Mvelase.

Electricity arrived in 2006, water in 2009. Although there wasn’t a ceremony for either, there should have been. The water was like a miracle. The women stood at the taps and watched it flow. On and off. On and off. An infinite supply to fill their containers for ever. The taps were communal, and the water would be sporadic, but just for a moment they could believe in the impossible. The days of fetching water from the river were over. They could rest their aching knees. One routine that didn’t change was the annual exodus to the highveld in search of thatch. Every winter a third of our crafters asked time off from beads to cut grass. They would be away two months, camping in the cold, counting their bundles into separate piles. The grass was free but it wasn’t cheap. One bundle for the farmer, one for themselves, with the added cost of a hired truck to bring the load home when it was ready. There was comfort in thatch which the old people missed when their RDP houses arrived. The first were completed in July 2012, square grey boxes of iron and cement with windows that let in the cold. Soon they would be part of the landscape, bare little houses, occupied with pride – but not by their intended owners. For they were a promise to the young, not the old. The youth liked the hemmed in modernity, the break with tradition, the cement and the iron. But the old wanted the warmth of a fire on the floor, and like the amadlozi , the family spirits, they needed to live under thatch.

First you collect the materials, then you build. Phumelele Mbatha has an exquisite hand for crafts but is not exempt from the toil of tasks at home, like collecting these rocks for a new building with her son Mdidiyeli.

Dhayimani Dladla and his family have rebuilt their home more than once since they were forced off Mdukatshani during the government removals of 1969. Today he is is back, sitting in the sun with his wife Kanyisile Masoka, a veteran beader. They have rebuilt on land returned to the Mthembus by the Mdukatshani Rural Development Trust. At rest at last.

Mdukatshani – Fifty Years of Beading

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