Mdukatshani - Fifty Years of Beading

OUR HELPERS Help seems an inadequate word for the voluntary support which has kept us going over 50 years. It would be impossible to list all the individuals and groups who have helped the project in different ways, providing skills we lacked, arranging sales and exhibitions, raising funds, tracking down supplies and suppliers, collecting materials like plastic bags, printing our reports, doing our accounts, and always being on standby in moments of need. Had the project had salaried staff we would have closed down long ago. Instead, from our first tentative beginnings, we have been dependent on voluntary help. We never went out looking for volunteers. They came to us by chance, from different directions, and they sustained us with friendships that have lasted down the years.

Winifred Philips Winifred Phillips was a trained occupational therapist when she arrived at Maria Ratschitz from England in 1971. A volunteer with the Quaker Overseas Voluntary Service, her many activities included short courses on beads for the tribal women from Limehill who came to the mission for a week at a time, “sleeping and working on the floor, worried about children at home, excited about being away, chatting all day and night”. The courses were a useful preparation for Springvale where the women started to arrive at 6 a.m. “Women with the most exotic headgear and ringlets, clayed faces, beads and brightly-coloured garments.” Ready to drop, 12 hours later, she could no longer see in the dark. But there were compensations. A hot bath in a tin tub under the stars. Winifred only intended to spend a year in South Africa but her stay became permanent when she married William Bond, a co-volunteer. Today they live in Cape Town where Winifred teaches crafts at the Waldorf Michael Mount School.

Winifred with her husband William Bond.

Linda Woodley Linda Woodley was preparing to return to Canada after a working holiday in South Africa, when she came to Maria Ratschitz on a weekend visit in 1972. She would eventually stay three years, offering help and support through a difficult period that made her part of the family forever. A trained occupational therapist she not only worked on the crafts, she also ran literacy classes, with a special interest in how to adapt IQ tests for Africans who had no education. She was a tireless teacher, helping her students struggle with concepts that were alien to them, and guiding them to make sense of letters on a page. Linda was with us when we moved to Mdukatshani, a small Canadian flag flying from her tent. Although she never did succeed in baking brownies on a camp fire, there were always little boys to eat the charred remains of her experiments. It was hard to let her go when she married and returned to Canada, where she resumed her old career, and produced a family of three.

Linda with Khwengce Mzolo, teaching basic literacy.

Julia Meintjes Julia Meintjes first visited Mdukatshani in 2004, a visit that would be the first of many, eventually leading to a collaborative project known as Threads of Africa which has enlarged the horizons of the crafters who work with her. Although Julia started with beaded bowls, she soon moved to designs in multiple metals, such as gold, silver, copper and brass. In 2011 she organised an exhibition, The Earth is Watching Us, at the Gold Museum in Cape Town, which gave three weavers their first flight in an aeroplane. Because the metal bowls are sold on an art market, Julia has been able to raise the wages of the weavers, while encouraging increasingly fine work.

Julia sits at a workshop at Mdukatshani, learning a weaving stitch from Bandlile Mtshali.

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Mdukatshani – Fifty Years of Beading