Mdukatshani - Fifty Years of Beading

THE END Or Another Beginning?

This report was completed during the Covid-19 lockdown with a Bead Room full of stock, and most of our customers facing closure. After 50 years had we come to the end of the beads? It is a difficult time to celebrate with the future unknown and full of uncertainty, but it isn’t the first time we have faced a dead end, and the crafters are willing to wait. Even in good years orders have been sporadic, with seasonal shifts between winter and spring. The women have always been ready to diversify, saving in months when orders are plentiful, but prepared for the months when there is no work at all. Today all of the crafters have gardens. Home gardens, communal gardens – and what you might call commercial gardens. More than 92 percent have chickens, and 85 percent have invested in goats, while more than a third of the women are weaving grass mats, amacansi , which are sold locally for ritual purposes. None of these ventures can replace the income from beads, but they provide a buffer, a back-up for the home – and an outlet for the women’s creativity. If a bead order arrives tomorrow, they will rejoice, drop everything and start at once. Meanwhile they try to transform the world around them, taking control, improving the design. It is still a long way to go before the end.

All home gardens are small miracles. Celiwe Kumalo digs for water in a dry river bed at Ncunjane, carefully saving all the homestead spillage to water her vegetables.

Sizani Mbatha, a Mashunka crafter, has carefully saved her earnings to accumulate a small goat flock.

Nyelisile Sithole, a Ncunjane crafter, checks her goats before letting them out of the kraal in the morning.

Ntombizini Mdlolo is one of the original crafters, now in a wheelchair, but still doing beads. Although she is a specialist in beaded sticks, when orders are scarce, she weaves grass mats on a homemade loom, selling them locally for ritual purposes.

A view of a “commercial garden” irrigated by pump on the banks of the Thukela River near Mdukatshani.

Mdukatshani – Fifty Years of Beading

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