Mdukatshani - Fifty Years of Beading

Sherrell Pitt-Kennedy with one of the first beaders who lived in a tribal area near Limehill. The names of all the early beaders were lost when the project’s records were destroyed by fire in July 1981.

THE BEGINNING Evolving theories around the invention of beads suggest threading something with a hole in the middle was so revolutionary it may have been brought about by a re-wiring of the human brain. Who made the first bead, and why? The innovative leap is a complex problem in evolutionary studies. When the oldest beads in the world – perforated mollusc shells – were discovered in Blombos Cave in the Cape in 2004, the discovery made headlines around the globe. Ancient Shell Jewellery Hints at Language , reported New Scientist . The mollusc shells were at least 75 000 years old and suggested humans had advanced concepts of symbolism and language much earlier than expected. Questions of evolution were far from our mind when we reluctantly ordered our first box of beads in 1969. It was a time of upheaval in South Africa, with thousands of Africans being moved from “white” areas to “black” to tidy the apartheid map. Some of the removals were documented. Many were not. The project now known as Mdukatshani has had two separate histories in two different places (See Page 51). Both were areas of large scale forced removals, so the story of the beads will always be entwined with heartache. Yet without the removals, would there have been any crafts at all? They came into being out of the necessity for opposition, a response to need rather than an outlet for creative talent. Yet creativity has always had a value in itself, something of the spirit to transcend reality, to lift the heart above the real world. This was as true for the first women to join the project, as it is true for the women who are still doing crafts today. When the bead project started in 1969 it was part of a larger craft programme initiated by Church Agricultural Projects (CAP) an ecumenical organisation based on the Maria Ratschitz Catholic Mission near Wasbank, KwaZulu-Natal. CAP was founded in 1965 to develop derelict church land to produce food and training for rural African communities, but it had only been at work a year when its plans were disrupted by the looming threat of government removals. The district – and the mission – were officially white, but the large African communities surrounding the mission were living on black-owned land, or “black spots”. Despite attempts to prevent the removals, in January 1968 government lorries arrived to move an estimated 9000 people to tents on the veld in a Scheduled Bantu Area called Limehill, 30 km away. Long before the removals CAP was involved in legal and practical support, and the crafts were one move among many that would help displaced families in the months ahead. Initially the raw materials for the crafts came from the mission: osiers for cane furniture, local clays for pottery, and Angora goats and merino sheep for wool. Why start on beads?

There would never have been any beads at all had it not been for a young sculptor, Sherrell Pitt-Kennedy, who joined us as a volunteer early in 1969. She came with her small son Seamus, and using her training in fine arts, soon transformed the pottery and the basketwork projects. Her heart was in beads, however. She was a child of the Swinging Sixties. One box , she pleaded. Just one box. She’d sell them to her hippy friends. But there were several problems with beads. They were expensive, they were in short supply (because sanctions were having an effect on South Africa wholesalers’ shelves were almost empty) and they had become a dying craft, even in African areas. Sherrell was going to get her box of beads, but she would have to walk the hills to find the beaders. She eventually found six women willing to try, one of them a sangoma (traditional healer) known as Gogo Nkosi, who would change the course of the beads.

A crafter doing beads alongside her thatch after her removal to Limehill

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Mdukatshani – Fifty Years of Beading