Of Severed Heads and Snuff Boxes - “Survivance” and Beaded Bodies in the Eastern Cape, 1897–1934

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2015-10-29
Journal	African Arts
Authors	Anitra Nettleton
Institutions	University of the Witwatersrand
Citations	1

Abstract

This paper is concerned with beadwork made and worn by Mpondomise peoples, isiXhosa-speakers living in the district of Tsolo in the Eastern Cape in South Africa, and their deployment as a means of developing modes of “survivance” (Vizenor 2008: 2011). The particular beadwork items considered here have European, mass-produced snuff boxes attached to indigenously designed and made beaded necklaces (Fig. 1). They form part of a collection made by a lay mission-worker, an Englishman called Frank Cornner, and deposited in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (1926), the British Museum, London (1933), and the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town (1936-1948). The last of these collections was accompanied by an intermittent correspondence between Cornner and Miss Margaret Shaw, who headed the ethnology department of the South African Museum for more than thirty years.1 The collections are remarkably similar in terms of the kinds of objects they contain, although many of the pieces in the Pitt Rivers Museum are older than those in the other two collections. There is no exact date for when Frank Cornner began the collections, but it must post-date 1897, when he arrived at St. Cuthbert’s Mission near Tsolo as a lay teacher.2 A small “museum” of beadwork was still visible at St. Cuthbert’s in 1937, when Alethea Graham arrived at the mission and noted that, “Last year was a famine year and the red people sold their beads for money, so Sr Superior bought a number and sells them, giving the money to the people.”3That the collections were made in the context of a mission is important for a number of reasons. One is that they reflect the mindset of the collector, who saw himself increasingly as collecting the “remnants of a dying tradition” in the midst of a Christian mission whose primary aim was to “civilize” the Mpondomise people, amongst whom the missionaries had established themselves, by “education” and conversion to Christianity.4 The Mpondomise people, whom the missionaries characterized initially as “very wild” (Schofield 1960:n.p.), belonged to two rival polities settled on either side of the Tsitsa River, who were reportedly often at loggerheads with each other over the course of centuries.5 They collectively, however, placed themselves under British “protection” in 1872, a move that allowed the British to introduce new regulations about land occupancy, decrease the power of the hereditary chiefs, and open the gate to an influx of Mfengu peoples into Mpondomise ancestral land (Beinart 1982, Crais 2003, Tyabashe 1996). The Mfengu, also isiXhosa-speakers, were seen by British colonial bureaucrats and missionaries alike as being amenable to conversion and civilization, whereas the Mpondomise were considered resistant (Crais 2003, Schofield 1960, Callaway 1905).6 In 1880 the Mpondomise under Mhlontlo revolted against British rule by instigating a rebellion, killing the British District Commissioner, Hamilton Hope (Crais 2003, Tyabashe 1996). Although the Mpondomise were subjugated almost immediately and peace was restored in 1881 with the return of the magistrates, they remained resistant to conversion, and as late as 1968, Hammond-Tooke recorded that 80% of Mpondomise people in the rural areas still practised traditional religious rites (Hammond-Tooke 1968).Collecting artifacts from local inhabitants within the mission context was conditioned both by this resistance to Christianity and by the institution of new rules of “belonging” by Reverend Gordon on the return of the missionaries and the rebuilding of St. Cuthbert’s. These rules forbade residents of the mission from going “naked,” using red clay on their bodies, attending beer-drinks, having dealings with “witch-doctors” or “making use of their instruments,” all of which were constituent parts of Mpodomise cultural traditions (Schofield 1960:n.p.). The missionaries did not, however, go so far as to demand that indigenous African visitors completely discard traditional forms of clothing, as long as their bodies were largely covered in a manner that the Christians considered seemly (Nettleton 2013). These dress regulations followed those generally enforced in colonial towns in the Cape, from the 1820s onwards, demanding that the “natives” wear clothing that covered their bodies from shoulder to knees.7The mission was the point at which isiXhosa-speaking societies started to divide into two distinct modern groups. One of these included people among whom Christianity and education, delivered along Western lines, became normalized and the ideal. Among the mission rules at St. Cuthbert’s was one that stipulated that all converts’ children should attend school from the age of 6 to 15 years, and all of them were dressed in Western-style clothing. The significance of the mission school was counted in the numbers of intellectuals and skilled people it produced over the years (Callaway 1936). These abantu basesiskolweni (“school people”) were in the minority among isiXhosa-speakers living in the rural areas as late as the 1960s, because of the resilience of traditional belief systems in the face of encroaching Western normative behaviors. The rural dwelling majority formed the second, modern division: the abantu ababomvu (“red people”)—sometimes called, derogatorily, amaqaba (“smeared ones”) by the “school people”—were the repositories of this resilience, retaining many aspects of “Xhosa” traditions (Mayer 1961). But they were also quick to adapt Western materials and objects, making these conform to their own purposes and meanings. It is both their resistance to Western ideologies and their strategic adoption and adaptation of Western manufactured goods in building a lasting “Xhosa” tradition that speak most clearly to Gerald Vizenor’s (2008) useful notion of “survivance” (Fig. 2).Following Vizenor’s claim that “The practices of survivance create an active presence more than the instincts of survival, function, or subsistence” (2008:11), I argue that the beadwork collected by Frank Cornner at St. Cuthbert’s, and by others from countless homesteads of Southern Africa, tells stories of encounter, adaptation, and reinvention. Each beaded item had a specific purpose, or sometimes multiple or serial purposes, generally attached to the bodies of those who owned and wore them, and was made by persons who had a particular relationship to the wearer (Fig. 3). Thus beadwork items could be used to tell stories of relationships with one’s partners, children, and ancestors, with one’s group as a whole, or within the confines of a single body. The formal properties of the beadwork are enmeshed in these sets of relationships and generally appear to have little meaning beyond that, not forming any kind of sign system that can be read programmatically, syntactically, or semantically. The stories it tells are only recoverable through its contexts of use, collection, and contemporary survivals. Yet they can be seen not only as a means of making the survival of indigenous custom present and visible, while adapting and developing imported materials and methods, but also as expressing resistance to European impositions on local customary practices.St. Cuthbert’s mission was, from its inception, run by priests (first only white, but increasingly black) of the Anglican Church; by white women who belonged, and black women who were recruited, to Anglican monastic orders; and by European lay persons. The mission was built using bricks and mortar; a church of stone was erected in 1912 (Fig. 4); and school houses of brick with pine floors were built for various constituencies, including a library and weaving (Fig. 5) and carpentry schools for adults, and a hospital, St. Lucy’s, which is still in operation today, although it is now a provincial facility. St. Cuthbert’s was thus, as were all Christian missions in Africa, constructed as an oasis of Western “civilization” in a sea of Mpondomise tradition.8 In spite of resistance, some Mpondomise people did convert to Christianity, and many of the young people educated there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries went on to become teachers and black intellectuals in the ensuing seventy-year struggle against white domination.9 It was among those who retained their own stories, however—those who found a means of survivance in Vizenor’s terms of a visible and living presence (Vizenor 2010)—that Cornner collected his beadwork items.It is necessary to digress a little here into a history of the use of beads within Southern African cultures because it is germane to the ways in which beadwork items can be read as evidence of survivance. Prior to the ready availability of imported cloth, most people on the southeast coast of Southern Africa dressed in clothing made of skins.10 This dress varied in form and complexity, but it appears to have been embellished with beads made from shells, clay, stones, seeds, and wood (Fig. 6).11 Until around 1750, glass beads were relatively rare in South East Africa generally, as they were mostly imported from sources beyond the continent (Saitowitz 1993). In the late eighteenth century, increasing trade with settlers at the Cape saw a rise in the volumes of glass beads available to people living in the Eastern Cape. By 1820 glass beads underpinned the trade economy of the Mpondo peoples (Peires 1981, Beinart 1982). Once the British allowed trade fairs to be opened up along the border between white settlements and the home territories of the isiXhosa-speakers, vast numbers of beads flooded this market and beads were effectively democratized. What is, however, extraordinary about this is that people in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere began to do things with glass beads that Europeans had never imagined, and in doing so they found ways of both complying with the colonial norms to which they were subject, and confounding them. The forms of beaded body accoutrements conserved in the collections made by Cornner are testament to this, because they were inventive ensembles of body adornment and metaphorical protection that insisted on local thought-systems, made them visible, and simultaneously deflected the powers of European interference.Beaders in the vicinity of Tsolo and St. Cuthbert’s mission created a wonderful miscellany of forms (Nettleton 2013). In many ways the composition of these beadworks is tellingly different from the ways in which seed beads were used in Europe. Perhaps this is because these techniques of beading were developed indigenously—there is no record that the missionaries who instructed African women in South Africa how to sew cloth taught them beading techniques. Alethea Graham, a missionary who spent some thirty years at St. Cuthbert’s, registered her discomfort at having to teach girls in needlework how to make “hideous pinafores” which were subsequently sold in the house craft school.12 Beadwork, which she found more appealing, was ironically regarded as belonging to the realm of “tradition” and was therefore disapproved of in the mission context except where Cornner bought it from outside for placement in a museum.In addition, the beadwork designs seen in this collection are most often geometric abstractions or constructions, mostly constituted of chevrons, diamond shapes, and triangles in a variety of combinations, of a type that now is taken to be typically “African” even though they are, to the trained eye, immediately recognizable as Mpondomise (Figs. 7-8). These beadwork forms do not, however constitute an old tradition dating back to “time immemorial,” as is sometimes claimed by contemporary politicians and indigenous cultural commentators, because their very existence relies on materials that were only introduced to the area 200 years ago in the bulk sufficient for the “tradition” to become commonly held within a wider community. Nevertheless, the Mpondomise beadwork tradition was under continuous development from the time of the first encounters with Europeans: at trade fairs on the boundaries between “Xhosa” and settler territories in the 1820s and via the increasing trade in beads that reached inwards from European settlements in the Cape at Port Natal and Delagoa Bay. The trade fairs, itinerant traders, missionaries, and later trading stores of the kind described by Callaway (1936) and fictionalized by Mda (2000) allowed access to sufficient quantities of beads, thread, needles, and other materials to enable women to make complex beaded objects. The resultant tradition relied ultimately on invention and reinvention of aesthetic patterns and forms by indigenous artists in the face of determined colonial attempts at annihilation of both historical indigenous culture and indigenous versions of modernity.That the acts of survivance embodied in the beadwork are at the same time equivocal and ambivalent is, I argue, part of their efficacy as a means of answering colonial power.13 They allowed for the survival of particular forms of dressing the body, where necklaces formerly made more simply of clay, wood, or metal beads became complex forms in different colors and textures, layered on bodies of indigenes at “home” that had otherwise to be covered in particularly foreign ways in spaces designated as “civilized” by the colonial masters. The ambivalence of survivance could here be seen as inherent in balancing tradition’s historical integrity in the forms of clothing used against its “modern” visibility. This modernity is built not only into the materials of the facture of beadwork and the newly converted abstract geometric designs,14 but also in the other forms either accreted to the beautifully made objects or transformed into newly traditionalized objects. Among the accreted elements were, for example, imported brass buttons used to fasten necklaces and belts, or as final points of exclamation at the ends of fringes, cloth, leather belts, and safety pins. The buttons used on the band of one fringed apron in the British Museum Collection (Fig. 9) had been removed from a European military uniform,15 thus introducing into the visual ensemble aspects of indigenous peoples’ relationships of power with the invader.This is even more evident in a set of extraordinary necklaces worn by men and women, in which the multiple-panel necklace has a long front panel from which is suspended a snuff box with the head of one of the monarchs of the British Empire embossed on the lid. The necklaces thus juxtaposed a new tradition of abstract geometric design of extraordinary manual skill, of visual and geometric acuity, with a European tradition of naturalistic imagery. The snuff boxes, which were made in Britain, bear images of the foreign monarchs to whom the Mpondomise were subject from 1872 onwards, from Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901) (Fig. 1) to (r. (Fig. and (r. (Fig. The images on the snuff boxes all the designs of or where the is with a than the used on in a British this almost as a form of continuous it is also a very on a particular form of one not to Mpondomise This imported to the Eastern Cape, these snuff boxes appear to have been among the There are in all of the collections made by Cornner, but there are in which monarchs are In the Pitt Rivers collection, the of the Queen Victoria appears relatively but is while and in the British Museum collection, and is the evident in in the Iziko South African Museum collection from which is the of the These thus with the of of these collections by the and reflect not only the patterns of of these snuff boxes into the Eastern Cape over a but the of the British and power and an of Mpondomise to for a with this of I to the ambivalence in the history of Mpondomise with the for British protection of their in 1872, the Mpondomise British power and in some ways to it to their own they against its and thus the of their of and in the British Crais has the Mpondomise and their attempts to European and to their own ends as an by the Mpondomise to he (Crais What more visible to make one’s survival and resistance British colonial power evident than to materials of one’s with the colonial and images of its more objects of of the head of the colonial of the of the British in this context could be read as of the necklaces the of British monarchs as as for their used by Mpondomise people in multiple from to with the ancestors, or as to to with a What these images is a naturalistic of power not by Southern African peoples, and not by those of the Eastern Cape to European These images make the of British monarchs present in a them to be around and of the of of is the of the of by the British in a that he to the of other in the is to “The in which stories of of are on both of the peoples This set of has had a very long (2008) that stories of were through and his about the significance of the head of on a particular to this In as a of in the and South Africa when he claimed to have found in and it back to South Africa for The claim of of the from is, however, to a record by of the of an being taken to on the and of claimed to have been by in the in a on a The is also in where the of both the British of the of head his in the of the by and the local of the having been and the removed to Britain, are to be in among living isiXhosa-speakers the significance of the stories of in African as of aspects of power where metaphorical is the and the in as was of the whose lay of the and at a time the Mpondomise among the of this must have been in among Mpondomise people from early Mpondomise were, various polities to their for their powers with The of a of the is recorded by as having been to of the the of the British at in the of the in (Peires by that of in this of white were to in the early as from African as the and Mpondomise for for of (Peires that of considered as the more be taken and used by the it is that of their own people was considered to the both as a or of but also in the from the This history that not only were the Mpondomise to have had some of the acts of some British but also that they considered to have has that the by the British in their attempts to the to a among isiXhosa-speakers of now that many or had been (2008) points to the ambivalence of the British to these acts as being or as the British were of as and it appears that the Mpondomise and other isiXhosa-speakers were to them, but in as repositories of this it is to at the on in the Cornner collections as expressing aspects of it is that the images of British which with the notion of the head of have power because they belonged to has noted that, the of among the and the British are called by and thus in the same But the images through which these of were within the colonial context were Although the on the snuff are similar to the specific used for the people who used and the snuff boxes must have been with the of of the head of on that through the of the Eastern Cape from early on in the history of trade and and of have to the and the of by their of the necklaces of this type collected by Cornner had different snuff boxes at the ends of their constructed beaded from those with the embossed with an at its is made up of of beads by that create the front The of the clearly by the and use of an band to lay both in its use as a and because it as a in the mission and a sign of access to Western and This is in a Alethea Graham in the of her having to at the St. Cuthbert’s mission for her with the and it was not only the a it also it against but in the mission it was to have been used as a for and to it was imported from the it have been a relatively In the indigenous however, it also be seen to into of and having a snuff which power have a particular on the who wore other necklace with a snuff (Fig. in the Pitt Rivers Museum in has an even more complex of of beads by seed beads, all and by of white beads to create similar The snuff box has a of appears to be Queen of on one side and a on the Queen is not in the of the snuff box but in a European with her on her set and her in a of made of appear to be not to the kind of made of beads and worn by isiXhosa-speakers and similar to the white beads in the necklace Yet the beads are here as worn one the other and are completely by the extraordinary of the necklace to which the is The indigenous use of the imported materials the by the and are at here is thus by the visual set up not only through the white relationship to but also in the relationship to in the embossed snuff and the and of the and others with in their The to which these were all part of the that in the trading stores of the rural Eastern but also formed part of a of on a cultural and aesthetic these necklaces as a tell of encounters between colonial and indigenous cultures is in the ways in which elements are and into a newly set of objects, but more so than in the side of the Queen snuff on the of the Queen however, appears with local African except within the context of the mission and the trading small on the in the and in the the not the vast open spaces and of Mpodomise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth In the a small mission settled in its midst have been almost it became by particular by the who the mission in the year of have had of a foreign and than those the of the attempts to the African land to convert to Western ways by of in the (Fig. and did not the of the mission and the into the twentieth century, and the to of and is still not generally In this African which was that of the beadwork items to which the belonged, the head and the not an for which the wearer some kind of but an in and mission and there be to the of the on this for an the among the people the and the accompanied by of who were to the from the of the in the sea or particular bodies of is to have seen on the of a on the saw the new people, who were to be and the new in the sea and The new people were to new and to the largely through them from the of British colonial The of their from their or appear to in with older traditions the of powers and with and to the in which they The Mpondomise for example, was in a in the River, where he was of and and a 1981, Hammond-Tooke the of the forms the of the of a white of with at a be to a wider of that was in a number of different at about the time that the snuff boxes were into use in the Eastern Cape. the are white when they are in their isiXhosa-speaking the Mpondo are white in the of their and they were often to have under the of the on one side of the snuff box and the of her on the could have particular of with indigenous the of the of a into an of one which the of of and an which a of a particular of power and a use of a necklace of this kind was, to the of the or who had it as a sign of and to the of the wearer also to the of beadwork as a means of Among generally, the is with the ancestral and in the it was often by of items as shells, and other items of extraordinary seed beads became more into the of adornment made by women, they many of the older or were sometimes with them. Cornner collected of the more to those beaded items which both and design panel necklaces collected by Cornner, very each one is from all others to its own and make its wearer distinct from his or her They were from one to the particular and different as they collected by Cornner and deposited by at also point to the properties attached to in the Pitt Rivers Museum being from which the important parts were removed they (Fig. that beaded necklaces were the of but by the later they were worn by young women, often in the first of Mpondomise who St. Cuthbert’s mission in the a from the of from a school (Fig. and the taken by and of young women at a in Mpondomise the late a people almost beaded items a it is not to from all the they were all in of the images of the of the British by the time the last was of the necklaces has but they were worn in a form of a particularly It is thus that the beaded created by Mpondomise in the late nineteenth remained important visual of back to colonial power in very distinct and ways into the This visible beadwork tradition however, almost completely and is mostly through the collections made by Frank Cornner, by a glass ancestral of the in the of St. Cuthbert’s in Tsolo (Fig.

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Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00251

References

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