SANDRA KLOPPER

REINVENTING ZULU TRADITION

The Modernism of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe's Figurative Relief Panels

When the acclaimed South African photographer Lynn Acutt visited the Zulu town of Nongoma in 1937, he bought two large figurative pokerwork panels from an artist who has become known as Qwabe (figure 1.1). They feature depictions of contemporary urban life interspersed with scenes related to the history of Zulu king Cetshwayo and his son and successor, Dinuzulu. In theme and content, these panels resemble a less ambitious but equally interesting set that was found in an antique shop in Namibia before being donated to the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban in 1980. While the first set, now also in the Killie Campbell Collections, focuses primarily on momentous events prior to Dinuzulu's seven- year banishment to St. Helena in 1889, the second set appears to record his subsequent incarceration in 1908, during his trial for treason in Pietermaritzburg for harboring the wife of the leader of the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion, in which Africans had sought to overturn a poll tax imposed on rural households in present- day KwaZulu-Natal (figure 1.5). I argue in this chapter that both works warrant careful scrutiny for the bold modernity of their direct references to racial discrimination and their depictions of the contrasting realities of rural and urban life in a society in which exploitative migrant labor practices had become the norm (figure 1.2). These panels also raise crucial questions about Qwabe's remarkable, if short-lived, interest in constructing complex narratives based on oral and popular sources, such as photographs and postcards, thus drawing both on traditional Zulu poetic traditions and modern technologies of reproduction.

The advent of modern Zulu arts in the twentieth century had deep roots in earlier traditions of royal patronage, which go back to the rise of the Zulu kingdom in the early nineteenth century. The great warrior king Shaka and his immediate successors employed skilled artists and craftsmen to produce prestige items for the king and his royal entourage. These included arm and neck rings cast in brass; intricately carved staffs of office, with complex abstract finials made from various hardwoods; and monumental chairs (each carved from a single block of wood), originally inspired by examples acquired from Portuguese traders at Delagoa Bay in present-day Mozambique. Some artists attained considerable fame, among them Mtomboti kaMangcengeza, who produced two chairs for the third Zulu king, Mpande, before his death in 1872. Since no one but the king could sit on a chair, and those approaching him had to crawl on the ground, prestige items like these had an important symbolic function, affirming hierarchical power relations that were further reinforced through royal control over trade imports, like beads and blankets. The second Zulu king, Dingane, who had a keen interest in beads, once asked the American missionary George Champion whether it would be possible to "get a beadmaker to live with him." People visiting Dingane's royal homestead in the late 1830s were received in a large thatched beehive dwelling, with twenty-one supporting posts, covered from top to bottom with beads of various colors. A great champion of the arts, he was also interested in other forms of expressive culture, such as praise poetry, which he promoted actively throughout his reign.

Following the destruction of the Zulu kingdom by British forces in 1879, the disruption of royal patronage forced most specialists to cultivate new patrons, ultimately boosting the production of various skillfully honed household items, such as headrests and spoons for the inhabitants of ordinary homesteads. Some artisans also began to work for external markets, carving figurative staffs and walking sticks, which they sold as mementos to soldiers and other foreign visitors passing through the country during the South African war of 1899–1902. These artists generally relocated to burgeoning colonial centers such as Pietermaritzburg and Durban, where they established small workshops aimed at supplying the growing market for carved curios. By the early twentieth century, enterprising efforts to tap into additional sources of income had also encouraged several carvers to produce novelty items for indigenous patrons, including meat plates decorated with organic designs inspired by the craftsmanship of German missionaries, and small open-shelf wall cupboards, commonly decorated with inlaid or burnished geometric patterns, in emulation of the early settler practice of fashioning comparatively inexpensive but visually arresting storage for cooking pots and other household objects.

Indigenous interest in storage racks of this kind seems to have spread rapidly among African Christians who, as a sign of their rejection of traditionalist norms and values, abandoned the long-established practice of living in circular thatch- covered beehive dwellings in favor of European-style wattle and daub homes. But these racks also became popular in remote rural communities, where they were used to store rolled-up grass sleeping mats that to this day form part of the wedding gifts brides present to the relatives of their future husbands. The mat racks produced now are still commonly decorated with geometric patterns, but instead of carving elaborate designs into already burnished...