XHOSA BEADWORK AND TEXTILES

The Xhosa-speaking peoples of South Africa include the Xhosa themselves and the Thembu, Mfengu, Mpondo, Bomvana, Xesibe, and Bhaca.

The special click sounds in the Xhosa language, together with other aspects of Xhosa culture, were influenced by the Khoisan peoples.

Imported European beads fueled the extraordinary beadwork traditions that Xhosa women created. At first, beads were extremely expensive and traded as currency. In the mid-1700s a pound of beads bought an ox. In the 1830s, a woman's beadwork might be worth twelve or twenty oxen, and beads costing about 10 cents could be traded for $10-a profit of 10,000% that is a useful index in assessing the aesthetic impact of early beadwork (see display drawers in the South Gallery).

During much of the 20th century, South Africa was the world's largest importer of beads, equaling the imports of the rest of Africa combined. The complete costumes exhibited here date from the 1950s and early 1960s, when beadwork reached its zenith. They were collected by Joan Broster, the leading writer and researcher on Xhosa beadwork. Though readily accessible, beads were still economically important in this era. A bride at marriage typically would have given her groom beadwork worth 20% of the bride-price that his family had paid to hers.

Beadwork was both aesthetic and symbolic. Each Xhosa group developed distinct beadwork conventions that signaled ethnic identity. Within these ethnic conventions, variations in color, pattern, and beadwork type indicated the wearer's age group, marital status, and other specifics. Among the Thembu, for example, diamond shapes could convey how many cattle had been paid for a woman's bride-price and how many children she had; other designs symbolized virginity, pregnancy or such things as stars, trees or rivers.

Xhosa peoples never carved masks or figures for religious ceremonies; rather they honored their ancestors through beadwork and dress at communal gatherings and dances. The dazzle of dancing glass, reflective and refractive, provided the spiritual medium in this overlooked form of African art. The swish and sway of beaded veils worn by Xhosa diviners, for example, induced trance as the spirits passed through the glass. The whiteness of diviners' beads symbolized purity and enlightenment.

Similarly, white clothing was worn for special events, but for everyday wear Xhosa traditionalists wore red ocher on their clothes and bodies, for which they were termed amaQaba, the Red People. Red ocher, called "blood of the earth," was associated with the ancestors, who underwrote fertility and received blood sacrifices, and with menstruation, which precedes conception. Beads were also offered as sacrifices, and on such ritual occasions it was necessary to wear beaded headbands and a long sacrificial necklace.

Fashion was an important factor in Xhosa dress. Victorian fashions and materials had a lasting effect on Xhosa style- seen in full skirts, elaborate turbans, embroidery, and braid-but early bead traders struggled to keep up with rapid changes in color preferences. In the twentieth-century, beadwork styles shifted from one generation to the next, allowing experts to date beadwork to within a decade or two.

Traditional dress declined from the late 1960s because traditionalism was associated with the tribalistic policies of the Apartheid regime. After the introduction of democracy in 1994, traditional dress has been readopted as a sign of pride, and is now commercially produced. Nelson Mandela, who was adopted into the royal Thembu family as a child, sometimes wears traditional costume, as he had done for his sentencing at his treason trial in 1962.