Arts and Africana: hierarchies of material culture

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Myths, Monuments, Museums; New Premises? 16-18 July, 199

Historical dimensions in the study of figurative wood-carving in South Africa

ican Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 17 March 1986.It is a widely accepted and disseminated tenet in virtually all the literature on African art that no tradition of figurative sculpture comparable to that of West and Central Africa existed in Southern Africa. This notion has bad and continues to have such wide currency in the literature that many blacks in South Africa are entirely unaware of the existence of their own artistic heritage. The propagation and perpetuation of this myth has been predicated on the most meagre of evidence. It is significant in the light of the argument that follows, that the South African Government itself, in pamphlets issued for the information of prospective white immigrants from Europe, continues to propagate this view of black South Africans as "fine-art" less. Here I am mast concerned with the presentation of these peoples as having had no tradition of figurative free-standing sculpture as it was this form of material culture which had the widest acceptance in Europe and America as "Art". This situation, has been exacerbated by the tendency in all the general literature on African art to represent Southern Africa with photographs of utilitarian objects such as headrests, milk pails and spoons among others. What this paper will attempt, then, is to examine why this myth has gained such wide acceptance and it will be examined in relation both to the history of the study or lack thereof of woodcarving traditions in South Africa and to the actual distribution, of such traditions

Scars, beads, bodies: pointure and punctum in nineteenth-century “Zulu” beadwork and its photographic imaging

In the nineteenth century, two imports to South Africa, beadwork and photography, were to impact on the ways in which people presented themselves to the gaze of others. Both required some forms of pointing and stitching, both within the things they constructed, and between the things they constructed and the bodies of those they made visible. Both were imported via colonial intrusion and were used to control the local population by visibly binding them to particular identities. At the same time local populations used these imports to reinforce their own identities and to speak back to the power of the colonists. The first import, of glass beads to the east coast, resulted in a tradition of beadwork in a multitude of styles. I examine the ways in which beadwork can to be linked to isiZulu-speakers’ scarification in the way it is tied to the body, worn and sometimes even stitched into the hair. I argue that these praxes talk of beadwork as a creation of a second level of skin and of a combined, layered set of meanings and identities. The second import, photography, allowed the different manners of scarring and of wearing beadwork to be recorded over a long time span. By bringing together the indexical function of photography (via Barthes) to record identities, the pointing of the camera at the object to be fixed, the bodies, the scars and the beadwork and, I argue, following Jacques Derrida’s (2009 [1978]) notion of "pointure", that the photographs have been laced onto, and entangle irretrievably with, that which they supposedly “represent”