Culture and expression of identity: The Ndebele of South Africa

BBeadwork and wall paintings in Ndebele communities have evolved over time and have a long history that can be traced back to the 1940s. Art production as an expression of Ndebele identity and the attachment to this form of material culture were largely shaped by the defeat by the Boers in 1883 and the resulting loss of independence and sovereignty, decentralisation and dispersing of the tribe, dispersal patterns after loss of land, and scattering of their polities.

After the defeat, beaded adornment and architectural designs were maintained as a prominent visual form of material culture to deliberately claim a consciousness of Ndebele identity. In other words, paintings in particular became an expression of cultural resistance and continuity. Everyday intricacies of what constituted Ndebele-ness and their values were communicated through these wall paintings. For example, women’s roles at home or in the domestic arena were aesthetically reflected through wall paintings. These paintings also cast women as nurturers of Ndebele cultural identity.

DDifferent kinds of beaded adornment convey messages of social meanings such as age sets and stages of growth from childhood to adulthood. For example, blankets commonly worn by Southern Ndebele women have different beads distinguishing newly married women from older women. Beadwork has a communicative power especially to the insider who can distinguish different types of beaded adornments and associate them with the respective age set. Additionally, beaded adornments serve a cultural purpose in ceremonial traditions, like girls and boys’ initiations where the initiates and their parents wear beaded garments, which symbolically communicate the value attached to initiation.

AAspects of Ndebele art designs have been appropriated by the post-1994 government as part of crafting a national identity as expressed in paintings in streets, billboards and tourist vouchers. This has preserved Ndebele cultural practice in many ways and Esther Mahlangu, one of Ndebele culture's icons, uses the colours of the South African flag in some of her paintings.

Mahlangu has a sustained interest in expressing, preserving and nurturing Ndebele cultural identity by producing beadwork and wall paintings that have earned her an iconic status of representation of Ndebele culture in South Africa and beyond. The visibility of Ndebele art forms in public spaces reflects the mutually constitutive ways of the appropriation of Ndebele culture as part of the South African traditional arts.