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

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...