In 1980 the South African tapestry artist, Allina Khumalo Ndebele (Fig. 1), sat down at her loom to weave The Mantis Wedding (Fig. 2).1 She had recently left the relative security of her job as a weaving trainer at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke's Drift, in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. Her departure from the center would gain her a form of freedom she had not previously known: the option to weave tapestries of her own. Over the next twenty-five years she would produce around 100 such narrative works at her new venture, Khumalo's Kraal Weaving Workshop.
The subject matter of Ndebele's tapestries, as well as those of a few of her trainees, evolved largely in the form of woven retellings of iZinganekwane, the inherited oral narratives popularly referred to as “folktales,”2 customarily told by senior women in isiZulu-speaking...