Panoramas from the Periphery: Women's History Tapestries at Rorke's Drift

Rorke's Drift was named after a nineteenth-century trader, James Rorke, who owned this tract of land prior to its purchase by the Church of Sweden Mission in 1876 (Fig. 2). The local name for the settlement is Shiyane, meaning “eyebrow,” supposedly a reference to the outline of the hill that forms the backdrop to it. To Majozi and others, however, Shiyane also means “leave it.” She explains this as a reference to a directive from the Zulu King Cetshwayo kaMpande (1826-1884), during the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, to his forces to abandon their all-night onslaught on the British garrison stationed here. This interpretation suggests that a complete rout of the garrison was avoided through the power and prudence of the Zulu king, rather than the valor of the British soldiers. Given the notions of “Zuluness” that would later be fostered at the Centre, this alternative meaning is a potent one.

Events would sustain this historical ethos into the twentieth century. In 1964, about a year after the art center was granted space at the old Swedish mission station, the site was coopted by a British film crew as a set for the production of Zulu, for which it was transformed into its nineteenth-century guise. Although the dramatization of the historical battle represented the British as victors, it nevertheless challenged colonial portrayals of Zulu savagery, instead asserting Zulu military skill, courage, and nationhood. Starring as his own royal ancestor, Cetshwayo, was Paramount Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, who had embarked on a revival of Zulu nationalism through his Inkatha movement.⁷ A vociferous critic of apartheid, he dismissed the government's proposed division of the region once pacified by the nineteenth-century Zulu king, Shaka kaSenzangakhona⁸ (ca. 1787-1828), into a “polka-dot state” reduced to pockets of historical Zululand.⁹ The notion of a “Warrior Race” in literature and film reached its apogee in Zulu and its 1979 prequel, Zulu Dawn, as Mbongeni Malaba (1986: 200) points out (Fig. 3a). Fearing the blockbuster would incite uncontrollable Black nationalism and interracial violence, the authorities responded by banning Zulu from Black theaters. So tense is the atmosphere said to have become at Rorke's Drift, that Dean Luthuli barred the filming of actual battle scenes on mission land.¹⁰

The Centre would be politicized also through its association with Buthelezi. Although the government had tried to prevent this, no doubt because of his success in reviving such sentiments in KwaZulu, the Centre's exhibition at the IZIKO South African National Gallery (ISANG) in 1972 would be opened by Buthelezi himself. Evoking a link between the Swedish art initiative and a heroic Zulu past, he emphasized his maternal great-grandfather's role in the Battle of Rorke's Drift (Buthelezi 1972: [1]). More practically, he also assisted the Swedish teachers with the renewals of their South African visas.

To the Swedes at Rorke's Drift, historical stories presented potential for its artists to assert self-identity and resilience, while avoiding the suspicion of apartheid agents. In subsequent years this ethos would be reflected in numerous tapestries and prints referencing a heroic Zulu past. Peder Gowenius, who together with his wife Ulla founded the Centre in 1963, recalls deriving personal inspiration from legendary figures such as Shaka and taking a group of students to nearby Isandhlwana Mountain, the site of the 1879 battle in which Cetshwayo's army defeated the invading British forces.¹¹ He also photographed some engraved battle scenes from The Illustrated London News 74 (2078) of April 12, 1879, that depicted the subsequent Zulu attack on a contingent of British soldiers at Rorke's Drift, which led to an all-night battle and a questionable victory for the British (Fig. 3b). These he used to show how images could be propagandized to “cheat” viewers (Hobbs and Rankin 2003: 5). Together with some local men, the Swedes also built a memorial to the fallen Zulu warriors. History was no doubt also evoked by features of the old battle site, such as the British powder magazine where printmaking was located at the time, and where John Muafangejo and Cyprian Shilakoe would print versions of The Battle of Rorke's Drift (in 1969 and ca. 1969 respectively).

Prior to these developments, however, two women, Philda Majozi and Mabel Molefe (ca. 1945-?), evolved The Royal Herd (1966/7)¹² (Fig. 4). Conceptualized as a birds-eye view, its emblematic circular feature represents King Shaka's isibaya, the central space in a traditional homestead in which cattle are assembled. Shown in side view, the bovines are pressed into a single unit, each separated from the last only by a thin brown outline. As a Swedish teacher at the Centre, Ola Granath, later wrote of the image, “[t]he Zulu king was so rich, it was told, that at night when the cattle stood in the isibaya, you could not see the ground” (Granath 1969: [11]).

Although Shaka is known to have accepted exclusively white cattle, Majozi points out that in the loom visual imperatives could override history if need be.¹³ Denying his preference in the tapestry, then, the herd is interspersed with black lozenges, chevrons, and triangles, and even a few black cattle. Surrounded by a facetted design of muted tones in the space of less significance outside it, these contrasts of dark and light render the isibaya a powerful central feature. Although not an explicit counterview on Shakan power, the women's visual solution undermines the monarch's wealth for the sake of impact—the sort of license the women considered worth taking if it gave a tapestry “life,” as Majozi puts it.¹⁴

At first the teachers found weavers reticent to draw more literally on history stories, attributing this to a preference for religious themes.¹⁵ But there may have been other factors at work here. Like it was elsewhere in southern Africa, performance of historical and political narratives has often been associated with men in isiZulu-speaking communities.¹⁶ But if there were such distinctions in oral performance in the Rorke's Drift region, they certainly fell away in the weaving workshop, as more explicit tapestries narrated Zulu history from the late 1960s (Figs. 5a-b). Attributed by weavers to Ester Nxumalo, Shaka's Kraal (1968), a panorama of the royal kraal and battlefield to the left of it, is populated by some thirty-two warriors, together with profuse details including animals, birds, and vegetation suggesting, perhaps, the magnitude of the Zulu Kingdom and scale of Shaka's influence.¹⁷ Though not centralized here as it tended to be in earlier tapestries, the homestead is laid out as a conventional “cattle-pattern,” with its symbolic interrelated spaces and structures. Interestingly, although it was woven by women, Shaka's Kraal depicts exclusively men, perhaps reflecting the royal decree that women move to their parents’ homes when men were conscripted. None of the weavers alive today recall its subject beyond the title, and no records on the intended content of the tapestry at Uppsala Akademiska Sjukhuset in Sweden (where I saw it in 2017) are available. However, the view undoubtedly depicts one of the many conflicts in Shaka's subjugation of independent chiefdoms in his campaign to forge a Zulu Kingdom. As it pictures a battle at a river, it may well represent the monarch's decisive victory over his Ndwandwe rivals around 1820. Having led them into a trap, Shaka's forces attacked them as they were halfway across the Mhlathuze River. This destroyed the Ndwandwe polity and ended the protracted Ndwandwe-Zulu war.

The homestead itself would be violated in Shaka's Cruelty (1973), a tapestry by Ester Nxumalo (possibly with Majozi),¹⁸ that asserts the monarch's ruthlessness and the gruesome fate of his victims (Fig. 6). Here it is the towering presence of Shaka and the chaos of his destruction that ousts it to one side. The isibaya within is overrun as people, dwellings and animals are tossed beyond the confines of the tapestry edge. Shaka's Cruelty depicts the spectacular annihilation of a rival chiefdom, as social order is disrupted, cattle are seized, and inhabitants are put to death in particularly gruesome ways. The king's brutality is explicit, as the focus is placed on the commands for which Shaka became notorious. A summary later drawn up by the Centre's manager, Princess Ngcobo, explains that:

Close reading of this visual drama suggests the weavers derived their imagery, at least in part, from the exploits of Shaka as narrated in izibongo, where his might was evoked by images of predators, fire, wind, and the overturning of houses. The upended dwelling at the top seems to echo praises valorizing Shaka's terrifying military genius:

All that survives of these dwellings is circular furrows where they had once stood. Another allusion to Shaka's praises is the gray raptor that attacks a purple bird, giving visual form to the image of the monarch as a “[b]ird that eats others” (quoted in Malaba 1986: 237). The winged predator may even reference Shaka's eventual usurper, Dingane kaSenzangakhona (ca. 1795-1840). As Malaba (1986: 6-7) points out, Dingane is conjured in praises of his own as a “bird that devours other birds.” Also depicted in Shaka's Cruelty is what seems to be the poisonous euphorbia tree²¹ associated with Zulu royalty, on which “no (ordinary) birds” would perch (Malaba 1986: 112).

Given the violence of its subject and the explicitness of its imagery, the weavers of Shaka's Cruelty may have experienced this tapestry as a transgressive act. However, Majozi draws a distinction between art and actuality, explaining a tapestry image as a “weaving idea” whose internal rules are independent of the governance of social reality.²² The Centre's staff might not specifically have asked weavers to transgress convention but, in their drive to conscientize the artists at the Centre, encouraging Zulu history themes was seen as a means of fostering a sense of pride. However, numerous weavers, whose families have been Christianized for generations, emphasize that their chief source of izibongo and other narrative genres in the workshop was school readers, often those of their children.²³ Then again, Shaka's Cruelty could equally be read as a form of compliance among devout weavers, as the portrayal of barbarism in a pre-Christian era could have been seen to validate evangelizing agendas.²⁴ Either way, the loom was not a space of surrender. Yet, in the essentializing opinions of some, the agencies of Black women at a rural mission in South Africa were not equal to a subject such as this. Referring to an earlier version of Shaka's Cruelty by Majozi and Nxumalo (made ca. 1972), Brian Lello (1973) diminished their narrative feat, finding it unlikely that the women could have developed this theme without the prompting of the church.

Other tapestry subjects were certainly cued, though not by the church. One reason for the introduction of the Fine Arts course was to infuse the workshops with new visual languages, and from the late 1960s it was quite common for relief prints to be taken to the looms. One was an ambitious tapestry, Life of Shaka (1974). While maintaining the general components of Caiphas Nxumalo's linocut, Mary Shabalala (1947-) and Josephine Memele (dates unknown), probably together with Ester Nxumalo,²⁵ rescaled it as a four-meter tapestry (Figs. 7a-b). As former staff Uno and Lillemor Johansson explained to me, at the top left Shaka's mother Nandi gives birth out of wedlock to the future king. To the right, his father's two first wives chase them into a forest. Below, the young Shaka kills a hyena, fights young soldiers, then kills a lion. He is elected king, then assassinated by his half-brothers, Mhlangana and the future King Dingane (ca. 1795-1840).²⁶ While rearticulating these events in high color, the women left Nxumalo's iconography largely undisturbed.

However, transforming a small black-and-white image into a woven magnum opus was no simple task. More than a “mere” scaling up, the process was complicated by the imperative of weaving landscape-format tapestries from the side of the view so that their eventual hung weight would not be placed on the thin warp strands but on the thicker weft strands. Moreover, as it grew in size the tapestry would have been roiled around the “cloth roll” beneath the loom. Keeping the full image in mind during the weaving process was accordingly a feat of visual memory. There were also social challenges. As is often the way with textile art, technical imperatives prompted negotiation between the women. This made for a complex process, especially in the case of large collaborative works. As Robertson and Vinebaum (2016: 7) observe of social agency, textiles “operate at the intersection of individual practice and group activity.”

Color relationships, which needed to be kept in mind as the imagery evolved unseen, were considered the key to success by most women I interviewed. Even though Caiphas Nxumalo's silhouette forms are largely kept intact in the warp, the features of his life are variously enhanced by oranges, blues, and purples with accents of red,²⁷ while strips of mauve escort the viewer through his legendary experiences. In June 1976, just as the Soweto Uprising broke out in protest of apartheid education policy, the tapestry prompted the Department of Information to assure readers in its cultural mouthpiece, Bantu, that the disruptive scenes in Life of Shaka were “far removed from 20^th century reality” (Potgieter 1976: 18).

Even when the tapestries reiterate the iconographies of printed works, they are invariably inflected with further meanings as personal preference, scale, color, and tactility enter the process. These expanded versions also involved complicated technical and visual adjustments as printed carved marks were transposed into a warp-weft matrix. The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea (1970), which Deliwe Mirriam Ndebele (1944-) recalls weaving with Jessie Dlamini (?-1985), was derived from a squarish linocut by Ndlovu (dates unknown), but the women stretched it into a more extended epic (Figs. 8a-b).²⁸ It is seemingly a scene from Exodus, a redemptive Biblical theme in which Moses leads the Israelites out of Egyptian serfdom, while their pursuing overlords drown. However, by coopting red wool, the women inflect the visual experience with a powerful suggestion of blood. Granath and former weavers who remember the tapestry say it also references the Battle of Blood River, where Zulu forces were overcome by White “trekkers”²⁹ at the Ncome River in 1838, in retribution for the slaughter of Piet Retief at Dingane's stronghold, uMgungundlovu. Occasioning association with blood through color, The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea conflates two histories distanced in time, at least in the minds of interviewees reacquainted with the image five decades later.

In many tapestries it is primarily male figures who are woven into history. But women are prominent in Ester Nxumalo's version of deliverance, All the Egyptians Drowned in the Red Sea (ca. 1966) which, tellingly perhaps, is said to have been a design of her own (Fig. 9). On the safe terrain beyond the drowning horsemen, two women in contemporary dress—perhaps weavers themselves—evoke the present era. Although none recall much about it, this oblique, transhistorical panorama may suggest the prospect of salvation in the apartheid present.³⁰

If some tapestries were reiterative, they were not equally so. Weavers would edit their adoptive imagery as they saw fit.³¹ In 1970 a (now-unknown) weaver developed Shaka and the Missionaries (1970) from a linocut by Ndlovu (Figs. 10a-b). The reversal of the woven image suggests it was made on an upright Gobelin loom, where the weaver faces what will be the back of the finished work. More crucially, the missionaries are excised from the image.³² There was good enough reason for this, as an encounter between them and Shaka was historically impossible, since he died before the first were recruited to the region.³³ But perhaps on account of limited loom size, the weaver settled on the most dynamic aspects, the warrior king, his impi (soldiers), and the drowning fugitives. She also insinuated White figures into the turbulent water, perhaps explaining the fate of the absent missionaries. However, as the light-skinned warriors in Shaka's Kraal show, pale figures do not always denote Europeans. Nor in the interpretation of this image can direction necessarily be taken from Ndlovu's linocut, as it is unclear there whether Shaka is a threat to the evangelists beyond, or whether he sends his men over the river into a flaming battle to protect them.

Missionaries were not necessarily spared in the iconographies tapestry artists developed at Rorke's Drift. In late 1966 Gowenius somewhat provocatively handed the weavers an old photograph of somber White missionaries with a Black pastor at the far left. In the tapestry subsequently made from it, The Old Missionaries (ca. 1967), Nani Regina Buthelezi (1928-1978) contrived some adjustments to this specter from the past (Figs. 11a-b). The dressed stone architecture is exaggerated, as is the angle at which the churchmen lean towards the far end of the image, progressively diminishing in stature. Of course, this might not have been the result of conscious intention. While in the photograph the reduction of scale would have been the outcome of the angle of the lens in relation to the seated missionaries, in the tapestry, where gradated nuances of light and space are not possible, the Black pastor is the smallest and most unstable of the group. Alternatively, he might have diminished in scale because the weaver put more effort into the right-hand side, from where the work was initiated, and less into the far end, due to a natural desire to finish the work. Whether Buthelezi intended the variance in scale or not, the image suggests the lowly stature of the Black clergyman who shoulders the weight of the listing missionary cohort.³⁴

Furthermore, repetition is not necessarily an indicator of low cultural worth. On this point Melanie Klein (2014: 1357) observes that Western ideals in twentieth-century South Africa demarcated repetition of images by Black artists as a trait of illiteracy. Yet in tapestries that built on an existing idea, such as The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea, rearticulation could equally be read as a progressive realization of its latent possibilities. Moreover, if considered in terms of the ebb and flow of personal creativity, the practice afforded weavers a respite from the pressure of continually having to think up unique ideas, as Shabalala pointed out to me.³⁵ Although the use of ready designs suggests subtle relationships of power, in which weavers deferred to the imagery of male artists and the prompting of Swedish teachers, they were evidently not experienced by the women as restrictive. They seem to have found it fitting that they enjoy the benefit of men's designs, since the sales of weavings increasingly funded the Fine Arts course.

One of the more inscrutable panoramas from this period must be Majozi's Dingane and the White Men (1977) (Fig. 12). Although I have not located a linocut prototype specific to the tapestry, the image is almost certainly based on a linocut print by Caiphas Nxumalo, whose normative style is characterized by fragmented landscapes, divine visages, and textual injunctions. Most typical are the silhouette figures of varying sizes with exaggerated heads, feet, and facial detail.³⁶ Albeit their iconographies were bold and inventive, it seems unlikely that these devout women, whose families were long-since Christianized, would have initiated a concept based on Shembe's teachings de novo.

Dingane seems to reimagine the historical encounter between Piet Retief and Dingane at uMgungundlovu in 1837. As orthodox history has it, Retief and other Dutchspeaking trekkers from the Cape Colony hoped to settle on the fertile land immediately south of the Zulu Kingdom. Dingane would agree to this conditional to their recovery the cattle stolen from him by the BaTlôkwa Chief Sekonyela (ca. 1804-1856). Once this had been accomplished, Dingane is said to have signed a “treaty” in early February 1838.³⁷ However, on subsequently observing his White visitors through an opening in the fence after dark, some say, he discovered that they had marked out a route around his homestead (Webb and Wright 1986: 112). Inferring from this their intention to kill him, Dingane mounted a preemptive attack on the trekkers, all of whom died.³⁸

Of course, these accounts fall short of explaining all the features of Majozi's tapestry. However, if considered in the context of Nxumalo's membership of Isaiah Shembe's Ibandla lamaNazaretha (Nazareth Baptist Church), established near Durban around 1911, an interpretation of the work can be broached. In a quest to bring together Christianity and Zulu nationalist spirit, Shembe's doctrines are a unique combination of Old Testament scriptures and inherited beliefs. His izihlabelelo (hymns) proclaim Dingane's significance:

Although he longed for Zulu ascendency, Shembe urged his followers not to emulate the sinful militancy of their precolonial forbears, whose descendants now bore the brunt of Jehovah's punishment (Echtler 2020: 105), particularly the passing of the Land Act in 1913, which had robbed Black South Africans of their land rights. Despite this, he managed to secure a tract on which he established a sanctuary, Ekuphakameni, and a holy mountain, Nhlangakazi, where polygamy and African modes of dress and dance were welcomed. In guiding people to Jehovah and redemption, Shembe is held to have gifted his isiZulu-speaking followers with the Sabbath, thus providing them with a route to liberation.

Majozi's tapestry seems to have inherited this injunction to remember Jehovah. Above Dingane a divine figure similar to that in another of Nxumalo's prints, Jonah (ca. 1969), holds a sword towards Dingane, perhaps the metaphorical sword that symbolizes God's word in Ephesians 6: 17, which appears in Shembe's Hymn 23 (Malaba 1986: 116). The other hand gestures towards the trekkers, the yellow and orange colors streaming from it alluding, perhaps, to Shembe's healing hands, which are said to “radiate like the sun” (Gunner and Gwala, cited in Masango 1996: 91). In turn, the large (flesh-colored) White figure, presumably Retief, displays the word “uJehova” while pointing to this apparition above. Assumedly the set of wagons laagered³⁹ to the right represent the trekkers’ families who await the return of the men on the slopes of the Drakensberg (see Rankin and Schneider 2019a: 369).⁴⁰ Further complicating this tapestry is the presence of weapons, particularly the bloodied tips of the warriors’ spears, whose red color offers interpretative options a black-and-white print would not. Inscrutable, though, is the pale-skinned woman near the dwellings beyond Shaka and his izinduna (headmen), who wears Zulu dress and the customary isicholo headress. Also unclear is the long brown strip on the right—perhaps a reference to the freshly filled donga (furrow) into which the trekkers’ mutilated bodies were said by a local informant to have been thrown (see Grobler 2011: 121).

In his normative linocuts proclaiming Shembe's teachings, Caiphas Nxumalo negotiates his identity in relation to oppression, militarism, colonialism, missionization, and deliverance. But one might ask what significance his imagery held for a Christian woman like Majozi—the more so as the act of weaving it would have entailed some personal risk. As his church was messianic and nationalistic, it was at odds with both Lutheranism and apartheid. Even though the Mission had settled on an (uneasy) accord with Shembe's successor, Johannes Galilee Shembe, this “degenerate” African-initiated church was still shunned in practice. While the Centre's studios enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, outside them the Dean and elders were deeply controlling of female residents on Mission land, who were subject to shaming or banishment for infringements of convention.⁴¹ Yet Jessie Dlamini, who was a weaving-workshop supervisor and, as the Dean's wife, the most highly-ranked woman, approved the production of this work—a formality the Centre observed due to the financial outlay involved.⁴²

The disappearance of these tapestries from the public domain has compounded the invisibility of the women's contributions. Dingane and the White Men, for example, went missing after its owner passed away, while most other works are in collections abroad. As few have found their way into published readings, history has inscribed them with notions of lesser significance. But as Aili Nenola (1999:22) observes of the erasure of women's subjugated knowledges, “[t]he fact that women's ideas and articulations have not been part of the mainstream of cultural tradition does not mean that they never existed. It only means that they have remained invisible—in life, as in scholarship and research.”

Through a multiplicity of means, including the voices of weavers themselves, my rereading of these historically situated tapestries reveals how misleadingly women at the Rorke's Drift looms have been represented by art history. Evoked both by events and the historical site itself, notions of Zulu nationalism played a role in numerous iconographies, not only in printmaking but also in the weaving workshop. Rather than quaint fictions set in an ahistorical past, the tapestries were dense with recollected knowledge, at times prompting government censors to distance works like Life of Shaka from contemporary reality.

The historical iconographies women such as Regina Buthelezi, Ester Nxumalo, and Philda Majozi articulated are all the more complex for their subject matter, which often evolved by way of appropriation of designs from the fine art studios. In tapestries such as Shaka and the Missionaries, women repurposed the visual languages of their male counterparts, restyling, advancing, or subverting their printed histories by means of color, scale, or iconographic intervention. Drawing also on genres of orality customarily dominated by men, such as Zulu praise-poems or Shembe's hymns, women entered discourses on heroic events, Zulu nationalism, and African-initiated doctrine, as Dingane and the White Men attests. But as Shaka's Cruelty, The Royal Herd, and Shaka's Kraal reveal, women also developed historical concepts their own.

Not all these woven histories were heroic scenes. Buthelezi's The Old Missionaries suggests the subaltern status of evangelized Black men in the Mission hierarchy. Dingane and the White Men imagines a religious injunction around a historical event. All the Egyptians Drowned in the Sea complicates a historical reading by associating the Exodus of the Old Testament with a scene from the present day. Nor were these deeply marginalized tapestry artists averse to taking risks. Dingane and the White Men, for example, coopted a forbidden African-initiated doctrine that coupled worship to the notion of Zulu cultural continuity. By such means, and the sumptuous matrix of the stranded surface, women accorded significance to the knowledges they evolved or encountered, whether represented by images suspended emblematically in a mauve surround, as in Dingane and the White Men, or a panorama bisected by a torrent of red offered by Israelites Crossing the Red Sea. In works such as The Royal Herd, women also granted themselves license to dispense with historical “accuracy” for the sake of impact, as their treatment of Shaka's cattle wealth reveals.

To my mind, these visual strategies are a persuasive dimension of the understandings women articulated through their tapestries. Relating history strand-by-strand, and often in collaboration, this circle of artists embraced imaginaries of the past in generative ways. Seen from this perspective, these agents of history mobilized the loom beyond simply an avenue of economic sustainability. Moreover, that women such as Ndebele and Dlamini developed other women's skills demonstrates agency in itself. Demarcated as a site of immunity to oppression and convention then, the loom presented opportunities for interpretation, self-definition, and group realization.