Here - Prince Claus Fund

The Post-modern Context of Rural
Craft Production in Contemporary
South Africa
Sandra Klopper
South Africa
The beadwork decoration used in South African ritual not only
straddles the fine line between tradition and modernity, it also
establishes both designer and wearer in a unique relationship.
Sandra Klopper celebrates the creativity of adversity.
‘… it may be that certain kinds of symbolic creativity in the expressive
and communicative activity of “disadvantaged” groups exercise their uses
and economies in precisely eluding and evading formal recognition, publicity
and the possible control by others of their own visceral meanings. In this
case, the decontextualised search for aesthetics is, by definition, doomed
to endless labour, for the aesthetic will be wherever it isn’t’. 1
Until very recently, South Africa’s rural communities were commonly studied as
discrete cultural or ethnic entities. In the course of the twentieth century,
this notion of ethnicity as a primary framework for understanding, not only
political structures and histories, but also the socio-cultural domain, was
entrenched through the significance racist ideologues ascribed to ‘tribal’
identities in an effort to sustain the dominance, in the region, of white settler
communities. In some cases, indigenous communities tried to influence these
ideologues by manipulating ethnic identities through a persuasive use of
expressive cultural forms, such as the art of mural decoration. By painting murals
on homestead walls and thereby becoming (quite literally) more visible, they
sought to lobby state support for their efforts to secure access to resources
like land. 2 In other contexts, ethnicity played a central role in strategies of
resistance to white domination, and to the growing impact of Christianity on
African values and cultural practices. 3
Especially in recent years, however, historians and anthropologists have
repeatedly questioned the role ethnicity plays in rural communities’
understanding of their life experiences. It has, for example, been suggested
that the increasing fluidity of global capital has led to a loss of any kind of
stable self-identification based on a sense of place. 4 As Zegeye points out,
moreover, in South Africa, resistance against apartheid afforded people
opportunities to share ‘not only values, but also daily life strategies and tactics
within the social movements they partook in’. As he rightly notes, these factors
have had a huge impact on post-apartheid South Africa. 5 Following the release
Figure 1
Apron, Limpopo Province, South Africa,
45 x 45 cm, private collection
photo A. van Eeden
84 Prince Claus Fund Journal #10a Popular Design and Crafts