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Oscar Wilde’s dictum that nothing succeeds like excess’; on another, as combining
‘beauty with vulgarity’. 8 Actively eschewing ‘the bourgeois idiom of
understatement and tastefulness’ 9 , prior to Versace’s untimely death in July
1997 he produced clothing that was overtly opulent, and loudly eye-catching; in
fact, not dissimilar to many of the garments currently being made by some of
South Africa’s rural traditionalists.
Figure 3
Breastplate, Limpopo Province, South Africa,
25 x 29 cm, private collection, Cape Town
photo A. van Eeden
Economic Necessity vs. Aesthetic Choice
Because of the realties of massive unemployment, especially in rural South
Africa, it would be easy to dismiss as absurd the suggested comparison between
Versace’s clothing and the dress worn by these local traditionalists. In contrast
to leading countries in the west, South Africa’s private wealth is concentrated in
the hands of a very small number of people. 10 By the early 1990s, fewer than ten
per cent of the country’s population seeking to enter the labour market
managed to find work in the formal job sector, 11 while estimates of employment in
the informal sector ranged from ten to 29 per cent. 12 Particularly in rural areas,
people with low skill and educational levels often fail to generate any income at
all, and those who do find employment commonly earn a tenth of the wages earned
by workers employed in the manufacturing sector in urban areas. 13
Frightening though these statistics may be, they should not encourage one to
assume that the crafted garments currently produced by women from
economically marginalised communities living in the country’s rural periphery are
inevitably shaped by an aesthetics of necessity rather than an aesthetics of
choice. Even though some researchers have cautioned – no doubt rightly – that
the recycling practices of impoverished communities 14 are sometimes far from
ennobling or liberating, let alone deliberate comments on the global circulation of
cheap commodities, questions regarding the creative agency of African
producers are never as simple or as straightforward as they might seem at first
sight. On the contrary, as Appiah notes in his consideration of contemporary
African creativity, ‘despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite
unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease and political instability,
African cultural productivity grows apace …’ 15
In South Africa, where impoverished rural traditionalists have shown a growing
interest in using plastic, rather than glass beads since the early 1970s, it is quite
common for outsiders to ‘misread’ the reasons for this development. Because
these plastic beads are now manufactured locally by a factory linked to Pretoria
Distributors, a wholesaling group that sells beads to other wholesalers
throughout the country, there is a vast difference in the local price of plastic
and glass beads. (The latter are still imported from various centres in Europe and
in the east). Today, 250 grams of white glass beads retails for about R50, while a
large bag of plastic beads costs about R10. 16 Unlike glass beads, which differ in
price depending on colour – for example, pink beads are so expensive to manufacture
that those currently being produced tend to be a milky, watered-down
camomile colour – plastic beads all retail for the same, comparatively low price.
89 Prince Claus Fund Journal #10a Popular Design and Crafts