Burnished

Zulu Ceramics between Rural and Urban South Africa

Elizabeth Perrill

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253061881
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: African Art

When Zulu women potters innovate or move to a more urban setting, they are asked why they have abandoned tradition. Yet when they continue to follow convention or choose to stay in rural areas, art historians speak of their work as unchanging symbols of the past. Burnished rejects both stereotypes, acknowledging the agency of rural women as innovative artists and complex individuals negotiating a biased set of power structures.

Featuring 90 color images, Burnished engages directly with individual artists and specific vessels, fracturing assumptions that Zulu ceramicists are resistant to rural transformation and insulated from urban realities. Elizabeth Perrill shares compelling narratives of women ceramic artists and the sophisticated beer pots they create—their aesthetic choices, audiences, production, and artistic lives. Simultaneously, Perrill documents the manner in which and reasons why ceramic arts, and at times the artists themselves, capitalize upon bucolic stereotypes of rural womanhood, are constrained by artistic methods, or chafe against definitions of what qualifies as a Zulu pot.

Revealing how white South Africans and global art gatekeepers have continually twisted the designation of Zulu ceramics before, during, and after apartheid, Burnished provides an engaging look at the artistry of entrepreneurial Black women too often erased from historical records.

ONE

AN ILLUSTRATIVE LEGACY

THREE POTS

Two dimensions can never fully capture the tactility and space of a ceramic vessel, but sometimes that is all that is left as evidence of the fragile original. Consider the black-and-white illustration of three vessels nestled in a triangular arrangement produced by educator John Watt (Jack) Grossert (fig. 1.1). This image, reproduced countless times, seems simple enough: three variations in form on a style of coil-built pot. Eventually, this illustration became the prototype for both English- and Zulu-language students, a model of what a Zulu pot “should” look like both inside South Africa and in the international press. However, close study of the creation of this illustration reveals how a complex system of racialized educational policies, the creative production of three young women, and the visual curation of a meticulous apartheid-era administrator continue to provide echoes of vessels long since broken, ephemeral shards of individual creativity.

Figure 1.1. “Zulu Clay Pots with typical decoration, uphiso, ukhamba, ingcungu,” illustration in Walter W. Battiss, G. H. Franz, J. W. Grossert, and H. P. Junod, The Art of Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1958, 123.

The pots pictured vary in height, angle of opening, and curve of their convex bellies, yet they are tied together by an aesthetic hegemony. Beginning with the vessel on the left, we see a nearly spherical pot with a slightly concaved flare at the edge of the lip. Moving to the back of the trio, a spherical pot with a tall, flared neck that is approximately one-third the height of the vessel’s body draws our attention. Finally, on the right, we observe a low-profile pot with a horizontally ovoid form. Each black vessel bears a prominent panel of decorative pyramids, its precision conveyed with white printed lines. With subtle variations, the major compositional direction of each panel runs from the lower left to the upper right of the shoulder region of the pot at an approximately forty-five-degree angle. Note that each vessel appears to repeat its decorative motif at least once, though we cannot see these objects in the round.

In the illustration created by art educator and apartheid administrator Jack Grossert, we can also observe nuances specific to the print medium of illustration. Rather than the smooth gradient of a photograph, the details of each vessel are depicted by means of white hatching and cross-hatching. Small areas of reflective light and the angles of the pyramid decorations were carved out from the original hardboard from which the print was made. The black, solid areas and reflective patches picked out in white give the impression that the vessel bodies were dark or black, and they appear highly smooth and uniform. This printing technique, similar to a linocut or a woodblock print, was used to depict many art forms in The Art of Africa, the 1958 publication in which these three pots first appeared. For the simple black-and-white illustrations that were possible at this time, the print was ideal; it was inexpensive and bore up to multiple reproductions without expensive photographic illustration technology or degradation of the image.

In its initial 1958 publication, the trio was captioned, “Zulu Clay Pots with typical decoration uphiso, ukhamba, ingcungu.” The Art of Africa was reprinted three times from 1958 to 1963, with 7,600 copies produced,¹ and these printing runs, fueled by the didactic needs of South Africa’s apartheid Bantu School System, spurred further dissemination. The trio of vessels would again appear in Inqolobane Yesizwe, an isiZulu-language cultural handbook published in 1966; in South African gallery advertisements from the 1960s to the 1990s; in the New African, published in London in the 1980s; and in didactic museum displays in KwaZulu-Natal from its first years of publication into the 2000s.² The bold black-and-white medium helped make this a favored illustration for later mimeographing and photocopying.

Iterations of this image are all we have left. The original hardboard worked by Grossert and the three vessels that were his source material no longer exist. Nevertheless, through this trace, the vessels have left an indelible stamp on Zulu ceramics. As envisioned by theorists such as Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai a generation ago, the social life of things and the lives of objects after their production can detach from their original makers, even from the original object and material of production. Objects and their reverberating images take on lives of their own, expanding beyond the intentions or imagination of the original sources.³ The source materials for this trio can be traced back to three beer pots created during a pivotal moment of national and cultural negotiation. Historical accounts of the Bantu Education system are replete with biographical details of White administrators. Is it possible to foreground not just Grossert but also the artist or artists whose hands formed the pots he sketched?

A CERAMIC SOURCE: ANCESTRAL SHADOWS, YOUNG WOMEN IN RURAL KWAZULU

In a provocative jab at Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin once wrote in a diary entry, “25 August, A Brechtian maxim: ‘Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.’”⁴ When this diary entry was made in 1934, Benjamin was working on his Arcades Project, a monumental musing on the sources and implications of consumerism, with particular emphasis on visual culture. With his tongue-in-cheek truism, Benjamin warns us away from nostalgia and implies that we must use caution when looking toward the past. The “good old things” in their day appeared as the “bad new ones,” and we cannot understand the present if we are overly sentimental about the purity of the past.

In the case of these three vessels, one might assume the original pots were “good old things,” pure and wrought by the hands of a rural student, and that Grossert’s illustration was the “bad new one,” a reproduction of the “authentic.” After all, beer pots are vessels of spiritual and social significance, and the production of these vessels was Black women’s work. We might be tempted to seek out the gifted student who created the prototypes. The regularity of the amasumpa depicted by Grossert and the consistency of this decorative motif seem to imply a single maker or region, an expert maker, and a model for the future. But the history of Bantu Education, the segregated educational structure for Black populations in South Africa that began in 1954 and continued well into the 1990s, twists this source into a simulacrum. We must be suspicious of our preconceptions and of appearances. In the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Killie Campbell Archives, itself a reproduction of British colonial archival impulses, Jack Grossert’s original sketchbooks reveal a complex synthesis of layered histories that, when peeled back, give insights as to the original makers.

Grossert recorded basic biographical details alongside dozens of documentary sketches he made while visiting apartheid-era Bantu schools, schools reserved for Black South Africans. Archival records reveal that these pots were not made by expert potters or masters of this historically women’s art form. Instead, these were pots made by teenagers. The ages and grade levels of the young women who formed these pots were meticulously recorded, each on a different day and at three different schools. I have attempted to recover as much biographical data as possible about these young women and their educational contexts and foreground them here. In other chapters the women who create izinkamba vessels are at the fore, but the further back we travel in history, the more difficult this process becomes. Though later prints depict these pots as anonymous cultural types, close visual analysis and comparisons of Grossert’s sketches makes artist attributions possible. The more spherical ukhamba form was created by Tholiwe Mfeka (age fifteen years), the wide ingcungu by Gretta Mgenge (age eighteen years), and the necked uphiso by Gertrude Dludla (age sixteen years). The three young women attended the Ongoye, Khangelani, and Ekuthuleni schools, respectively, and their vessels were selected by their school instructors to appear in regional exhibitions held throughout KwaZulu and Natal between September 1954 and June 1955.⁵ They were award winners, approved of by at least two layers of apartheid-era school administrators, their teachers and Grossert.

This chapter seeks to contextualize these vessels and to hint at the shadows of these three women, offering brief glimpses of their identities and creative work. By focusing on three young women who eventually had a significant, albeit mediated, impact on Zulu visual culture, we begin to appreciate the complex agency between the network of individuals and the concept of the Zulu izinkamba genre that created these images—the young Black women who created these forms to please apartheid-era school instructors, the instructors who saw the work these students created as exemplary, and the school inspector who synthesized an iconic and indexical image of Zulu izinkamba.⁶ Alongside the trio of vessels that became icons of Zulu ceramics, we will also see examples of forms and decorative techniques that were edited out of Grossert’s increasingly constrained depictions of Zulu cultural iconographic norms.

Figure 1.2. Sketches by J. W. Grossert, September 22, 1954, “Empangeni Show,” 1. Original housed in the Killie Campbell Africana Library of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Mfeka’s vessel, the first on the left, is described as an ukhamba, a drinking vessel, in Grossert’s publications. Her work was presented at an exhibition held in 1954 in the coastal city of Empangeni, an area known for its historically strong mission schools prior to apartheid. This regional show provides an opportunity to contextualize creativity and diversity of form. From the two pages of documentation drawn from the Empangeni show, it is clear that both vessel shape and decorative style varied widely in this region’s school production. The first page of documented vessels at this show features at least three vessels that bear distinct signs of Western influence (fig. 1.2). The top left form has a neck far narrower than most Zulu necked pots, making it appear more like a vase. The center-bottom work has a ruffled edge and wide, thin handles of an almos...