POLOKWANE – In the Zulu culture, people express their feeling using colourful beads which they make into accessories their loved ones can wear. It’s a tradition that is well known and as old as the language of its people.
When it comes to writing a letter these days a email or whatsapp will work. In the very rich African culture of Zulu writing a letter or sending a message is a whole other language.
Traditional love letters measure are 5cm long and 4cm wide. The beads are sold in excess and the accessories could be anything from bangles and headdresses to matchbox covers.
Young girls will often accompany their elder sisters to the local store where they learn more about the colours and quality of various types of beads. Often, others’ accessories are observed and people will either want theirs to be similar or completely opposite to those of others. You can tell a lot about what someone has been through or how they are loved by the beads on their accessories.
The men depend on female relatives to explain the intricacy and sometimes the story behind certain pieces. Learning by experience, the significance of standard ornaments are by no means beyond them. They can see whether a woman is uncommitted, engaged, married, unmarried, has children or unmarried sisters and recognise regional colours which tell them where she comes from, assuming that she wants these things to be known. Without anyone saying a world, a whole story is told.
All traditional Zulu bead work, excluding items used by ritual specialists, relates in someway to courtship and marriage. It also helps to regulate behaviour between individuals of opposite sex. This exclusively feminine craft has an intuitive fluency found only in inspired forms of poetry and visual art. Bead workers are unaware of a “system” such as that imposed upon language by spelling rules and grammar.
However, no true art is without discipline, so Zulu craftswomen accept certain fundamentals:
• Bead work communicates between unrelated males and females, avoiding the discomfort of direct initial discourse on the sensitive subject of personal relations.
• Bead work flows from females, the designers and manufactures, to males – their traditional clients.
• Men wear bead work to show involvement with women they may marry, incestuous implications preclude beaded gifts from mothers, sisters and daughters.
• Bead work symbolism is encoded within a limited number of colours and geometric figures.
• Colour symbols have alternative values but those assigned to geometric figures are constant.
• Values assigned to colours are in groups of positive and negative alternatives, except the colour white, which has no negative connotation.
Symbolic coding is influenced by a number of factors:
1. The combination and arrangement of colours.
2. The use and nature of an object.
3. The deliberate breaking of rules by which these factors operate.
The bead work has definite forms and shapes, these include:
• The Triangle: The three corners of a triangle represents father, mother and child.
• As a basic unit of design it can:
a) be inverted, apex pointing downward. This signifies the unfulfilled man principle (Unmarried man).
b) be positioned with the apex pointing downwards, signifying the unfulfilled female principle (Unmarried woman).
c) join with another along the base to form a diamond (stylised egg, a universal fertility symbol) representing the complete female principle (Married Woman).
d) be positioned with apexes meeting, an hourglass shape, symbol of the complete male principle (married man).
• The Ibheqe:
This is generally sold as a love letter in souvenir shops that supply a small tag with simplistic interpretations of colour. A girl expressing her love for a man would not place the unfulfilled male symbol within its feminine counterpart, but arrange them the other way around, with the unfulfilled male symbol (triangle , apex down, in white beads) enclosing the unfulfilled female symbol triangle apex up, in red beads).
• The Ucu:
There are some instances in which deliberate breaking of rules is used as a design technique. An example of such an object is the Ucu.
The object is a five meter long necklace of white beads, wound around the neck as an engagement token. It often includes a small tassel of beads in the appropriate blue-and-white combination.
These carefully handcrafted pins can be worn as a brooch. They make a beautiful gift and have in recent weddings and has been used by different cultures as gifts for guests at a wedding. The bead work can also be seen in different other uses like covering items like a matchbox for instance.
