Read this book and you will never be able
to look at isishweshwe, whether as a smart outfit at the races, practical
working clothes, part of a cultural ritual or even a humble oven glove in quite
the same way again. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer - Courtesy of The
Witness)
Next time you pull on that serviceable old
sunhat or set off to choose a new outfit for a bride’s traditional visit to her
husband’s home, demurely dressed as a suitable daughter-in-law must be, stop
for a moment and look at the isishweshwe fabric
in your hand. Printed indigo, brown or red, it is seen as an important part of
the indigenous culture of Southern Africa. But what is it really?
Back in 2005, the Jack Heath Gallery on the
local university campus hosted The Isishweshwe/Amajamani exhibition as part of
a conference on Dress in Southern Africa. The conference was convened and the
exhibition curated by Juliette Leeb-du Toit, then teaching at the Centre for
Visual Art. Growing from that, Leeb-du Toit has written a book, isishweshwe: A History of the Indigenisation
of Blueprint in Southern Africa.
It is the culmination of years of academic
research that took her all over the world, from the dusty recesses of rural
trading stores where ancient bolts of fabric still lurk, to family-run textile
factories in Hungary, to museum storerooms in Africa and Europe and to folk
festivals in Germany where smiling blond girls dance in wooden clogs and long
skirts made from familiar-looking blueprint as they celebrate a romanticised
vision of European peasant culture.
Whether you call it isishweshwe, isishoeshoe,
ujamani, blueprint or a host of other names, it is not indigenous to South
Africa, and has only been manufactured here since the 1950s. But its first
appearance on the African continent was long before. Very early “proto
blueprint” from around 900 AD has been found in Cairo, and in the 15th
Century blueprint was making its appearance as trade goods from India and the
Far East. Soon after that, indigo-dyed cloth was being made on the Cape Verde
islands for barter in the slave trade, a dark episode in the fabric’s history.
Hard wearing and attractive, blueprint
moved from its probable Asian roots to Europe. Raw indigo dye travelled the
world in huge quantities, so much being traded that it was used as ballast in
ships as it moved around the globe. Peasant communities all over Europe took it
to their hearts, and blueprint can still be seen in rural Eastern Europe as
well as Spain and Portugal. Perhaps that shade of indigo blue does something to
the psyche – think of all those indispensable indigo jeans in our wardrobes.
Princess Magogo, the mother of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, noted that in Zulu
cosmology blue is associated with the divine as well as with spirituality, calm
and coolness. Maybe that’s why we all love it.
But there is a political aspect to
blueprint, and not just in its links to slavery. It has been through
unpopularity in Hungary, where it became associated with the disliked Romanian
part of the population. In Africa, missionaries were determined to see their
adherents dress in Western style to the extent that blueprint was known as
“mission print”, and can be seen as representing colonial domination.
Voortrekkers wore it, and after the Anglo-Boer war and the ugly history of
concentration camps, Boer women used it as a statement of their nationalism.
However, in its Southern African context,
blueprint eventually came to be seen as a statement of Africanness – gone were
the days when both slaves and their owners wore it. The fabric plays an
important role in Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana cultural identity, sometimes
associated with marriage, childbearing or mourning. Herero women in Namibia and
Botswana use it for their spectacular, distinctive outfits – fabric and style
both rooted in the colonial era. As Leeb-du Toit points out in her book, it can
be seen as manipulation by colonisers who wanted to sell more fabric from their
factories, or as a form of emulation by upwardly mobile local societies which
would then morph into an act of defiance against the coloniser.
She also points out that, back in the 1970s
when the apartheid regime was at its height and hippy culture held sway in
Europe and America, liberal whites wore it as a form of protest that also tied
into the contemporary fashion for ethnic dress. Leeb-du Toit recalls wearing it
herself – and admits a possible naivety in doing so – but says it was often
welcomed by African wearers who saw it as what it was meant to be: a sign of
solidarity. But there were others who saw it as pretentious posturing.
So – a solidarity statement or cultural
appropriation? Hard-wearing peasant dress or high fashion? Read this book and
you will never be able to look at isishweshwe,
whether as a smart outfit at the races, practical working clothes, part of a
cultural ritual or even a humble oven glove in quite the same way again.
*isishweshwe:
A History of the Indigenisation of Blueprint in Southern Africa by Juliette
Leeb-du Toit is published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. – Margaret von
Klemperer
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