Suzy Bell
Clay – ubumba -has never looked so glamorous. “Ceramics!” sniffs Kobus Moolman, the education officer of the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg, as his hand waves at the magnificent historical and contemporary collection of ceramics now on exhibit. There are delicate animal studies by Hezekile Ntuli from the 1930s, voluptuous beer vessels in Bible-black, exquisitely detailed busts and portraits, brightly-coloured Rorke’s Drift stoneware, decorative Ardmore earthenware, and even one of King Cetshwayo’s drinking vessels.
This highly significant exhibition, which has pieces from 1896 to the present, is only marred by the fact that so many are titled “Zulu artist unknown”. Because it was only in 1970, explains Moolman, that the Durban Art Gallery purchased the first works by the region’s black ceramists (11 stoneware vessels from the Rorke’s Drift studio).
And it was as recent as 1986 that the Natal Museum acquired its first public collection of Zulu ceramics. Moolman reasons that the earlier neglect was perhaps due to the ethnographic nature of early collecting in Natal: “Wares were anonymously acquired as material evidence of the conquered Zulu people. Zulu ceramics were for a long time looked down upon as low-fired terracotta and ignored by the major art galleries.”
Co-curator Ian Calder adds that museums collected hundreds of pieces of ceramic work and labelled them “Anonymous Zulu”. “Reclaiming heritage is very difficult,” admits Calder.
Moolman lovingly touches an ukhamba (drinking vessel) and explains that the earthenware beer vessel denotes respect for the ancestors. “It’s regarded as an important means of mediation between the living and the ancestral shades, the amadlozi.”
With the forms of Zulu pottery and their decoration being closely associated with Zulu social life and cosmology, clay vessels are appropriate since the ancestors are associated with the earth. “All the utensils used in the brewing and serving of utshwala -home-brewed sorghum beer – are kept in the umsamo, the sacred area inside the main house of the kraal, in line with the hearth and the door.”
Since the blackening of the pots (by reduction firing with cow-dung) is a form of respect for the ancestors who inhabit the dark and cool umsamo of a house, the difference between the Zulu ceramics you may buy at the tourist markets and those made for domestic ritual use in the community, is vast. The tourist curios are left with their exteriors a mottled terracotta, or are coloured with red shoe polish instead of being blackened as the umsamo pots are.
Exhibiting Pietermaritzburg ceramist Jabulani Mhlabini remembers having to help his grandfather collect the clay by day to bring it in for shelter at night, placing it in a “special box so that the ancestors could visit the clay at night. He told many wonderful stories while we’d watch him create with the clay.”
Mhlabini was taught as a child by his mother, respected ceramist Dorah Mdlalose, who “gave me clay to play with to keep me quiet”. Mhlabini’s brightly coloured sculptures are in stark contrast to his mother’s work, which is sombre. “She used the money [from selling figurines] to pay for our school uniforms and our school books,” says Mhlabini.
In the Eighties, he met some Pietermaritzburg artists at the local African Art Centre. “It was then that I started creating works that reflected the news events of the time.”
A fine example of this is the shocking Christmas Gift at Shobashobane. It is a poignant reminder of the death of 19 people by armed Zulu men on Christmas day 1995.
“I got the news from my neighbour who heard it on the radio. I just couldn’t believe it was the same village I used to visit my uncle during Christmas as a child. When I heard the news I remembered those happy times, which made it difficult to understand how people could shoot children down while they were celebrating Christmas. The thought of it kept ringing in my mind -very painful. I just had to follow up on the incident.”
Calder acknowledges that it is a very unusual, extremely sad piece: “Ceramics are usually about nice things -beer pots are for celebration. But here Mhlabini is commenting on a tragic event, with striking detail of bloodied figures, warriors and assegais. It’s an emotionally charged surface with reliefs revealing themselves in an unfolding narrative sequence as the spectator moves around the piece.”
The sculpture takes the form of a woman: the lid is the head and neck – and she is screaming. The base resembles the conventional blackened form of an ukhamba with projecting breasts that are bleeding. “People are people are afraid to touch the work,” says Moolman in a respectful whisper.
“The decorations of the vessels are also indicative of its role within the utshwala ceremony, a ritual observance associated with a variety of life cycle celebrations, specifically birth, puberty, marriage and death,” explains Moolman. “Usually only the smaller pots used for drinking or serving beer are decorated, while the larger izimbiza, used for brewing, are neither burnished nor decorated.”
The widespread assumption that contemporary Zulu ceramic work represents “an unchanged form of pre-colonial expression” is now being challenged. Moolman says researchers now argue that this nostalgia for a tribalism uncontaminated by Western technological civilisation is mistaken. “The Ubumba exhibition, instead, provides the viewer with intriguing cross-references between the past and the present, and reveals the extent to which Zulu pottery has adapted and responded to a rapidly changing social environment.”
Calder agrees that the exhibition reveals something of the extent of assimilation and post-colonial diversity in more than a century of collecting “traditional Zulu” ceramics.
Preserving an embattled heritage while articulating individual visions – these are the challenges Zulu ceramists face in a post-colonial society.
Ubumba is at the Tatham Art Gallery until April 26, then moves to the Durban Art Gallery