Art @ Work Today

Abstract

From the mid-1960s and into the 1980s which was a period of particularly repressive politics in South Africa, the pottery produced by the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) Arts and Crafts Centre at Rorke’s Drift, was hailed as a significant expression of Zulu-Sotho tradition and culture in an idiom that would appeal to western patrons. Utilising western production techniques and for the most part guided by pottery teachers from abroad, the potters innovated their traditional pot making into the crafting of novel forms which retained deep-rooted cultural symbolism. Rorke’s Drift ceramics were the first by black crafters to be acquired for a South African public art collection at a time when black arts and crafts were politically shunned. Three decades later, Rorke’s Drift pottery no longer commands attention as objets d’art but has an appeal as curiosities and curios. The Rorke’s Drift potters deliver proof that ‘African’ craft is plastic, and that the pots, even with their commercialised aesthetics, cannot be dismissed as cultural caricatures. Post-colonial patronage funded and promoted the Rorke’s Drift pottery workshop. When that fervour waned, the survival of a particular expression of craft hinged on the resilience of cultural meaning rather than of form.

Keywords

Rorke’s Drift, ceramics, craft, post-colonial, indigenous, westernisation, authenticity, meaning, transformation, integrity.

Introduction

1970 was a year of great significance for black craft potters in South Africa. In that year, the Durban Art Gallery acquired 11 works produced in the pottery workshop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift, for its permanent collection. It happened in the era of fierce, repressive apartheid politics which sought to impose white supremacy and deny blacks any participation and expression in a multi-racial society. The Rorke’s Drift pots were to be the first works by contemporary black crafters to feature in a hitherto segregated public collection.

Through exhibitions in South Africa, Sweden and the USA, Rorke’s Drift’s pottery, weaving and prints gained international recognition for innovation of a cultural heritage, expressed in forms which reflected indigenous origin and meaning but in an idiom that appealed to the Western mind set. Collectors, galleries and museums vied to own and exhibit Rorke’s Drift pots alongside those crafted by their western contemporaries working in a predominantly Anglo-Oriental style. By the turn of the century and outside of the museum and gallery domains, Rorke’s Drift pottery was for the most part considered de minimi. In a free and democratic South Africa there was no longer a pressing need for foreign nurturing of marginalised people and their marginalised craft. Rorke’s Drift could not compete with the aggressive marketing of more fashionable ‘indigenous’ art - the pots came to stand in the shadow of ceramics-as-art, and the workshop itself was not rejuvenated with new talent and vigour.

This does not mean that Rorke’s Drift pottery must be considered a mere relic of post-colonial patronage, that it has no share in the contemporary cultural crafts of South Africa and that it has no relevance in the debate about craft as a making of identity and meaning. The opposite is true: Rorke’s Drift pottery proves that an indigenous African craft can adopt or reject or adapt to outsider influences, and retain its integrity.

A short history of the Rorke’s Drift pottery workshop

The early history of the pottery workshop has been thoroughly documented by Sarah Hosking (2005), Ian Calder (undated), Calder and Berit Sahlström (2004), Mathodi Freddie Motsamayi (2012) and others. In the early 1960s, Helge Fosseus, head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) in the south-east region of South Africa, envisaged creating self-help craft groups to assist blacks earn some income. Fosseus gained support for the project in Sweden and recruited teaching staff. Craft and art teaching initially focussed on sewing, weaving, drawing, painting and printing. In 1963, the ELC set up its arts and craft centre at Rorke’s Drift near Dundee in what is now the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Three workshops were dedicated to weaving, sewing and printmaking and in 1968, a pottery workshop was added.

From the very inception, there was a gender division in the workshop which continues to the present day. Women were recruited to handbuild pots and men joined the workshop to be trained in throwing pots on the wheel. The rationale for this was that these women, though predominantly from the Sotho culture but living in a Zulu community, were practising crafters of hand-built pots such as mirifi for brewing, pitsa for cooking and other domestic pots (umsamo) and in particular the ukhamba (plural izikhamba) for the low-alcohol beer (utshwala). The Sotho tradition of making pots is the coiling technique with decorations in red terracotta colours with a unique thickened lip. In Zulu pottery tradition, pots are coiled and decorated in brown and black colours which are burnished at the leather-hard stage, fired a second time to produce a glossy black surface and then polished with cow fat or waxes. Both cultures added decorative elements as applied motifs or incised into the surface or a combination of both. Zulu motifs included raised bumps (amasumpa), pinched surfaces and geometric designs of hatched and cross-hatched lines and grooves, raised linear coils, zigzags and triangles which are borrowed from designs and repeat patterns on traditional Zulu mats (isithebe), Zulu basketry and beadwork. [1,2,3,4,5]

The men were all Zulu and produced wheel-thrown pots with a distinctive feel for western utilitarian forms with the addition of handles where required. The decorative work was quite different with more muted colours and the designs scratched into the surface in bands and cartouches which addressed the forms of the works. The linear and figurative designs were strongly influenced by the linocuts and etchings produced in the centre’s graphics workshop. Two of the men in fact attended the graphics classes and transposed those experiences onto their pottery. [6] The narratives addressed cultural life, identity and – but in a less explicit manner than the artists in the graphics workshop – also made social commentary. The familiarity of form and the decorative work which brought the men’s work closer to art-craft, may explain why the men’s work consistently held greater appeal and today command substantially higher values than the women’s works.

External influence

What the ELC mission sought to achieve, was “indigenous authenticity” [7] in the craft and art. Strictly speaking, the pottery was neither indigenous nor authentic because it adopted non-traditional techniques, forms and meaning. Authors writing about the pottery have used differing terminology to describe the fusion of western aspirations and traditional practise. Hosking called it a “composite globalised identity” [8], Mags & Ward wrote of “interwoven … African tradition and Scandinavian Enlightenment” [9], for Calder it was a “hybridity … in the conflation of Scandinavian graphic design and indigenous sources” [10], Calder & Sahlström considered it “Convergences of indigenous African and introduced Nordic systems of knowledge and pedagogical discourses” [11], and in Motsamayi’s [12] view, it was “examples of ‘invented traditions’, that is new forms of African expression intended mainly for Western patrons”. The external influence on Rorke’s Drift can not be denied but the craft was sufficiently resilient to retain distinctive essences of traditional identity and material culture but was also sufficiently plastic to absorb new forms and a new language of expression. There was no blatant pandering to the tastes of westerners – whether teachers or buyers - but a willing exploration and interpretation of the ‘other’. The potters, notably the women, had the licence to create forms that were western in concept but which drew on their own cultural heritage: transforming bowls and vases into sculptural forms such as the bird-pots which were probably modelled on 19th century European hen-on-nest forms. [13] This was an “augmentation” rather than a “rupture” of tradition, say Calder & Sahlström. [14].

The Rorke’s Drift potters set a precedent in distinctly naming themselves as the crafters/artists of their works. It was not common practise amongst South African black crafters to establish individuality nor did buyers and collectors insist on that. Anitra Nettleton of the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Arts (2010) points to the fact that the anonymity of African crafters earlier underscored Western perception of what was authentic and different. She then argues that by promoting crafters within the art hierarchy, their works were elevated from being beautiful functional objects in an ethnographic context to being largely “use-free” beautiful objects outside of their cultures. Rorke’s Drift pottery most certainly fits this scenario. It did not take long for collectors to recognise the individual genius of the potters rather than the collective genius of the workshop, and pursue the named works of the most inventive and accomplished potters. The pottery of Dinah Molefe and Elizabeth Mbatha assumed a status of greater ‘collectability’ amongst the works of the women hand-builders and amongst the men, the thrown pots of Gordon Mbatha and Joel Sibisi were considered to be de rigueur to complete a representative Rorke’s Drift collection. (Some 46 years later, Elizabeth Mbatha and Gordon Mbatha remain active potters at the workshop.)

Rorke’s Drift and the post-post-colonial angst

The ‘engineering’ [15] of traditional black pottery for works that have appeal and value for users and collectors outside of the culture of origin, has been met with some angst. This may be valid in cases where the works are created on demand, become mere commercial replications, assume entirely untraditional forms and accrue artificial value. The western exploitation of African culture in the post-colonial era, states Joseph M. Nyasani (1997), is no different from the “cultur[al] emasculations” at the dawn of colonialism and leaves “black Africa … painfully crucified on the cross of blackmailers, arm-twisters and their forever more enslaving technologies”. [16] Nyasani’s rather acerbic view varies only in degree with current opinion that Rorke’s Drift pottery produced after the mid-1990s, progressively showed a loss of imaginative interpretation of traditional form while favouring works with commercial appeal. The material quality most certainly deteriorated with the introduction of commercial clay as opposed to the former locally sourced clay, new glazes and firing in an electric kiln. Polychrome decorative work made way for mostly black- or metallic copper-surfaced works with the occasional dab of a bright colour. Forms are now replicated in multiples with nominal variance in textured surface decorations.