Made in Africa: Tapestry and the Topography of Swedish Philanthropy in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT

During the 1960s, tapestries from Swedish art and craft centres in southern Africa were acclaimed in the Nordic country as an outcome of its own expertise and largesse. Yet when these works by marginalised women artists in Africa were exhibited at the National Museum in Stockholm in 1970, they were dismissed as the fruits of Swedish cultural imperialism and naive artistic minds. Despite the ensuing public debate, the exhibition and its discourses, like the works themselves, are little known in southern Africa and now largely forgotten in Sweden. In considering the visual vocabularies of some of these tapestries, many of which were woven at the renowned centre at Rorke’s Drift in KwaZulu-Natal, this article addresses the implications of these Swedish ‘culture-rescue’ projects, showing how women’s artistic ‘voices’ on the subcontinent were silenced, not merely by apartheid suppression but also in Swedish representations. By interrogating the attitudes that the audiences of the exhibitions held towards black women artists, the article reveals how the tapestries’ woven iconographies were a complex response to circumstance, covertly interrogating white hegemony while invested with self-definition.

KEYWORDS:

• National Museum
• Sweden
• Rorke’s Drift
• Thabana li Mele
• tapestry
• apartheid

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce copyright material in this article. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any copyright infringements have occurred, she would appreciate information that would enable any omissions or errors to be corrected.

Notes

1 Situated in eastern South Africa, this province incorporates the former Natal province and the KwaZulu ‘homeland’ (previously Zululand).

2 ‘Made in Africa’ was arranged by an exhibition working group that included Helena Lutteman, Staffan Snidare, Dag Widman, and the former Rorke’s Drift teacher Ola Granath.

3 A major source in this enquiry was my interviews from 1999 to 2018 with those who shaped, and reshaped, these cultural initiatives in southern Africa: the Swedish art teachers and the tapestry artists themselves. The archives in Uppsala of the Church of Sweden Mission, which facilitated the committee’s ventures in Africa, illuminated the actors' dilemmas and decisions. Swedish newspaper articles from 1970 facilitated my recovery of public attitudes, as did memoirs of committee members.

4 Linking the words hem (home) and slöjd (handcraft or handicraft), hemslöjd (def. form hemslöjden) translates as ‘homecraft’, ‘handicraft’ or ‘handcraft’ in English. The extent to which they denote ‘art’ and ‘craft’ is open to debate.

5 S. Höjer, Slav stig upp …  (Stockholm: Stockholm Tidens Förlag, 1961), 82–88, 127–135.

6 Terms such as u-länder emerged from Sweden’s philanthropic initiatives in former colonial countries from the mid-twentieth century.

7 In 1979, one of the committee members, Jytte Bonnier, was to claim that she had recognised the project as a ‘Trojan Horse’ that would reach black women in the guise of apartheid’s native craft policy, although neither she nor others seem to have shared this insight with the couple.

8 P. Gowenius, interview with the author, Växjö, Sweden, 2 June 2016.

9 Other courses included printmaking and ceramics and one for art and craft advisors. Although the number of women weavers during this period is unknown, those who wove for any length of time are estimated to be about 110.

10 S. Höjer, ‘Den tidigaste Svenska u-landshjälpen – och den senaste’, Sociala Meddelanden, 6 (1962), 538; S. Höjer, ‘Ett konkret project’, in Fred och Frihet, 38, 2 (1964), 17.

11 S. Frennberg, ‘Hjälp till självhjälp’, Form, 58, 10 (1962), 639.

12 Höjer, ‘Ett konkret project’.

13 R. Tarschys, ‘Vävt i Natal’, Dagens Nyheter, 6 May 1965.

14 B. Dahlbäck, ‘Företal’, in Made in Africa (exhibition catalogue) (Stockholm: National Museum, 1970), 2.

15 C. Häglund, ‘Cyniskt i överkant’, Fönstret, 38, 9 (1961), 212.

16 Other women, such as Elisa Xaba and Beatrice Zwane, seem to have worked on this tapestry also.

17 Although my other interviewees have speculated about the identity of this figure, I recently established it from a newspaper article as Snidare. ‘Svenskar invävda i Afrika’, Dagens Nyheter, 17 April 1970.

18 Information from Ola Granath, the second principal of the centre. I compiled this interpretation from numerous interviews with him, as well as his description in O. Granath, ‘Om vårt förhållande till afrikankst konst’ (exhibition catalogue) (Stockholm: National Museum, 1970), 6–7.

19 P. Majozi and M. Shabalala, interview with the author, Amoibe, 7 March 2018.

20 G. Bredberg, ‘Afrikanskt: Från religiös rit till betald bild’, in Vår Kyrka and Veckotidning (joint special edition), 109, 16 (1970), 25.

21 Native reserves, or Bantustans, as they were later called, originated in the Natives Land Act (Act 27) promulgated in 1913 (with amendments in 1936) that designated specific areas in which so-called ethnic groups were to reside in South Africa.

22 P. Gowenius, Blå jakaranda: Mitt tack till Afrika (Gårdsby: Self-publication, 2016), 43.

23 A. Ndebele, interview with the author, Swart Mfolozi, South Africa, 14 March 2017.

24 O. Granath, interviews with the author, Hudiksvall, Sweden, 16–20 June 2016.

25 P. Gowenius, interview with the author, Växjö, Sweden, 7 June 2018.

26 Power, Gender, and Community Art Archive, Special Collections, University of Johannesburg (hereafter PGCAA), P. Majozi, questionnaire for Ola Granath survey, Rorke’s Drift, c.1969.

27 P. Gowenius, interview with the author, Växjö, Sweden, 7 June 2018. Interestingly, Swedish critics such as Olvång tried to deter sales of these ‘authentic’ works that testified to Swedish success in Africa. Their relatively conservative buyers included church parishes, such as Svenska Kyrkan Församlingsgården in Skellefteå where Shiyane now hangs.

28 Hobbs, ‘Ideology, Imagery and Female Agency’, 148.

29 Hobbs, ‘Ideology, Imagery and Female Agency’, 106.

30 P. Majozi and M. Shabalala, interview with author, Amoibe, 7 March 2018.

31 O. Granath, ‘För att fortsätta med verkstäderna’, unpublished paper, c.1969.

32 A. Mbatha, ‘Theories that Did not Succeed in Practice’, in J. Addleson, Azaria Mbatha Retrospective Exhibition (Durban: Durban Art Gallery, 1998), 59.

33 See Hobbs, ‘Ideology, Imagery and Female Agency’, 118.

34 The Made in Africa catalogue referred to The Hungry Lion as The Big Lion. As various titles have been assigned to this work, identifying its weavers has proven complicated. Furthermore, the details of the story fluctuate slightly in P.Gowenius’s various recountings of this narrative.

35 PGCAA, E. Xaba and E. Mdluli, questionnaires for Ola Granath survey, Rorke’s Drift, c.1967.

36 Granath, ‘För att fortsätta’.

37 P. Gowenius, interview with the author and Elizabeth Rankin, Växjö, Sweden, 26 June 2001. In some versions of the story, Peder Gowenius has recorded the inspector's name as Van der Wahl.

39 The work was sold in Sweden and is presumed to be there still.

38 Mdluli and Xaba seem to have drawn on the well-known imagery of swallowing from inherited oral stories, such as that of uNanana Boselesele, in which a woman discovers that her children and animals, and whole villages, had been devoured by the monstrous predator Sondozima (sometimes Sondonzima). She outwits it by making it swallow her and then slicing open its belly to create a way out for them.

40 P. Gowenius, unpublished memoirs (translated by Alistair Cochrane, 2002), 45.

41 P. Gowenius, ‘Art, Apartheid and the Forbidden Message: Looking Back on my Time at Rorke’s Drift’, in P. Hobbs and E. Rankin, Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2003), xiv.

42 P. Gowenius, unpublished memoirs, 32.

43 This was not a far-fetched precaution. Gunnar Helander, a Swedish missionary and critic of apartheid stationed at Rorke’s Drift, was banned from South Africa in 1957. Later, Peder Gowenius and other Swedish art teachers would be harassed, followed, or abducted. See Hobbs, ‘Ideology, Imagery and Female Agency’, 198. Despite this, the South African state media did not hesitate to use the centre’s achievements to advance its own interests, publicising these to suggest that black communities were flourishing under this regime of unequal provision.

44 U. Gowenius, letter to the author, Växjö, Sweden, 13 February 1999.

45 ‘Svenskar invävda i Afrika’, Dagens Nyheter, 1970.

46 D. Kunene, Heroic Poetry of the Basotho (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 114.

47 Kunene, Heroic Poetry of the Basotho, 15.

48 The term lifela (sing. sefela) was originally used for Christian hymns. It later also came to be used to refer to the chanted ‘word music’ of migrant labourers.

49 D. Coplan, ‘In the time of Cannibals: Basotho Working-Class Aurature and the Meaning of Sesotho’ (unpublished manuscript, University of Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, 1989), 7.

50 D. Coplan, ‘Eloquent Knowledge: Lesotho Migrants’ Songs and the Anthropology of Experience’, American Ethnologist 14 (3), 415–16.

51 P. Gowenius, unpublished memoirs, 21–4.

52 B.M. Khaketla, Lesotho, 1970: An African Coup Under the Microscope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 281.

53 P. Gowenius, interview with the author, Växjö, Sweden, 9 June 2018.

54 Peder’s wife Ulla, their newborn baby, and other Swedes had managed to leave Lesotho for Rorke’s Drift some days earlier. Ulla returned to Sweden sometime later, having avoided expulsion from South Africa by informing the authorities that the couple had separated.

55 ‘Svenskar invävda i Afrika’, Dagans Nyheler, 17 April 1970.

56 B. Olvång, ‘Kulturbilder från skilda länder och miljöer’, Aftonbladet, 23 April 1970.

57 Afro-art had also endorsed consultation with the Lesotho government. In 1967, Jytte Bonnier (founder of Afro-Art and committee member) visited Lesotho for a planning meeting with Thord Palmlund (SIDA), Peder Gowenius, Peter Lowes (Deputy Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme), and David Biggs of the Lesotho Ministry of Economic Development.

58 P. Gowenius, interview with the author, Växjö, Sweden, 9 June 2018.

59 For a fuller account of this development, see Hobbs, ‘Ideology, Imagery and Female Agency’, 202.

60 B. Olvång, ‘Kulturimperialism? Ja!’, Aftonbladet, 5 May 1970, translated by author.

61 B. Zwane and E. Ndebele, interview with the author, Amoibe, 10 November 2016.

62 B. Olvång, ‘Kulturimperialism? Ja!’, Aftonbladet, 5 May 1970.

63 F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, [1961] 1963). Swedish translation as Jordens fördömda (Göteborg: Gösta Skoog, 1962).

64 ‘Afrikanskt konsthantverk under debatt’, in Vår Kyrka, 21 (1970) (no page number).

65 Bredberg, ‘Afrikanskt’, 38.

66 Bredberg, ‘Afrikanskt’, 25.

67 Öhman’s deployment of this term is an adaptation of Valentin Mudimbe’s conceptualisation of Western knowledge construction as a ‘colonial library’. V. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

68 M. Öhman, ‘“Sweden Helps”: Efforts to Formulate the White Man’s Burden for the Wealthy and Modern Sweden’, Special issue ‘Kult 7’, Nordic Colonial Mind (Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University), (2010), 141, https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:951167/FULLTEXT01.pdf, accessed 5 January 2019.

69 See K. Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43, 6 (1991), 1241–1299.

70 The Olvång debate is missing from Konstfack’s otherwise comprehensive collection of cuttings on its interactions with Rorke’s Drift. Amongst other possibilities this might suggest a need to distance the institution from the interventions to which it once sent graduates (see Hobbs, ‘Ideology, Imagery and Female Agency’, 14–15).

71 P. Gowenius, interview with the author, Växjö, Sweden, 14 May 1999.

72 Tapestries from Serowe mostly escaped commentary, not only because Botswana was generally considered not to have colluded with apartheid but, more probably, because they were largely non-figurative works made by young girls.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philippa Hobbs

Philippa Hobbs is a senior postdoctoral fellow with the South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture, within the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.