Where beads sing and bulls bellow: Living history in the Eastern Cape

The Eastern Cape's rich history and culture aren’t obvious when you drive through it but the names on the map reflect memories, and you can read every cow and bull you see as a symbol. Cattle were the core of the indigenous culture here. Grazing land was at the heart of colonial-era conflict.

On the beach at the mouth of the Great Fish River is an unmarked but crucial line in the sand. In 1780, Dutch colonists declared this the border between the Cape Colony and amaXhosa pastoralists, thereby appropriating seasonal grasslands used by the amaXhosa and laying the ground for ongoing conflict. After the British takeover of the Cape in 1795, they pushed the Cape boundary ever eastward, plunging the region into a century of “Wars of Dispossession”.

How would you know? You might read John Soga’s insider view, The Ama-Xosa (1932); Noël Mostert ’s epic tome Frontiers; Triangle of One Hundred Years Wars by JJ Klaas; or many others. On the other hand, as my fellow traveller Stephen Haw suggests [link below], no bibliography delivers the sense of place as viscerally as being there. Visit the area and see what the beach sands might suggest to you.

History has a perverse side. Imperial officials carved out expropriated frontier districts and named them after random royals and familiar shires. King William’s Town (KWT), today called Qonce, was once the Eastern Cape’s capital of trade and manufacture, especially wagon-making; today it is totally eclipsed by East London’s car factories.

From bustling towns like KWT and via traders, the amaXhosa obtained imported beads of glass and metal, blankets, buttons of brass and mother-of-pearl, imperial leather. They fashioned these exotic materials into modes of dress that celebrated their identity and became traditional, known as umbhaco, which expressed modernity and reflected the colonial encounter, itself linked to global forces. Wearing it could signal critique, as when Mandela wore a bead collar and white blanket during his treason trial.

Today, it's possible to purchase entire umbhaco outfits tailored by specialists. In East London, the Eastern Cape Craft Collection supports regional designers and makers, empowered by the Eastern Cape Development Corporation (ECDC). Across the road, in China Mall, knock-off umbhaco items are available at prices that undercut the local makers. 

Among the East London Museum’s long-standing displays that remain popular with visitors are its celebrated coelacanth and dioramas of amaXhosa in mid-20th-century dress. A recent exhibit explores amaXhosa knowledge, usage and belief about plants. Lacking budgets for reinstallation, museums modernise and decolonise with such contemporary displays, and by incorporating local voices and perspectives.

Qonce's Amathole Museum features a multilayered exhibition of the liberation struggle. It arcs from 1891, when the Native Congress, precursor to the ANC, was formed in KWT’s library (now incorporated into the museum), through the turmoil of the Ciskei period, to today. Unique artefacts illuminate this convoluted history. You can view the pretentious throne that Ciskei President Lenox Sebe commissioned, oversized and upholstered with leopard skin, and the sole remaining champagne glass from Ciskei Airways.

Broster, a third-generation Transkeian, spent 14 years running a remote family trading store at Qebe, high in the Drakensberg foothills. She recounts this period in her autobiographical Red Blanket Valley, named after the red ochre (imbola) that traditionalists applied to their bodies and clothing, signifying connection to their ancestors.

In 1954, Broster started a beadworkers’ circle to support local women and began to research and collect beadwork, assembling about 6,000 pieces. She also raised funds to start a clinic — greatly enlarged today — and built a church.

I decided to track down parts of Broster’s beadwork collection and to visit the originating community at Qebe. Our excursion was facilitated by Vulisango Ndwandwa of Eastern Cape Arts and Craft Hub in Mthatha, which resuscitated the Qebe beadworkers’ co-operative and whose organisation markets their beadwork at Mthatha’s Nelson Mandela Museum and other venues.

We met the beadworkers’ co-op, Sonenthlahla (meaning “we are fortunate”), in Chief Gcinindawo Zibene’s meeting house. We presented gifts for the assembly and for the ancestors, and were received with song and dance. The living shared tea and biscuits; the ancestors absorbed fine brandy poured into the navel at the centre of the rondavel floor. Then we all drank gin and the women dressed me in beadwork. A highlight was meeting an elder, Noncakubani Dayeni, who as a young woman had known Broster. She said Broster was fondly remembered in these parts for her kindness.

By contrast, at nearby Walter Sisulu University, the Broster Beadwork Collection of about 3,000 pieces is professionally housed and protected under national heritage legislation. Though it's not open to the public, I relished two sessions there with curator Zukisa Madyibi identifying objects published in Broster’s books.

One of the most consequential events in amaXhosa history occurred near where Morgan Bay is today. In 1856, colonial pressure on amaXhosa chiefs reached a crisis point. At the Gxara River mouth, a teenage girl named Nongqawuse received a message from the ancestors about deliverance from the white colonisers. Provided that amaXhosa immediately ceased farming and slaughtered their cattle, the settlers would be swept into the ocean. Her uncle, counsellor to the king, delivered her message; King Sarhili issued his order and the Cattle Killing began. The ancestors never responded as predicted. Instead, the Xhosa nation was plunged into poverty and famine, and politically diminished. 

Today, there's no inkling of this chaos and spiritual agony at the neatly fenced Morgan Bay Hotel. However, an upstairs sitting room offers framed historical pointers: Ming porcelain fragments, Indian carnelian beads and cowrie shells from Maldives. European ships such as the Santo Espiritu, a Portuguese carrack wrecked at nearby Double Bay in 1608, carried these as transoceanic ballast that later could be traded in West Africa, especially for enslaved captives. Apparently, Xhosa-speaking people first encountered glass beads this way, from wrecks. Delivered to the shore from the watery realm of their ancestors, this made beads not just adornments but spiritual matter.   

Walking along the beach at Chintsa East, we met a group dressed in umbhaco. I recognised from their outfits that two of the women were amagqirha.  The leader of the group, surprised at my few words in isiXhosa, invited us to join a ceremony the following day in Mooiplaas, 20 minutes inland from Morgan Bay.

The occasion was an umbuyiso, held some years after relatives die to spiritually recall them to rejoin and protect the family. Our host, Sithembele Thomas (aka DJ Mantofontofo on FM 89.5Mhz) explained that this umbuyiso would be extraordinary. While they're usually performed for one deceased relative, Thomas would recall two ancestors and hold a lavish feast the day after. He dropped me a pin.

GPS is a modern miracle. We arrived in the semirural location and there stood Thomas’s teenage son, Oliver, to open the homestead gate. It faced the wooden fence of the cattle kraal where, traditionally, deceased relatives were interred. Thomas’s central rondavel dominated the smallholding, a traditional stage for key parts of the ceremony. Men were seated to the left, women to the right, with home-brewed beer along the centre of the back wall.

We waited for relatives to arrive, while other members of the family dressed and prepared in other dwellings. The women emerged with skirts and aprons of maroon and pink, their heads turbaned. At sacrificial occasions, mature men wear an isidanga, a long necklace comprising strands of turquoise beads, a beaded headband and a white blanket ornamented with custom black braiding. White clothing expresses purity and liminality, an attractive flux for spiritual communication at ceremonies. Vivid contemporary touches included the lead igqirha’s skirts of brilliant green and yellow, colours associated with fertility, and a male igqirha’s orange trousers with matching anklets.

This visual feast was peripheral to the spiritual undertaking of recalling the ancestors, led by Thomas as intlabi, “the one who stabs”. The intlabi prods each animal to be sacrificed in the breast. If it bellows, it means the ancestor accepts the sacrifice. Two pure-white goats were the gate-openers, easily dispatched after appropriate bleats. The amagqirha beat drums and sang. The first bull, too, bellowed on cue and was quickly culled with a blade to sever the artery at the back of his neck.

The second bull refused to bellow. When this happens, it means the ancestors are displeased for some reason, often unresolved conflict in the family. A ripple of tension ruffled the gathering. Thomas tried repeatedly, applying frothy umqombothi on the bull’s mouth to beseech the ancestors. He grew sweaty, tired; he and other elders made further entreaties at the gatepost and tried again to “tickle” the bull. Still no response. More prayers, repeated invocations ... silence.

Tension mounted. Confessions emerged of buried feelings within the family, perhaps blocking the ancestor’s return. Speakers sobbed. Among these swirling emotional currents we felt a simultaneous upswelling within the collective consciousness as our gathering willed the bull to bellow, to transmit to us the ancestor’s spirit from the realm of the dead so we might send the bull to its death. We got the vibe from some of the neighbours that our presence as white outsiders was unwelcome, perhaps preventing the ancestor’s coming. I suggested to Thomas that perhaps we should leave but he said the problem had nothing to do with us and though we were free to leave at any time he’d rather we stayed.

Finally, Thomas’s family returned to the rondavel to start over. The amagqirha divined that the second ancestor might feel offended at being blended into the first's ceremony. This supplementary round of supplication hit the spot. Finally, the bull bellowed. Clapping and drumming answered the spirit’s sign. We shared the palpable relief. This beast quickly crossed the threshold, his meat remained immanently spiritual, awaiting communion at the coming feast. So, beings cross borders. We all die. Some return, perhaps, it depends on belief. In any event, community is built and cemented through such shared experiences. As ubuntu holds, we are through others.

Some of the Eastern Cape’s culture is accessible in museums but is best absorbed as lived experience and through making human connections. The Eastern Cape’s history is trickier to uncover. After some exploration, though, history envelops you like a blanket, and you begin to experience unexpected shades of meaning within the everyday. A beaded and embroidered blanket, for example, is deeper than it seems on the surface, offering inroads into culture, history and religion, and inviting us to travel further.

• Gary van Wyk is a New-York based art historian, curator and art dealer currently focused on South African beadwork and ceremonial textiles.