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Course: Art of Africa > Unit 6
Lesson 2: South Africa- Marriage apron (itjogolo or ijogolo), Ndebele peoples
- Married Woman’s Apron (Ndebele peoples)
- Thethana, South Sotho artist
- Beaded collar (ingqosha), Xhosa artist, South Africa
- Santu Mofokeng, Train Churches
- William Kentridge, drawing from Tide Table (Soho in Deck Chair)
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Marriage apron (itjogolo or ijogolo), Ndebele peoples
A conversation between Dr. Peri Klemm and Dr. Beth Harris in front of unrecorded artist, marriage apron (itjogolo or ijogolo), 1920–40, Mpumwanga, South Africa, leather, glass beads, fabric (Newark Museum of Art). Created by Smarthistory.
Video transcript
(soothing piano music) - [Dr. Harris] We're in the Newark Museum, looking at a large,
beautifully beaded apron. While we might think about an apron as something we wear while
cooking to stay clean, this is described as an apron
because it was something that was worn on that same part of the body. But this is something
that was highly valued, that someone took a very
long time to create. - [Dr. Klemm] This is an ijogolo, which is a married woman's apron among the Ndebele in South Africa. In order to understand this piece, we need to talk about
what she would've worn prior to wearing this ijogolo. - [Dr. Harris] A woman
would've worn something that was also beaded, but that was beaded on a harder surface. - [Dr. Klemm] And it
could have been leather but it would've been a hardened
leather or a stiff canvas. - [Dr. Harris] This one
is beaded on leather. Like so much African art, objects can mark periods
in someone's life. - [Dr. Klemm] And in
addition to that, the ideal, that which is considered beautiful, often reflects a moral
virtue or an inner quality, and that's really the case here too. So that earlier stiff canvas that a girl would wear
prior to initiation, prior to marriage, was really supposed to suggest something about
her chastity, her virginity, that she's not ready yet to have children. - [Dr. Harris] So it's
something hard and impenetrable to suggest her chastity. - [Dr. Klemm] And that
initial apron that she wears is beaded by her mother. And what's depicted is a
very abstract representation of her mother's hopes and
aspirations for her daughter, specifically, for where she might live. It could be an elegant house. It could be a house with glass windows and electricity and
airplanes flying overhead. Essentially, it would be a
house in a cosmopolitan city. - [Dr. Harris] And this is because, at this time in South Africa, the system that people were
living in was apartheid, that is, a system of segregation where whites lived in
affluent places in cities, where blacks lived in townships where they were impoverished, usually without running
water or electricity. And so this makes sense
as the mother's wish for her daughter's future domestic life. - [Dr. Klemm] And in that sense, these beaded aprons were
political statements. They said something about the treatment of the Ndebele people. Something that the apartheid
regime did not know, they saw the aprons as beautiful, as expressions of an ethnic identity, and that these Ndebele
must actually be happy because they're doing so much bead work. - [Dr. Harris] Often people make art when their identity is threatened, they hold onto their traditions,
they express their identity through the symbolic
forms of their culture, and that's true here of the Ndebele. This increase in their
aesthetic production actually was an indication
of their oppression. - [Dr. Klemm] When the
Ndebele were forced to move to KwaNdebele, that is,
the town of the Ndebele, by the apartheid regime, they were forced off
their ancestral homeland. They were forced away from the places that they would herd their
animals and plant fertile crops. And they were restricted
to a zone that was barren, and that didn't provide
them a means of livelihood. The government had
promised them a factory, had promised them running water,
which actually never came. - [Dr. Harris] So this apron was made for a woman who was married. The leather was given to
her by her mother-in-law, and then she beaded it as an adult, now living a life that was very different than the one that her
mother had imagined for her. - [Dr. Klemm] What she's
beading is no longer a dream, but rather a reality. She's beaded what she has,
that is a woman's compound, represented here by those
two central squares. And then gardens and corrals
for animals on the outskirts. - [Dr. Harris] We're
looking at, essentially, the ground plan of where she lived. - [Dr. Klemm] This is a space
she would've made her own, she would've painted, and
she would've been proud of. - [Dr. Harris] The flaps
below, we see five of them, the center one is for the woman herself, and the other ones are symbols of the children she hopes to have. - [Dr. Klemm] The idea is that she has children on either side of her. - [Dr. Harris] I'm seeing
these glistening, ruby red, sapphire blue beads, emerald green, and all on this white field. I can imagine the hours and
hours that it took to make this. - [Dr. Klemm] Pieces like these
are very heavily collected. The KwaNdebele site became
a tourist attraction with the fall of apartheid, and so, many people go to this place and they purchase items like this. So today we see a
renaissance in bead work, different reasons for making it, and also the introduction
of new kinds of materials, not older beads like the
ones you see in this example. Ndebele women are making aprons, both for indigenous use
as well as for outsiders. - [Dr. Harris] Again, what we have is really a symbolic language, where what a person is
wearing can tell us so much about who they are, about
their family's hopes for them, about where they live,
and about their status. - [Dr. Klemm] And while these indicated something about their station in life, we also know that they
were a way for women at this particular historical moment to have a voice for,
at least symbolically, what they wanted, i.e. electricity
and access to modernity, which in actual fact, they could not have. (pleasant piano music)