This 19th/20th century Zulu beadwork fragment is an object used for bodily adornment. Bodily adornment, in the many forms it takes, is a persistent feature and preoccupation of human social life. Terrence S. Turner says of this consistent and persistent fact:

…the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well…the surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual; becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment becomes the language through which it is expressed.

Bodily adornment, or the social skin as Turner calls it, is a central mode of both encoding and expressing identity across all cultures in history. As such, items of bodily adornment, the ways they are made, who they are made for, what they are made of, when they are and are not used, and what happens to them over time provides us with a lot of information into not only the values of the culture but the specific ways individuals relate to and understand themselves within social and cultural contexts. This item is no different.

Fragments and Ambiguity: Interrogating the Label of “Apron”

Though this object is labeled as an apron, this deserves some further interrogation. This object is a fragment of a larger piece, which makes identifying it difficult. It could have been part of a necklace, waist band, or it could be a fragment of an apron as the Brooklyn Museum label designates.

Here, I have put another example of an “apron” (top left), alongside a “waistband” (top right), a “necklace” (bottom left), and the beaded fragment in the Brooklyn Museum (bottom right) (though these designations could and should also be questioned, which is why I have put them in quotes). Based on these comparisons, I do believe the object at the Brooklyn Museum most closely resembles the apron from the British Museum. However, it is worth keeping in mind that the apron’s fragmentary status precludes knowing what this object is with certainty.

A (very) Brief History of Beads and the Zulu Kingdom

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of the Zulu Kingdom as a result of a series of conflicts between two warring Southern African kingdoms.

In 1816, Shaka, the illegitimate son of the chief of the small Zulu kingdom, ascended to the chieftancy, and over the course of the next several years, he led a series of battles that integrated or defeated the two previously warring kingdoms, leading the Zulu to become the dominant power in the Nguni territory.

The Zulu kings established a strict royal monopoly on the import of glass beads, and glass beads were distributed according to rank, marital status, age group, and sex. It is widely believed that beadwork techniques were developed at the court of the king by women and girls.

Beadworking stayed within the domain of women in Zulu society, and as women were released from court service and moved away, these techniques spread across the Zulu kingdom, and beadwork became integrated into everyday dress and played an important role in ceremonial occasions.

Beadwork and Becoming in Zulu Culture

Historically, beadwork has served the purpose of regulating courting and sexual behavior in Southern African culture between men and women and circumscribing socio-cultural and spiritual roles.

In Zulu culture, successful movement through the life phases of childhood, marriage, childbearing, and death was an essential part of the more general biological and spiritual process of becoming a human being, and personhood was defined by completing these life stages. Beads were used both within rites of passage but also to signify one’s status, life phase, and sex in everyday life. As such, beads were central to Zulu understandings of what it meant to be a person.

Unmarried women wore the most elaborate pieces of beadwork. They  not only adorned themselves in beads, but used beadwork to express interest in suitable young men. These young men would court women, and then women would actively choose to have the man as her lover.

Women would signal interest by first giving the gift of a single strand of white beads called ucu, and then more complex beads with colors and coded messages would be exchanged. These pieces of beadwork were worn by both men and women. As the relationship progressed, increasingly elaborate pieces would be made by the girl to express her feelings.

I believe this specific piece would have been worn by an unmarried woman, as married and pregnant women’s aprons were often made of cowhides or other textiles with beaded belts layered on top.

Zulu Beadwork as “More-Than-Language”

Beadwork has a notably linguistic component. Starting in childhood, it is customary in Zulu society to engage in speech avoidance as a sign of respect, particularly to elders. Speech avoidances are particularly relevant to girls and women, especially when they are in a relationship with a man and are considered most ritually dangerous, in phases such as marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and mourning.

Traditionalist women in Zulu society, express themselves via regional color and motif conventions that reference the formerly oral language of Zulu praise poems, which utilized metaphor, alliteration, and innuendo.

In beadwork, design and meaning reflect the makers’ point of view by both materializing and expressing identity according to gender, age, status, and age-group that correlate with important rites of passage such as engagement, marriage, birth, and mourning. Women can also express personal emotions like happiness, disappointment, and anxiety through beadwork.

Beadwork should be interpreted as a metaphorical language in the sense that beadwork does not possess a universal set of meanings, syntax, and rules. This is because colors and patterns within beadwork are highly contextual to the specific beadworker/wearer and the time, place, and community they belong to.

Beadwork, like all metaphorical and symbolic language, has the capacity to explain and express things in ways that written language and speech cannot. This is not only useful for women to express themselves within the context of a culture of respect and avoidance, but it also means that there is a particularly affective, poetic, and “more-than-language” dimension to beadwork.

Final Curatorial Statement 

It was an honor to research and curate this object. Its small and intimate scale belies the incredible amount of history and meaning contained within it. Both my approach as a researcher and curator centered on allowing the object to speak for itself.

This first involved close-looking exercises, where I approached the object with very little historical background. This allowed me to notice materiality, flaws, patterns, craftsmanship, scale, and other visual and haptic qualities that may inform its reason for existing and the journey of its life. Here, I would like to express my gratitude to Conservator Celeste Mahoney and Associate Curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Dr. Annissa Malvoisin, both of whom made this object available for study over the course of the semester and made this in-depth research process possible.

I then embarked on my research journey, which involved consulting a variety of sources. A huge thank you to Dr. Denise Lim, who provided me with ample resources on the history of South Africa to orient my research. I also consulted books on textiles, beadwork, anthropological works on bodily adornment, scientific matter on glass and bead production, archaeological work on beads, as well as works that focused on Zulu perspectives on beadwork and its meanings. I would also like to thank Dr. Morgan E. Moroney, Assistant Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum, for providing me with resources on ancient glass production.

After my research concluded, the process of creating the digital exhibition began. This involved several challenges, particularly how to emphasize the fact that this object would have been worn on the body. This led me to begin my digital exhibition with a statement about how this object is specifically an object of bodily adornment. I also included photos and drawings of how aprons would have been worn. Though none of these approaches are entirely perfect.

Though I am not the most tech-savvy, Afiya Owens-Kalfani, a web developer at Parsons, made the WordPress incredibly simple to use, and I am incredibly grateful for her help throughout the semester.

Overall, this curatorial project was extremely expansive. I gained an incredible appreciation not only for this object, Zulu culture, and the beauty of beadwork, but also for the various people, including classmates, my course instructor, and the staff at the Brooklyn Museum, who helped me throughout this project. Without whose help, I would not have been able to do this research.