community reflections

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.

From ‘Abt Vogler,’ by Robert Browning

 

Reap not the seeds of weakness
That country is coming back
Hold that dear in your hearts
It is not lost, but kept
By the “Father of Orphans”…

From ‘The Grave of the King—Part One,’ by SEK Mqhayi[1]

 

My husband Justus and I arrived in Hamburg, on the banks of the magnificent Keiskamma River, in July 2000—ignorant of the place, its people and the shape of our future there. After years in Johannesburg, where I had recently completed my Masters in Fine Art at the Technikon Witwatersrand (from 2005, known as the University of Johannesburg), I was overwhelmed by the natural beauty of the place. Deep within me I felt that I had come home—to the land of my forebears, my mother’s people. It was between these settler farmers in the Eastern Cape and those I would meet along this ancient river, that the bitter Frontier Wars had been fought.

I grew up hearing stories of the hardships my mother’s ancestors had suffered as poor English and Irish immigrants to the annexed territory the British called Kaffraria.[2] But these family stories omitted to mention the enormous suffering the Xhosa inhabitants of the region had experienced at the hands of the colonial government. Nor did my apartheid-era history syllabus at school convey this. It was only later, in early adulthood, that I learned of the enormity of the crimes the British had inflicted on the Xhosa peoples of the Eastern Cape.

When I came to know the people of the village of Hamburg, the legacy of Britain’s brutal colonial subjugation and dispossession of the Xhosa people was still palpable. The grief, loss, hurt and economic deprivation of so many living in the villages between the coast and the R72 contrasted starkly with my gratitude for the pristine, undulating beauty of the landscape, and my sense of privilege in being able to live in such surroundings comfortably.

As part of my Masters’ degree, I had worked on an artist’s book which I called Naught for your comfort, about the so-called cattle killings of 1856 and 1857, a tragic consequence of the contested millenarian ‘vision’ of the young Xhosa girl Nongqawuse. Nongqawuse claimed that two of her ancestors had spoken to her on the banks of the Gxarha River, telling her that the Xhosa peoples should destroy all their crops and cattle, and that in return the ancestors would drive all European settlers into the sea, never to return. Then there would be a time of plenty, and the kraals would be filled with beautiful, healthy cattle and the granaries would overflow with grain. By tragic contrast, the widespread sacrificial destruction of crops and livestock destroyed the prosperity and independence of the proud Xhosa peoples, and forced a humiliating dependence on the colonial regime for survival.^[3] Approximately forty thousand Xhosa people died of starvation.

The first exhibition of the newly established Keiskamma Art Project, Vuselela or Restoration, held at the National Arts Festival in 2002, sought to redeem the legacy of Nongqawuse by symbolically, and through female agency, restoring the herds destroyed in the Cattle Killings of 1856 to 1857. The women artists, traditionally forbidden to work with cattle, made a new, stitched herd, fulfilling—at least metaphorically—Nongqawuse’s prophecy that the four hundred thousand cattle lost would be resurrected. This would prove to be the start of an extraordinary process of psychological and social resurrection for the women and broader community of Hamburg.

From Vuselela flowed the idea of telling a panoramic story of South African history, not from the vantage point of the victors but of those they subjugated. Our inspiration came from the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry, which traces the events that led to the Norman conquest of England in 1066; the Keiskamma Tapestry instead depicts two centuries of Xhosa life, from 1756 to 1994.[4] People in the broader Hamburg area didn’t seem to know much about their history and my idea was that, if they had a stronger sense of their collective, historic identity as a people, they would gain self-esteem and a sense of the way forward in their individual lives. In a series of workshops, the artists shared oral histories passed on by parents and grandparents and historians came to share and contextualise written historical accounts. Working together in a spirit of shared humanity, we started putting together a revisionist history of the region.

In this first major work of the Keiskamma Art Project, I was determined that every woman would have a drawing represented. There would be no major artist; each individual who had worked on the piece would feel a sense of pride and agency, and the work would represent a collective community effort to restore trust and hope, and to show care for one other. This is why every artist and embroiderer’s name has been stitched into the work, along with the names of the South African benefactors who, metre by metre, funded the piece.

At the time I worked unconsciously, guided by my faith and conscience, following my intuition and some bigger, only half-understood, dream. Something seemed to pull me forward. I remember thinking that all we had to do as artists was just ‘show up’ and get started, despite our relative inexperience. To our surprise, as we needed expertise, it would somehow materialise. Only many years later did I come to see this kind of kinship or sense of human community as an expression of earthly resurrection. Just having the faith to begin starts a process where miraculously people unite behind a common cause and work humbly together. I cannot name everyone but I know that, wherever we looked, we found help and support.

Jan Chalmers and Jacky Jezewski, friends from Oxford, in 2002 taught us the Bayeux embroidery stitch, among many other embroidery skills.

Marialda Marais, an exceptional teacher from the art college I had graduated from in 2000, guided some of the more skilled artists. She came every July university vacation for several years to teach formal art classes to those interested.

Jackie Downs, a young artist from Gqeberha, who had just completed her Fine Arts degree at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg and was looking for work, moved to Hamburg to help us.

Tanya Jordaan, an artist and photographer who had graduated from the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, also joined us as a volunteer.

We came together as one community to thread the warp and the weft of South African history. Inspired, we brought this history to life, figure by figure.

The British colonial government had used the Keiskamma River, the iXesi in isiXhosa, as a boundary, a means to ensure that the dispossessed Xhosa could not return to reclaim their ancestral lands, now declared a British colony—British Kaffraria. The Keiskamma Tapestry sets out to move beyond the painful and divisive narrative of colonial history, restoring the voices and hidden histories of the people living around the Keiskamma River, from pre-colonial times, through the period of British colonial occupation and the apartheid era to the advent of democracy in 1994. Particular attention is given to depictions of pre-colonial San, KhoiKhoi, and Xhosa life, showing in vivid detail what we know is soon to be destroyed. The tapestry goes on to depict growing conflict between the British colonists and the Xhosa people, in particular the series of conflicts known as the Frontier Wars, which took place between 1779 and 1878. Significantly, the work doesn’t simplify the complexity of history, showing skirmishes over land and resources between Xhosa, San and KhoiKhoi groupings, as well as strategic co-operation with the occupying forces by some groups.

While the stories of the Keiskamma Tapestry arise from the very ground the people of Hamburg walk on today, they also speak to the broader history of the country. The message is one of healing, kinship and community—the triumph of humanity over political ideology. By situating the story of the Wars of Dispossession and the Cattle Killings within the context of the Norman conquest of England, we affirmed a commitment to healing the wounds of division and war that have harmed our collective psyche as a nation. Saxons and Normans became one people —so could we.

We ended up with 117 metres of embroidered hessian in several huge rolls, standing more than 1 metre high. It wasn’t clear where they fitted chronologically into the story until my son Robert photographed them and we were able to work out the order from the photographs. Some pieces were wider than others and we had no idea how to put them together neatly. To our relief, through a mutual friend we found Carol Slabolepszy, an expert seamstress and artist. Carol arrived in Hamburg and, working with our own seamstresses, completed the work.

It felt as if our tapestry had resurrected a story that had always belonged to us but that had been long hidden from view.

From this time onward our prefab studio on the Keiskamma River become a meeting place for women to talk about their problems, to receive sympathy and assistance, and to feel a sense of love and solidarity. The wounds of history could start to heal.

*****

In the 1980s I was a medical doctor, working in a state hospital in Johannesburg. I had suffered from undiagnosed postnatal depression since the birth of my sons in 1976 and 1977 and had since then struggled to find meaning in medicine. By the late 1980s I was burnt out, depressed and disillusioned, struggling daily with the paradox of treating my patients’ physical ailments when many of their psychosocial and spiritual issues left them with no hope in life or belief in a future.

During this time my son Graeme went on a school trip to Europe and brought back a cardboard model of the Isenheim Altarpiece, by the early Renaissance artist Matthias Grünewald. I learned that Grünewald had worked in a hospice for people dying of St Anthony’s fire, a painful, fatal disease with no treatment. Grünewald had seen close up the cruel effects of this disease and his artwork was to bring those afflicted hope in their suffering.

While looking at my son’s cardboard model of the Isenheim Altarpiece, something struck me that would stay with me for the rest of my life: Grünewald’s Christ on the cross carried marks of disease. Some art historians suggest that Grünewald attempted to show all diseases known to mankind on the body of the crucified Christ, so that these diseases would be crucified with Him.

The artwork comforted me, offered a perspective that allowed me to cope personally with all the suffering and despair I was witnessing as a doctor in an under-resourced state hospital.  Disease and death could not ‘have the last word,’ the Isenheim Altarpiece seemed to tell me. Its impact was profound. Yet, unbeknown to me then, it would assume even greater significance in my life in the years to come.

In 1990 I left medicine behind and enrolled in art school at the Witwatersrand Technikon, later to become part of the University of Johannesburg. There I discovered the transformative power of art. The practice of making things offered me a chance to express myself, to find meaning in the making, and to begin the process of healing. I began to see that, in making an artwork, one inhabits a unique space between the physical and the spiritual world, between sensuous reality and memory, association, imagination and hope. After years of depression, I was able to find meaning and spiritual sustenance through engagement with ideas around resurrection and restoration within, rather than beyond, the sensuous, temporal world.  I found meaning both in the philosophical encounter with these ideas and in their expression in art. And so, I became an advocate for art making, believing it could help humanity face adversity and despair by offering a space for hope, spiritual restoration and social reparation.

The interconnectedness of death and resurrection in Grünewalds’ artwork resonated with my longstanding preoccupation with cycles of birth and death, light and darkness—the essential pattern of the earth and all creatures living in it. Over the past 35 years my spiritual understanding has deepened as I have come to understand, only very gradually, that our lives are impacted constantly by death and rebirth. Signs of resurrection are often fragile and ethereal and can all too easily disappear from view. We glimpse the eternal from the corner of our eye, yet if we turn our full gaze in its direction, we lose sight of it. This is why death and pain can so easily overwhelm us.

My years in Hamburg deepened this sense of life’s fragility. When we moved there, I had resisted doing medicine again as I had not practised as a doctor for over 10 years. But the poor health of especially the children and old people meant that I could not live in the village with a quiet conscience.  Once the community knew of my medical background, the elders called me to a meeting and asked me to work in the local clinic. This was in 2002, before we had any inkling of the devastation the HIV/AIDS pandemic would cause.

By late 2003 and early 2004 we were starting to see the first young adults coming home to die. These were the breadwinners, the brightest and best who had escaped rural life to earn income for their families in the cities. At this time, Thabo Mbeki’s government was denying South Africans access to life-saving antiretrovirals (ARVs). AIDS, in its extreme expression, is multiple diseases afflicting an undefended body. How could one tell someone they had a virus that would at that time, without hope of treatment, condemn them to a slow, ugly, painful death, often involving rejection by their community and family?  AIDS thrives in the fault lines of society and divides communities as it spreads. Like Grünewald, I could face those who suffered only by offering a story of resurrection beyond this life, particularly when I was confronted with the full horrors of the AIDS epidemic in 2004 and 2005.

This is what gave birth to my idea of making together, in our close-knit community, an artwork based on Grünewald’s crucifixion and resurrection: the Keiskamma Altarpiece. The work would be rooted in our own experiences, dealing with the illness we were seeing daily, and afflicting the people we knew. Both the act of making art and the concept of resurrection beyond this life, would offer hope and faith to a community overwhelmed by this devastating and seemingly endless epidemic.

By now we had four talented young artists, identified by Marialda Marais, attending art school: Cebo Mvubu^[5], Nokuphiwe Gedze, Nomfusi Nkani and Kwanele Ganto. They did the larger drawings while those less experienced, and the embroiderers, filled in the smaller figures. Again, countless people collaborated to help make the Altarpiece work. We had no clear plan when we started this mammoth work, yet it all came together in the end. My husband Justus and Jonathan Betani, a member of the Hamburg community, managed to stretch the embroidery over the wooden frame and hinge the complicated, unequal pieces of hessian into a working altarpiece.  Tanya Jordaan took the photographs for the final panels.

The act of making brings resurrection in ways we cannot predict. As we were working on the Keiskamma Altarpiece, God – at least to my way of thinking – surprised us. Over the weeks and months of art making we watched with astonishment and relief the physical recovery of people who had had no hope but who now, through PEPFAR, George Bush’s AIDS relief program, had access to ARVS. This further deepened my understanding of how resurrection comes to us in this flawed, earthly world.

However, everything changed in 2008, when Government policy on HIV/AIDS changed and the South African Government started supplying ARVS. Now all access to ARVS had to be though Government clinics. We had formed a community of love and care where people felt safe and accepted and now, owing to lack of funding, we had to close our in-patient hospice and hand our patients over to the Government system. Several of our precious patients died because of poor medical care and neglect in Government hospitals. In this dark time, we despaired that all our work would come to nothing. We embarked on a monumental piece, based on Picasso’s Guernica, expressing our grief and anger. Even in this valley of the shadow of death, we managed to find peace and some comfort by working together.  We used old materials, traditional clothing of Xhosa women in red earth tones, black braid, old beadwork from women’s damaged ceremonial clothing and blankets from our AIDS hospice, where many people we knew had died.

Once again, we were blessed with the presence of skilled people like researcher Irene Neilson and social worker and textile artist Magda Greyling, who began working closely with us soon after her arrival in Hamburg. Magda did extraordinary work with the orphaned children of Hamburg especially. In community drawing and ceramic workshops, Irene explained and contextualised Pablo Picasso’s work, while Magda worked sensitively and respectfully with grief-stricken adults and orphaned children who were able to express their own sense of loss in drawings based on Picasso’s ‘Weeping Women’ series. They also made pots to remember loved ones. The drawings were later converted to embroideries and incorporated into the monumental Keiskamma Guernica.

Our idea was to link our grief-stricken community with a community of ordinary, innocent people who, on market day in the Basque town of Gernika, were bombed in an act of war unrelated to their lives. This artwork of Picasso’s expressed outrage at the death of innocent civilians who were not involved in the geopolitical conflicts that massively disrupted life in Europe in the late 1930s.  The Guernica has become a powerful symbol of ordinary people’s outrage at brutal, cruel events.

By embroidering into our Keiskamma Guernica the name of every community member who had died, sewing into the artwork blankets that had covered dying loved ones, and setting up a sacred place in a special exhibition in Grahamstown, we honoured all those in the Hamburg community we had tragically lost. Some viewers expressed concern that the work offered no redemption, unlike the more hopeful Keiskamma Altarpiece. But those close to the Project said that by expressing their grief and anger, confronting death, and personally naming those lost, they had felt comforted. In this sense the work was an expression of profound community catharsis. ^[6]

*****

I have never felt far from the abyss of despair, and because of the fragility of my vision of resurrection, I have always hesitated to speak of it. It is as if the articulation will somehow alter or destroy its ephemeral presence, glimpsed through the beauty of nature and the wellspring of human kindness. The enormous human suffering inflicted by the AIDS epidemic mirrored yet another form of destruction in our lives: the degradation of our precious and sustaining natural world. Signs of this had long preoccupied and distressed me. The last personal art book I made before moving to Hamburg was a tribute to my niece Claire. At the time she died in a car accident in 2000, I had been working on a book about the plight of the African elephants struggling to survive in Mashatu, Botswana. Somehow Claire’s death and the demise of the elephants merged into a fundamental question about life itself. How can individual humans and the whole complex, throbbing, detailed, interconnected world we live in bear knowledge of what is inevitable: our own destruction and death? For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 3/19). Daily, the death of our environment confronts us all. Daily, we need to find a way of not despairing—of keeping faith and hope so that we have the strength to reverse the large-scale destruction of nature brought about by human dominance and to acknowledge nature’s own inherent rights.

The physical making of the book brought unexpected insight.  Struggling with my own feelings of loss—expressed visually and in half-formulated, sometimes inchoate ideas—I gradually reached an understanding that resurrection does not apply only to humans, saved by faith for a sterile heaven. It applies to our whole interconnected, interdependent network of life. Heaven will come to earth, not vice versa. Earth will be restored. Art making had allowed me to process my grief and ushered in new understanding as I encountered the fragile beauty of the natural world. Every living thing is growing or dying, and we must remember that resurrection and life speak at least as loudly as death. True resurrection means every living creature that ever existed will be part of our earth’s restoration: ‘Kept with a fonder care,’ in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem, ‘The Golden Echo.’

In 2006 we embarked on a monumental work in praise of our village, its inhabitants, and the natural world around us—all sustained by the generous waters of the Keiskamma River. We called it the Creation Altarpiece. By the time we started work on it, our working group in the Art Project had spontaneously divided into designers and embroiderers. Nozeti Makubalo had considerable artistic ability and had worked consistently in design from the beginning. Now the four young people (Cebo Mvubu, Nokuphiwe Gedze, Nomfusi Nkani and Kwanele Ganto) who had bursaries from the Foundation established after the death of my niece Claire, had competed their art diplomas and were also taking active roles in leadership and design.

As with the other major works, somehow people found their roles and worked in harmony, each playing a crucial role. An expert would arrive to guide us, and once again we managed to draw everything together into a cohesive whole. For example, Gay Staurup came to visit from Australia and taught us felt-making. Our resurrection fig tree in the Creation Altarpiece is painstakingly needle-felted, mostly by Gay, but with a valuable contribution by Keiskamma artists like Veronica Betani. Around this time Jackie Downs, who had managed the art project until then, left. Florence Danais replaced her and stayed on for nine years, setting administrative order to our very chaotic manner of working.

In this work, too, I was surprised by joy: manifestations of resurrection through art making which added new layers to my understanding of resurrection within the community of Hamburg and its natural surroundings. The altarpiece is based on a work by Jan van Eyck called Lam Gott, painted in 1432, which I had seen in Ghent (Belgium) while on an art exchange. It depicts in great detail the countryside and cities of the Low Countries with all their flora and fauna. In this work people from all walks of life stream towards the altar, bearing the sacrificial Lamb of God. We reinterpreted the painting for our own context and showed the many different clans and groups of our own village moving towards a sacrificed cow (in the Xhosa tradition of using cattle for sacred ceremonies). The people are portrayed against the backdrop of an unspoilt and thriving natural environment, teeming with life, where the Keiskamma River joins the Indian Ocean.

*****

In 2017 I worked with the women of Bodiam studio in the neighbouring village to create another large-scale work, A New Earth, based on the painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels by the early Renaissance Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is in many ways my artist’s statement, an expression of my growing understanding of life’s purpose. The making of A New Earth allowed me to manifest my vision of an earth infused with heaven, and to explore a path to salvation in this fallen world.

Western cultural thinking is hard to discard and I easily resort to a dualistic logic. Christianity, following Platonic thinking and later the Cartesian dualism of the Enlightenment, sees heaven and earth as distinct entities, like mind and matter, body and spirit. The same dualistic philosophy underpins an age of rapidly advancing technology that has speeded up human exploitation of nature and finally left us unsure of our own and the planet’s survival. In the secular twenty-first century, many have rejected even Cartesian dualism, seeing the given physical world as all that exists: matter without spirit. Only in cultures still close to and obviously dependent on the environment, are the spiritual and physical interdependent and inseparable.

Yet fundamental to Judaism and early Christianity, is the belief in a new creation, which is the rebirth of this physical earth, with all of its remarkable creations. Unlike the earth we see around us, this new earth is indestructible. This sense of heaven in and of the earth is at odds with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, created when Europeans were introduced to the ‘new’ world beyond Europe for the first time. This was the beginning of the scientific age, when Cartesian ideas began to exert a profound influence on Western thought and religion. The sense of the sacred immanent in all life and matter was being steadily eroded by this dualistic philosophy. Bruegel’s work vividly reflects the prevailing belief in the separation of body and spirit, earth and heaven, fallen creature and divine Creator.

Bruegel’s painting depicts the banishment of the rebel angels from God’s heavenly kingdom. It shows a host of strange creatures, realistically portrayed but monstrous in that they are a fantastical medley of various animals. A furious, righteous Angel Gabriel banishes the fallen angels from the light of heaven into an earthly morass of these strangely deformed and frightening creatures. Bruegel seems to be saying that all things of this world are complex creations, simultaneously wondrous and damned. (One is reminded of the way the rich in Europe collected artefacts from distant places perceived as strange, fascinating, ‘other’, and exhibited them in curiosity cabinets.)

In A New Earth, I wanted to show that, in the face of earth’s destruction, it is possible to believe in the resurrection of every stone, tree, creature that ever existed. I have long held a hope that humankind will not be raised from death into an unfamiliar, lonely, angelic world but that heaven will come to earth. I believe that all of creation is waiting for that wonderful day: ‘For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.’ (Romans 8:22–23, King James Version).

In A New Earth we therefore challenge Bruegel’s painting, showing that earth is in fact heaven and the first resurrection depicted in Christianity foreshadows the burgeoning forth of all that has ever existed. It is a manifestation of my belief that a new heaven and a new earth will grow, and that we have the agency to make this possible.

*****

To become a part of this world in all its complexity and still remain hopeful and attentive, I have had to learn to find resurrection in everyday life, not just in my Christian belief and ideas.

We have faced defeat over and over again in the community of Hamburg, where poverty, illness and loss never go away. Sometimes resurrection is hard to see in the daily life of the community. It is never as conspicuous as Grünewald’s triumphant Christ rising from the tomb or the celebratory Keiskamma Altarpiece or the Lazarus effect of ARVs. After the miraculous return to health of many people close to death, I had to learn that real life only occasionally offers such epiphanic moments. They occur in extreme circumstances, like war, pandemics and natural disasters.

In the later years of my work with the community in Hamburg and surrounds, I began to learn of other, more subtle, places to find resurrection. I learned to seek and find it in everyday, simple activities and relationships. These redemptive moments were easy to miss in the face of ongoing suffering but, once acknowledged, were everywhere I looked. They were evident in the day-to-day conversations, actions and interactions of the community of women with whom I made the artworks. When I look back now over the 25 years since the Keiskamma Art Project began, and more than thirty years since I first encountered the Isenheim Altarpiece, I am able to see that a far more enduring and meaningful resurrection has taken place. In making these monumental, collective works, we have resurrected a community, where everyone has a place in a large, living, ever-growing, ever-changing organism.

Through a sense of sharing and belonging, lasting relationships have been built across racial, cultural, and economic divides. People have come from all over the world, shared their knowledge and been accepted and cared for. A vast network of interconnected people has been created, able and willing to share stories and to give and receive skills, affection, humour and understanding. People who would have had no other way of meeting each other, have become friends. They have shared their lives, their human hopes, loves and fears.

If one imagines lines linking Hamburg to every person in the world connected with the making of the artworks, the globe would look like an intricate web.  This is how we make heaven on earth: in the synchronous events, in the unseen forces that move us, in the spaces between human beings. Through tangible acts of making, of stitching, the intangible emerges. The physical artworks are a signature of the numinous, its gentle presence, not the thing itself. The thing itself is easily missed and easily destroyed. Human kindness has made these works possible.

Through years of working closely with the Hamburg community, I have come to see and truly appreciate what I only partially understood 30 years ago, when I first started making art.

Every good impulse counts.
Every act of kindness matters.
Everything created with our hands and hearts is kept and is valuable.
All we do has ultimate meaning.

 

Note:

In writing this personal memoir I have mentioned only those people who immediately came to mind in the context of each particular work. It is important to me that every person who assisted is remembered, even if not individually named here.

Apart from those I mention above, the people who closely supported me personally and contributed to this part of ‘A New Earth’ are Mavis Zita, Eunice Mangwane, Nomsi Mei, Nolunthu Mavela, Nomfusi Nkani, Novuyani Peyi, Nokwanda Makubalo, Graeme and Robert Hofmeyr, Pippa Hetherington, Rachel Johnson, Cathy Stanley, and my close friends and family—too many to mention.

All of these people illustrate that heaven on earth is made by individuals working together in communities of trust and hope.

 

[1] The Xhosa poet Samuel Edward Krune Loliwe Ngxekengxeme Mqhayi is here referring to restoration of pre-colonial Xhosa culture and identity in his extraordinary narrative poem, ‘The Grave of the King’, a classic of Xhosa literature, originally published in two parts in the Xhosa newspaper, Izwi Labantu (‘The Voice of the People’) in 1908.

[2] The colonial term ‘Kaffraria’ is offensive today.  I use the word here in its historical context.

^[3] My Masters’ exhibition portrayed Africa’s crucifixion by European colonisers. I came to see the stone crosses placed along our coast by Bartholomew Dias, the first European known to have set foot on South African soil, as a painful symbol of this violation by colonial powers. Similarly, in my artist’s book I saw Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and philosophy of forgiveness rather than retribution as a symbolic fulfilment of Nongqawuse’s prophecy.

[4] The Cream Tapestry, made later in 2004, also takes inspiration from the Bayeaux Tapestry. While its narrative trajectory covers the same historical period as the Keiskamma Tapestry, this work was carefully planned rather than process-driven, and includes explanatory text embroidered alongside the images.

^[5] Cebo is currently the chief designer and production manager of Keiskamma Art Project.

^[6] I have not mentioned the “Rose Altarpiece”, which honours women who took in orphans in those hard times. Luisa Cotardo from Lecce taught us the ancient technique of cartatesta leccese to make the roses in the “Rose Altarpiece”, another example of the way people with the requisite skills were able to guide and help us.