Abstract
For more than three decades, artist-weaver
Allina Ndebele has drawn on traditional
Zulu symbolism and thought systems as
inspiration for her work. She began her career
as a trainee nurse in a Swedish mission
environment at Ceza, KwaZulu-Natal, in the
early 1960s, during an era when restrictions
on traditional African beliefs and practices
were being challenged by some enlightened
missionaries. Ndebele then learned weaving
from Ulla Gowenius, a Swedish art school
graduate. She was encouraged by Ulla’s
husband, Peder Gowenius, to draw on African
and personal themes, in a narrative, ‘free
weaving’ style in the few such weavings
she made at this early stage of her career.
Later, when starting out on her own as a
professional artist working independently
from the weaving workshop at the Evangelical
Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre, Rorke’s
Drift – which she had helped the Goweniuses
establish in 1963 – Ndebele experienced a
crisis of uncertainty in her choice of subject
matter. When she subsequently gave herself
licence to draw on the traditional stories her
grandmother used to tell during her childhood
the dilemma was resolved, albeit that the
themes were considered transgressive in the
mission environment in which her family lived.
These accounts became an ongoing source
of inspiration for Ndebele’s intuitive ‘free
weaving’ works for some thirty years. This
essay explores some of the layers of reference
and interpretation in two of the concepts that
appear repeatedly in Ndebele’s iconography:
‘living water’ and the ‘ordered homestead’. In
the form of rain that falls from heaven, runs
in streams, fills rivers and collects in pools,
‘living water’ emanates from the munificence
of the great god in the sky, uMvelinqangi,
fertilising the earth and making all forms of
life possible. A further sense of prosperity
is denoted by the ordered Zulu homestead,
with its dwellings arranged around the central
cattle kraal. These animals are markers of economic wellbeing and serve as spiritual
links with the ancestors. Conversely, the
absence of these fundamental resources, and
the consequences thereof, are played out in
this work.