beaded belt, unrecorded Maasai artist

Arts worn on the body signify identity, social status, and personal taste. They also reflect women’s creative contributions to commercial networks and markets. Here too, an artist’s gender governs their choice of medium for making jewelry and other personal objects. Often, female artists work with beads, shown in the Maasai and Ndebele women’s beadwork here. In contrast, male artists work with metal, represented in metal jewelry from Ethiopia and southern Africa. Although lingering colonial perceptions fostered a simple and binary view of some African jewelry as inauthentic “craft,” artists created personal adornment for many reasons. Through artistic production, these artists rejected societal marginalization, expressed cultural values, and experimented with trade beads and other valuable materials. The geometric designs in this Ndebele beaded panel reflect murals that women painted on the outside of homes to resist apartheid policies. These policies forced the removal of Zulu families to “tribal homelands” in rural areas in order to strip black South Africans of their citizenship and render them invisible. Under these oppressive conditions, women artists asserted their creativity, identity, and resistance through murals and beadwork.