These decorated aprons were gifts from the groom’s family to his wife, and signified her new role in society.
Marriage apron (itjogolo or ijogolo), 1920–40, Mpumwanga, South Africa, leather, glass beads, fabric (Newark Museum of Art). Speakers: Dr. Peri Klemm and Dr. Beth Harris
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] 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 in that same part of the body.
[0:18] This is something that was highly valued, that someone took a very long time to create.
Dr. Peri Klemm: [0:24] 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 have worn prior to wearing this ijogolo.
Dr. Harris: [0:35] A woman would have worn something that was also beaded, but that was beaded on a harder surface.
Dr. Klemn: [0:41] It could have been leather, but it would’ve been a hardened leather or a stiff canvas.
Dr. Harris: [0:45] This one is beaded on leather. Like so much African art, objects can mark periods in someone’s life.
Dr. Klemm: [0:53] In addition to that, the ideal, that which is considered beautiful, often reflects a moral virtue or an inner quality. That’s the case here, too. That earlier stiff canvas that a girl would wear prior to initiation, prior to marriage, was supposed to suggest something about her chastity, her virginity, that she’s not ready yet to have children.
Dr. Harris: [1:14] It’s something hard and impenetrable to suggest her chastity.
Dr. Klemm: [1:18] That initial apron that she wears is beaded by her mother. 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.
[1:33] 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: [1:41] 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 and cities [and] 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: [2:05] 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 be happy because they’re doing so much beadwork.
Dr. Harris: [2:24] Often, people make art when their identity is threatened. They hold on to their traditions. They express their identity through the symbolic forms of their culture, and that’s true here. The Ndebele, this increase in their aesthetic production actually was an indication of their oppression.
[2:42] 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. They were restricted to a zone that was barren and that didn’t provide them a means of livelihood.
[3:03] The government had promised them a factory, had promised them running water, which actually never came.
Dr. Klemm: [3:09] 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 her mother had imagined for her.
Dr. Harris: [3:24] 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. Klemm: [3:39] We’re looking at, essentially, the ground plan of where she lived.
Dr. Harris: [3:44] This is a space she would have made her own, she would have painted, and she would have been proud of.
Dr Klemm: [3:48] 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. The idea is that she has children on either side of her.
Dr. Harris: [4:02] I’m seeing this 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: [4:14] Pieces like these are very heavily collected. The KwaNdebele site became a tourist attraction with the fall of apartheid.
[4:23] And so many people go to this place and they purchase items like this. Today, we see a renaissance in beadwork, 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.
[4:38] Ndebele women are making aprons for indigenous use as well for outsiders.
Dr. Harris: [4:45] Again, what we have is 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: [4:58] And while these indicated 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.
[5:15] [music]
Married Woman’s Apron (Ijogolo), 19th–20th century (Ndebele peoples, South Africa), beads and thread, 75.6 x 67.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
This five-paneled garment is known as an ijogolo, a bridal apron worn by Ndebele women. Upon marriage, the groom’s family traditionally gave the bride a plain leather or canvas apron with five flaps. The newly married Ndebele woman embroidered that apron, creating bold geometric designs with imported glass beads. She would wear this apron on important ceremonial occasions to signify her married status. The multiple panels, referred to as “calves,” symbolize the future children the woman will bear.
Throughout southern Africa, peoples wear beaded garments that comment upon their stage in life and convey aspects of their individual identity. Different types of beaded artifacts may communicate social and marital status, number of children, and a person’s home region or ethnicity.
Although the historical origins of southern African beadwork are uncertain, it is known that glass beads from Europe were available in the area as early as the 16th century through trade with the Portuguese. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the region became the world’s largest consumer of glass beads. Dating beaded works is difficult, although the color and size of the beads, the patterns and motifs, and the material used can all provide some indication of age. Older works typically have leather backings and use mostly small, white beads with minimal color designs, as in this example.
© 2006 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (by permission)
