Our House

IF THE CHOICE were up to Zimbabwe, it would pursue a path independent of South Africa, the powerful and domineering neighbor across the Limpopo River to its south. Yet, because of fate, history, and the accidents of geography, the most significant forces that shaped modern Zimbabwe and its predecessor, Southern Rhodesia, came from across the frontier. In the 1820s, a fugitive general named Mzilikazi, fleeing the Zulu warrior-king Shaka, crossed the border from present-day KwaZulu-Natal (on the southeast Indian Ocean coast), where he would found the Ndebele state. In 1890 came the colonial encroachment by British–South African empire man Cecil John Rhodes, after whom the country was named. Zimbabwe and South Africa share in Rhodes a common ancestor; in Ndebele a language with a close connection to Zulu (the most spoken language in South Africa); and the common visual vocabulary sometimes called Ndebele art.

Ndebele art involves geometric motifs painted on the walls of houses using dung, limestone, red clays, soot, ash, and other natural pigments. The art was popularized by the South African artist Esther Mahlangu, whose show this year, “Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting,” was being held at the Wits Art Museum, in Johannesburg, when I visited; around the same time, the National Gallery in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, was hosting the exhibition “Matobo Goes Fashion . . . and Beyond.” As serendipity would have it, I was given a chance to place Mahlangu’s work in the broader context of Ndebele art—both in South Africa and Matobo, southern Zimbabwe, the landscape in which Rhodes is buried.

This February, I traveled 230 miles from Harare, the capital, to Bulawayo, in the southwest. Roughly a half hour’s drive from Bulawayo is Matobo, the epicenter of this painting tradition that predates colonialism. Matobo itself is extraordinary country. It is marked by spectacular flatback granite hills and balancing rocks, caves with Sanrock paintings, and forested fertile valleys. Although the region was later designated a national game park, its main attractions are not the rhinos and antelopes roaming the woods, but the landscape itself and the myths it has accrued over the centuries.

When I visited Matobo, traipsing through the park, climbing a steep boulder, and attempting to decipher paintings on the cave walls, I did so with caution and wonderment. I could see why English historian of Zimbabwe Terence Ranger wrote that when Rhodesians left the newly independent country of Zimbabwe in the early 1980s—or, in Rhodesian parlance, “took the gap”—many of them “often took with them a water colour of the Matobos to remind them of what they had lost.” No doubt they wanted a reminder of the beauty of the land in which their racist forebear Rhodes is buried, in a grave hewn into a giant granite dome. But I was also vaguely aware of tectonic and other metaphysical forces bigger and more ancient than I—my ancestral antecedents, and the human race itself. More than that of anywhere else I have been to in Zimbabwe, the mystique of the land was tangible; perhaps this is why the area was previously a shrine for dances of the Mlimo rainmaking cult, attracting supplicants from across southern Africa. Could this be the reason why the locals thought it prosaic if the walls of their houses went unadorned?

One morning, on my way to see Rhodes’s grave, I found myself in Tshapo, a village to the west of the national park, looking at paintings on huts and houses made by the womenfolk from the district. The visual language between South African Ndebeles and the Ndebeles of Zimbabwe is largely shared. But in Zimbabwe, the art not only incorporates triangles, chevrons, rhombuses, and other sharp-edged geometric formations, but also places a particular emphasis on the circle. This point is stressed by the authors Pathisa Nyathi and Kudzai Chikomo in their 2016 book Echoes from the Past: Interpreting Zimbabwe’s Decorative Symbols:“The baskets are circular, so are the clay pots. In fact, the artifacts do not have right angles”; they note that local cattle barns, stone-walled settlements, and even military formations all take the shape of a circle. My host that day was historian and retired teacher Misheck Dube. He told me that the practice of painting walls dates to when the Bantu people—the forebears of present-day Zimbabweans—settled in these parts centuries ago and began to live in houses. Painting, like the thatching of huts, was deemed women’s work, completed after the end of the summer rains, when the harvest was in the granaries. Women would meet their peers and ask each other for advice about how best to decorate their houses. “They would work collectively, one house at a time, until they had finished all the houses,” Dube said, in Ndebele. “The way they decorated was not random, but deliberate; they would look to see how they could draw comparisons with their lives and cosmology.” Pointing to circles painted on the wall, Dube added: “As you see there, these are circles and they held some meanings to them. For instance, the circles make reference to the earth. One artist told me: ‘These motifs come to me as I sleep and dream.’ Another said they were taught by their grandmother.”

Dube’s daughter Khanya came back to Matobo in 2017 after spending time away. On seeing other women win prizes for their well-adorned houses, Khanya took up painting. She joined a collective of three other women, who work together to design patterns and build elaborate clay cupboards and also painted the walls and the floors of the open-air porches of their huts. Khanya told me in Ndebele: “When you paint, it must be something with a meaning, something I will be able to explain if you ask me what it means. These triangles, for instance, are referring to the woman’s pelvis (this also applies to men); the circle means the earth. Most things are round: pots, huts, et cetera.” They don’t use industrial paints, but red clay, burnt stalks of maize (to make a gray), cow dung, and other natural pigments. Painting for these women is not only a means of adorning their houses, but also a marker of temporality. Every winter (the cold season in southern Africa is from May to July), they take out their pigments and paint their houses, then repeat the ritual the following year. My visit in February coincided with the end of the rain season, when the brightness of the paintings had dimmed, weathered by time and the elements, soon to be retouched.

The following day, when I was at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo, I had a chance to see the art of Matobo women in the form of an exhibition. “Matobo Goes Fashion . . . and Beyond” was a showcase of women artists from the district. On the opening night, models wearing garments designed locally with Ndebele design motifs took part in a fashion show. Among the included artists was Siduduzile Moyo, who was shown in a photograph pressing her stencil to the wall with one hand, a brush in the other. Beauty Ngwenya’s painting—in which intersecting yellow and dark-hued circles weave through each other to form a dizzying pattern—shared a wall with Lakhina Zulu’s jagged star in earthy tones and other women’s paintings on canvas. If an observation could be made about both shows, it is this: Most people who know of Esther Mahlangu’s work have never seen it outside its gallery context; yet what “Matobo Goes Fashion . . . and Beyond” did was showcase the work of ordinary women, in rural settings, going on about life and painting: art as life, and life as art. 

Esther Mahlangu was forced to act in an ethnographic charade, yet she constructed a unique Ndebele grammar that has finally been acknowledged.

The next leg of my trip took me to Johannesburg, the second city to host Mahlangu’s show after it was staged last year at Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. The presenting institution, Wits Art Museum, is housed at the University of the Witwatersrand, near the artist’s old base of Botshabelo and the coal-country town of Middelburg. Botshabelo—its name is the Sotho word for “place of refuge”—was a farm originally bought in 1865 by German missionaries from the Berlin Mission Society. The plot of land, on which a teaching and a theology school were established, provided shelter for Africans displaced by Dutch and British colonialism and internecine fights over territory. By the time Mahlangu joined in 1980, the old institution had become a museum and cultural village. From 1980 to 1991, Mahlangu worked at the museum, painting murals and demonstrating the traditions and daily chores of the Ndebele. It was in her Botshabelo years, working with others, that she also began to develop a private, modernizing visual language for what is known locally as umgwalo, a traditional ritual for Southern Ndebele women (to differentiate them from other Ndebeles in South Africa and elsewhere). Her grammar consisted of triangles, the razor-blade shape, and rhombuses, sometimes in which quadrilaterals—a color-rich, playful visualization of Euclidean geometry—jostled with figuration.

For decades, Ndebele, Mahlangu’s mother language, wasn’t considered its own separate tongue. In the reasoning of apartheid architects, Ndebele was just Zulu by another name. For that reason, the community was served by Radio Zulu, until 1983, when Radio Ndebele was launched. Ndebele might share the philological structures of its cousin Zulu, but, crucially, it borrows words from a distinct language family, Sotho, and other dialects spoken in the eastern South African province now known as Mpumalanga. Perhaps the apartheid government made concessions on an Ndebele radio station to get Ndebele speakers on its side, but, in a historical echo reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s “valences of history,” these were also the years in which Mahlangu was mastering Ndebele visual semiotics and modernizing Ndebele artistic practice. She also began to use industrially manufactured paints, improvising new shapes, working on diverse canvases, and introducing figuration.

Mahlangu began painting at the age of ten. In her telling, whenever her mother and grandmother were painting their houses, the then-adolescent Mahlangu would invite herself to do the same, but would be scolded. “What have you done, child? Never do that again!” they would say. But she wasn’t discouraged. “After that, I started drawing on the back of the house, and slowly my drawings got better and better until they finally asked me to come back to the front of the house. Then I knew I was good at painting.” That last phrase—“Then I knew I was good at painting”—is the title of the show, curated by the South African scholar and teacher Nontobeko Ntombela.

“Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting” featured Mahlangu’s now famous BMW Art Car, painted in 1991: She was the first African artist to be commissioned to paint for this series. Also on display were dolls adorned with beads; paintings of geometric motifs on everyday objects including a television, stilettos, sneakers, and miners’ hats; and a beautiful striped blanket on which intricate shapes (pyramids, chevrons, a parallelogram) were etched into colored beads. Visitors also saw her figurative works on the themes of freedom and democracy, made in collaboration with the former South African statesman and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela. In 2002, Mandela revisited the penal colony of Robben Island, where he had been imprisoned by the apartheid regime for decades, and did a series of sketches of a clenched fist, chained hands, and hands breaking free, reflecting on his time there. It was to these sketches that Mahlangu added her geometric and figurative shapes.

Painting for these women is not only a means of adorning houses, but a marker of temporality.

The Mandela collaboration was a milestone in her career, a signifier of how far she had traveled since her first show, in 1989. For that inaugural display, she was sought out by curators who were planning “Magiciens de la terre,” the 1989 exhibition at Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Grande Halle de la Villette that brought together famous art practitioners from the West with obscure “Indigenous” artists. They had come and taken pictures of her house in her absence; when they asked where the artist was, they were told, “At the museum.” On reaching the institution, they asked for an “Esther” while brandishing a photograph of her home. Her proud rejoinder was, “This is my house.”

In the now-legendary Paris exhibition, the curators reconstructed her house (a model of her home was in the Wits Art Museum exhibition) and invited her to paint it in the same style. This first visit abroad—for which she traveled for the very first time on an airplane—became an endless source of self-mythmaking. A signpost to a school she founded to teach the craft of painting to children was included in the Johannesburg show. In her signature colors, sky blue and yellow, it reads: NDEBELE ART SCHOOL FOR CHILDREN DONE BY ESTHER MAHLANGU / THE 1ST LADY TO VISIT OVER SEA. Another painting on this theme—emblazoned with the words SOUVENIR DE PARIS—is executed in a postcard style; in a manner reminiscent of the sticklike figures first scrawled by the San, the first inhabitants of southern Africa, it depicts a rondavel out of which emerge a boy and woman making a beeline for a place with that most French of monuments, the Eiffel Tower. Just below the two figures is an airplane painted with her signature geometry.