Material Culture in Southern Africa, an approach

Robert Ross, Leiden University Institute for History

Getting from here:

To here:

What is the problem? I would like to begin by giving two thought experiments. For the first, I would like you to imagine how the professors of this University of say 180 years ago would react if they were visit it now. They would be shocked by many things—women in classes, women in trousers, women whose skirts reveal the shape of their legs, no doubt much more. They would not understand many things—everything that works with electricity or the internal combustion engine, above all. But they would recognise many things as variants of what they had been used to. Tables, chairs, knives, forks, spoons, plates, glasses, jugs, pots, pans, paper pens, books, cupboards, shelves, carpets, drapes –curtains—paintings on the wall, beds, sheets, blankets, baths, washbasins, hairbrushes and combs, razors, toothbrushes and a whole lot more. Compare this, and this is my second thought experiment, with the experience of their Zulu contemporaries, in a house belonging to the descendants in South Africa. They might recognise much of what was in the house as having belonged to those few whites with whom they may have come into contact, but in principle there would be nothing in a modern house which would also have been in a Zulu house of 1830—except perhaps for a few things as decorative ethnographica, and maybe some hidden muthi—medicine. In the Netherlands, there has been a gradual evolution in the basic material culture of everyday life. In Southern Africa, in contrast, there has been a total revolution.

Max Gluckman once wrote that “wealth did not give a chief opportunity to live a higher level than his inferiors. He had more wives and bigger homesteads, but he could not surround himself with luxuries, for there were none”—not necessarily strictly true, as we know that in Great Zimbabwe the kings ate better beef than the rest of the population. But power was about domination of dependents, and in the best Darwinian manner about the multiplication of descendants.

In the course of time things changed. Monica Hunter wrote of her experience in East London in the early 1930s as follows:

Some of the houses are filthy with vermin and a perpetual odour of bad meat. Many are scrupulously clean. The degree of cleanliness has a correlation with the degree of education, but it is also dependent upon the wages earned. European furnishing is aimed at. … Victorian fashions still prevail. Second-hand furniture is bought at sales, and in the house of a well-to-do tradesman or teacher one finds the horsehair sofa, plush tablecloth, lace curtains and elaborated frilled bed hangings of Victorian England. Only the aspidistra is lacking. It is often replaced by artificial flowers. In these surrounding a gramophone is a bizarre modern note. Only goatskins on the linoleum-covered floor remind one that the owner’s father was a herdsman. Often the walls are papered with sheets of old magazines as the only available substitute for wall paper, and photographs of members of the family or of e prints, usually representing Biblical school teams, and crud scenes, are hung up. The crudity and ugliness often make one shiver, but the European furniture is treasured, and most women take a housewife’s pride in their rooms. Outside many of the better houses are borders of flowers or rows of pot plants, or sometimes a small patch of vegetables. 

Or Susan Middleton Keirn in Soweto in the 1970s:

Rooms contain velvet sofas and matching chairs, and marble-top individual tables or coffee tables. Lighting in these homes is provided by floor or table lamps, or formal chandeliers, rather than the hanging paper globes of most contemporary homes. Some owners have used a French provincial style of décor with brocade-upholstered furnishings and heavy window treatments of tied-back full-length drapes over sheer open weave casement fabric. Still other homes use the fashionable massive imitation-leather loose cushion sofas and matching chairs with exposed wooden arms. These may be complemented with chrome and glass-top tables. Several homes have wood panelling on two walls on either side of the fireplace and built-in bookcases which hold, not only books, but stereo components as well.

This has continued. South Africa since the ending of apartheid has been characterised by an enormous consumer boom, which is driving the country’s economic growth. In part, of course, it is the release of energy and of desire for goods. It is at least arguable that one of the effects of apartheid had been to contain African possibilities for material possessions, and thus to make them increasingly attractive. As the dam broke after 1994, the world opened up. This is a rarely described, but vital part of South African history.