In the popular perception, the Ndebele people of South Africa are one of a scattering of tribes that time has forgotten: women turned into stylised, living sculptures by the neck, leg and arm rings they wear; beadwork of extraordinary and timeless beauty; homesteads still decorated in vibrant geometries used since time immemorial.

Another variation on a theme of exotic otherness that the western imagination has imposed on African reality. Actually, it would be hard to imagine any version of Ndebele identity that was further from the truth. The truth is historical, time bound and intricately tied up with white domination in South Africa. In fact, Ndebele wall painting dates back no further than the 1940s. Nearly all the motifs to be found in the beadwork worn by the women derive from things identifiably western in origin. The very existence of the "Ndebele" people can be traced to the middle of the 20th century.

Further back there were two Nguni clans, the Ndzundza and the Manala, who around the fourteenth century migrated north from present-day KwaZulu Natal to what is now Mpumalanga province. Though part of the same people, the two clans split after bitter struggles of succession around the end of the sixteenth century.

The Manala all but disappeared through assimilation with the Sotho Tswana population of the area, but towards the end of the nineteenth century the Ndzundza had become a regional power significant enough to threaten the expansionist aspirations of the Boer settlers of the Transvaal Republic.

Tensions between the two led to war, in which the Boers triumphed in July 1883. Not satisfied with seizing the lands and chattels of the Ndzundza in reparation, they indentured the entire people for a specified period of five years, dispursing them at random throughout the territory in an attempt to break the cohesiveness and traditional lines of authority of the people.

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At the expiry of the five year indenture, many of the Ndzundza were released, but there was bitter suffering to come. Having been entirely dispossessed, they became nomads, looking for piecework in a country that had grown hostile and suspicious towards them.

But the Ndzundza culture proved remarkably resilient. Gradually Ndzundza refugees gathered at various locations in the former Transvaal province, but notably around Hartebeestpoort near Pretoria where the Ndzundza royal family had ended up. It was here that, in the 1940s, some Ndzundza women began decorating their walls in prototypes of what was later dubbed distinctively and "traditionally Ndebele" designs.

There is no definitive answer why these wall decorations suddenly emerged, but part of the reason certainly lay in a simple assertion of group identity as a way of telling others "that Ndzundza were living there". But - and this is an important point - the assertion of identity was not effected through a revival of time-honoured traditional usages.

Until well into the nineteenth century the Ndzundza had lived in grass huts, on which wall painting was not even a possibility. Even after they adopted mud-walled architectural styles they decorated walls only with patterning achieved by dragging fingers through mud.

Now here was something different. Firstly, the houses around Hartebeestpoort were built differently, to accommodate western-style building materials such as door and window frames. They were also painted, for the most part, with commercial paints. Ironically the use of natural pigments appears to date to a later period when house painting spread to more remote and rural areas.

But fact and history were not allowed to stand in the way of ideology. The man who brought the wall paintings at Hartebeestpoort to public attention had other agendas to pursue. He was A L Meiring, a Pretoria architect and academic...and an enthusiastic supporter of the Afrikaner National Party which was poised to come to power in the 1948 elections.

The National Party needed to reinvent South Africa in order to justify and sustain its apartheid policies. Its vision of the country was one made up of separate and ethnically divided minorities, each with its own identity and its own tribal destiny. If the ideologues of the National Party could sell such a version of the country's ethnography, their policies of apartheid would be both logical and presumably legitimate.

Through this dubious project, the material culture of the Ndzundza blossomed. In addition to the wall painting, other cultural usages were revived or adapted as the people regrouped. The wela, or male circumcision and initiation ritual, was reinstituted. Dormant traditions of bead working were revived among the Ndzundza women (rites of female passage are expressed through beading just as the wela marks the rites of male passage).

In the art there was something highly visual; obviously and exotically "African" in flavour which could be used to bolster the fiction of an African population divided into separate tribes. Meiring lost little time in promoting the culture of the Ndzundza within the parameters of National Party ideology.

The wall painting was fabled into ancient and timeless tribal tradition. The beadwork was rendered up as something that had not changed since time immemorial. The Ndzundza were dissolved along with the Manala into a more convenient tribe designated as "Ndebele", though in reality they had hardly more in common than, say, the French and Francophone Swiss.

With such conceptual frameworks laid out, the entire Hartebeestpoort community was moved in the early 1950s to an instant "traditional" village at KwaMsiza. Here the community functioned as living exhibits in an ethnographic museum set up under the auspices of the Department of Tourism.

Even more ironically, the material culture of the Ndebele flourished at KwaMsiza. The practice of wall painting had spread throughout the areas occupied by the Ndzundza.....and was closely associated with a renaissance of the culture and a consolidation of their identity.

The point here is that the art of the Ndebele has, at least in our time, been Janus-faced. On one hand, both the beadwork and the wall painting have functioned as part of a tourist industry. But at the same time the flowering of Ndzundza and Ndebele culture (there has even been a spinoff among the Manala) has a private face.

Throughout its development in the twentieth century it has consolidated the people and expressed a national solidarity. The beadwork, for instance, serves to map out the life cycle of the woman from birth through childhood to puberty, marriage, childbearing and matronhood. Likewise, Ndebele wall painting came to be associated with the male initiation or wela, with each mother being expected to signal the fact that one of her sons was enduring the ordeal of manhood, by painting or repainting her home.

Like many other African survivors, the Ndebele have demonstrated a genius for adaptation. You can see this in the way the beadwork has evolved. The earliest known examples of married women's beadwork (dated to the 1880s) are made from white beads punctuated by only the most minimal and arcane of symbols, which appear to be associated with the mysteries of the homestead.

With the next discernible wave of bead working, from the 1920s, the imagery changes. Still abstract and geometric in character, it evokes a range of quasi-representational domestic imagery, particularly of huts.

Gradually, as the beadwork styles evolve, the range of motifs to be found on both the beaded aprons and the wall paintings grow increasingly elaborate. Huts give way to schematic representations of houses with chimneys, then to flat blocks, telephone poles, electric lights; even, in some instances, what are designated as television antennae. The functionality of the pieces within the ritual context is maintained, but the transformations effected by history are also registered.

Nowadays, though, you can travel through three or four villages before you find a painted homestead and many of those that are decorated have not been renewed in years.

By the early 1990s hardly any of the old beadwork that once was passed down from mother to daughter in accordance with custom actually remained in the possession of the Ndebele women. For the most part, women wore, on ceremonial occasions, a variety of beading that goes by the somewhat scornful designation of "party-style".

Such beadwork is characterised by a bold and highly simplified geometric design, eschewing the symbolic and representational formulas of the past. It is usually made of relatively large beads in only two or three colours. It is so remote from either the significance or the styles of earlier bead working that the older women declare it is not even recognised by the ancestors as being of Ndebele origin. Nor would it be: it is derived not so much from models used in the rituals and ceremonies of the people as it is from being quick in production and likely to appeal to the tourist market. This is some measure of the precariousness of the culture in the 1990s.

Johannesburg-based Ivor Powell has been an art and political journalist for much of the last 20 years. His work has been published in many leading international publications and he has edited several South African journals and newspapers. He is the author of the book Ndebele A People and Their Art, for which Mark Lewis took the photographs.

EVERY BEAD TELLS A STORY

Although seldom worn in everyday life, beadwork has rich ceremonial symbolism for Ndebele. The earliest traceable pieces of Ndzundza or Ndebele beadworking date only from the late nineteenth century, when European traders moved through the southern African hinterland with stocks of Czechoslovakian-made glass beads. Though mystery surrounds the earlier history of beading traditions, it is clear this was not the first time that the Ndzundza worked with beads. It is not only the practised skill seen in the oldest surviving beadwork that leads to this conclusion, but the fact that beadworking, as far back as we can go, is not used merely to decorate and adorn. Even in the earliest surviving beadwork, it bears traditional meanings and is made and worn in accordance with established rules, though in recent times even these ancestral rules are, more and more, forgotten by a new and increasingly westernised generation.

One possible reason why older beadwork has not survived is that in the past women would be buried with her beadwork. But with the commercialisation of the culture, that practice fell into disuse, as beadwork was increasingly seen as a potential source of income. Male traditional healers always wear beads to symbolise their calling, Ndzundza royalty sometimes wear beads on ceremonial occasions and very young boys wear the single strand of beads known as usucu around their waists and less frequently the apron of beaded tassels known as the lighabi. With these few exceptions, beadwork is exclusively the preserve of women, for whom it serves important ritual and traditional functions. Indeed it is hardly an exaggeration to say the entire life of a woman is mapped out by beads.

Not all beadwork worn by the Ndebele is charged with high ritual seriousness. The ornate breastplate worn in the picture left is a vanity. On the other hand, the isiphepetu (stiff beaded apron) is an item with deeper traditional roots. It is made by the girl herself, or sometimes her mother, during the period of seclusion which the girl undergoes around the time of her first menstruation. During this seclusion, she symbolically becomes a woman and is henceforth considered marriageable. Designs worked into the isiphepetu are generally abstract but are often derived from stylised representations of huts, kraals and the like.

One of the most striking pieces of beadwork worn by Ndebele women is the linga koba or, literally, "long tears". A pair of beaded strips attached to a headband and trailing to the ground, the linga koba is a token of matronhood. It is first worn by a mother when her son returns from male circumcision initiation. In the idea of the "long tears" is embedded the mother's simultaneous joy at having raised a man and lost her boy.

The beaded apron worn here is an ijogolo, which is made after the woman cements her marriage by bearing children.

Once every married Ndzundza woman owned and progressinvely embroidered a marriage blanket or nguba like this. In the traditional context, the blanket would be given to the woman on the occasion of her marriage. Then, for each year of married life she would add a single strip of beadwork as a record of the progression of her life. From the 1940s on, the design of the beadwork centred on stylised depictions of huts, steps and other elements of the domestic environment.

Thirty years ago this extraordinary spectacle was relatively common in areas inhabited by the Ndzundza. Today it is rare in the extreme. This woman from the still powerfully traditional Nebo district is wearing metal neck and leg rings called dzilla. They are traditionally made for her by her husband and worn as tokens of marriage. In the traditional framework, the wealth of the husband is measured by the number of dzilla he provides her. Nowadays, however, clip-on plastic dzilla are far more common and can be bought, ready made, in stores catering to the traditional market. Such stores also stock the vertically striped blanket bearing the so-called Middelburg design. Over the years this has become something of a uniform for married women, who are required by tradition to cover their shoulders in public.

Published in Travel Africa Edition One: Autumn 1997. Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)