Rea Khoabane
RESPECT: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as a young woman with her signature turban scription that makes the wearing of doeks mandatory. Southern African women mostly wear doeks as a sign that they are betrothed, married or bereaved. But these are modern cultural innovations and expectations and not an expression of authentic African culture.
“Our Southern African ancestresses wore headdresses and what anthropologists call ‘bonnets’ (that is, detachable and decorated headdresses) and not headscarves.”
Writing on his travels in the Cape colony in the 18th century, Swedish botanist CP Thunberg remarked that slaves, “as a token of their servitude, always go barefoot and without a hat”. Whenever a slave was emancipated, Thunberg noted, the first thing they did was buy footwear and an extravagant hat. Slaves would wear a turban.
There is an even longer history of blackamoor images or icons dressed in turbans. These are mostly found in Spanish and Italian art and involve black figures, usually male. In decorative sculpture the full body is depicted, either to hold trays, as virtual servants, or bronze sconces for candles or light fixtures.
Last year, fashion house Dolce & Gabbana caused an outcry when it dressed models in blackamoor earrings and sent them sashaying down the runway.
In traditional Zulu culture, a married woman is supposed to wear iduku, a head wrap, when she’s around her in-laws to show respect. Xhosa women always wore some form of headdress, as a sign of respect to the head of the family — either their father or husband. Older Xhosa women wore more elaborate headpieces because of their seniority.
Various ethnic groups had their own forms of traditional dress and the colour of their garments and the adornments they wore denoted their origins.
In my language, Sotho, it is a tuku. The culture raises women to wear the tuku as a sign of respect to others and herself. During a Sotho cultural wedding when the newly married woman is welcomed to the family and home by her in-laws, she is given a doek to wear as a sign that she has been accepted into their family.
Wearing her signature turban, Nompendulo Mkatshwa, president of the student representative council at the University of the Witwatersrand, inspired sisterly camaraderie as she and other student leaders stood at the forefront in the struggle for education during the #FeesMustFall protests last year.
Mkatshwa has been described as iMbokodo from the Nguni word for rock, and this rock has certainly struck government nerves.
At the 2015 Feather Awards Mkatshwa was seen wearing an ANC-branded doek.
Asked about its significance, she said initially she wore it to cover up a bad hair day. However, when she realised its impact in the media, she began to embrace it as her crown as a young black female in a leadership position.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela made headlines for wearing full Xhosa attire complete with the doek when she went to support her then husband, Nelson Mandela, during the Rivonia Trial.
Mkatshwa says women still have to overcome many obstacles and the best way they have found to signal their unique place in this modernday struggle is by wearing the doek. HEADDRESS: A model at the Slava Zaitsev Spring/Summer 2013 fashion show in Moscow