Dolls – not just toys
Durban exhibition shows their worth
DOLLS can be like books. They tell stories. Not only locally in Zulu culture, but also among the Aboriginal people of Australia and the First Nations of Canada.
Exhibits from all three cultures are on display at the KwaZulu-Natal Society of Arts in Glenwood until August 19.
“The three different genres have a lot in common,” said Kate Wells, the co-ordinator of the local Siyazama doll-making project who put together the exhibition along with another professor, Kym Rae, from the University of Newcastle in Australia.
“Similar issues that are exposed through dolls include wellness, nutrition, child rearing, Aids and cosmology,” said Wells.
“A lot of spiritual aspects are looked at through the dolls, and they make for a fantastic collection. They are like books. You can read so much into them.”
Siyazama has even produced a book to help people “read” the Zulu dolls.
The exhibit, Re-Stitching History shows how traditional ways of doing things can repair traumatised cultures – and that’s what they’ve been doing in Africa, Australia and Canada, using dolls.
Rae’s work with dolls began when an indigenous artist she worked with in New South Wales needed to tell her children, after the death of her grandmother, that the old lady was one of Australia’s “stolen generation”.
“They had been forcibly removed from their homes and often put into institution as a transition to becoming a slave for a (white) family.”
“She didn’t know her grandmother had been part of the stolen generation until she passed on.
“She felt it was really important for her children to know about the story from the elders of the community. But when we started off doing the project using a video, the elders didn’t say a word, so we had to try another way.” Rae had heard of Siyazama in South Africa after meeting Wells at a conference in Bristol, in the UK. “So we started creating dolls around people, places and incidents,” she said. The exhibits she has brought over from Australia are made by people aged 14 to 72 and involve “very personal stories”. Rae has also been instrumental in bringing out the exhibits from Canada, where she had met Elizabeth Dotater, a member of one of the First Nations, while working in Ontario in the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve. “She ended up depressed after an accident and wanted to find the positive,” said Rae. “She met elders who said she needed to reconnect with her culture in which it is very traditional to make dolls from corn husks.”
Wells went on to call dolls “extraordinary art”.
“The idea is that they are not just playthings … they are living legends of impacted information.”
The Siyazama doll-making project evolved in the late 1990s when there was much fear in the community related to HIV and Aids and many of the dollmakers were affected, read an exhibition brochure.
According to the brochure: “Most often, this was as a concerned community member and woman in a society where there was little understanding of contraception.
“The series of workshops sought to raise awareness of HIV transmission through informal discussion with a health team.
“The women in the community were at first angered and confused by the lifestyle changes suggested by the health educators, and a number of them suffered abuse and beatings when they took condoms home.
“At that time, Zulu men in the community were in denial about HIV/Aids and those who had paid lobola felt that they had full rights over their wives.
“The opportunity to hear about the physical, mental and social complexities of Aids became a transformational process for many of the dollmakers.”