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125 ChApter 5 Stitched-up Women, Pinned-down Men: Gender Politics in Weya and Mapula Needlework, Zimbabwe and South Africa brenda schmahmann Husbands would help us if they feel pity, but sometimes they don’t [feel pity]. And what makes you see they don’t is that you are pregnant and have a child on your back and are going out fetching firewood and the man does not help. I became pregnant again [for the third time] in 1988. My husband was working at that time but then he got arrested and was jailed for two years for some reason. That is when our suffering increased enormously. After his return from custody, I got pregnant with our fourth child, who was born in June 1990. In 1992 my husband was jailed again for some reason. Then I got a job but my salary was not enough for me to pay school fees. The first of these passages quotes Charity Mugala, who was living in Weya—a communal area (formerly known as a Tribal Trust Land) about 170 kilometers east of Harare in Zimbabwe—in the mid 1990s (Mugala, interview by Brenda Schmahmann, october 27, 2006, Weya). The second—dating to 2001—is by Julia Makwana, a resident of the Winterveld, a peri-urban area about 40 kilometers northwest of Pretoria in South Africa.1 Although the context and cultural frameworks of these commentators may be different, both women construct scenarios in which support is not forthcoming from a husband , whether through reluctance or absence, and a female is thus forced to undertake all domestic labour or single-handedly generate earnings necessary to sustain herself and her children. Projects established in both contexts have provided a mechanism for women to achieve economic self-sufficiency by producing needlework in between managing domestic duties. From 1987 until its eventual demise in 2000, Weya offered opportunities for women in the region, who are almost invariably Shona speakers, to produce appliqués for sale in Harare and, 126 brendA sChmAhmAnn occasionally, other cities in Zimbabwe. Similarly, the Mapula (Tsonga for “mother of rain”) project has, since 1991, provided a lifeline to women in the Winterveld—individuals who belong to a wide variety of language groups— by enabling them to produce embroideries marketed via retailers throughout South Africa. Initiatives such as these have additional importance. Self-help projects that cater to women specifically have the advantage of creating spaces in which females may find not only a respite from circumstances characterized by gender conflict but also the support of organizers who are alert to the impact of such conflict on women’s lives and are committed to finding strategies for negotiating and addressing it.2 Although they are just two of a number of Southern African self-help needlework projects which have catered for women, Weya and Mapula share a quality that tends not to be at play in most other such collectives. In addition to enabling women to acquire agency denied them through patriarchal norms, these two projects address unequal relations of power between men and women through the actual themes and topics featuring in needlework made by their members. In this essay, I identify ways in which works by the two projects manifest this engagement. The subject matter chosen for needlework points to men’s tendency to avoid supporting their families, for example, and while they may often represent marriage in positive terms, Weya and Mapula works also frequently invoke reference to conflict with male partners. But if needlework by both projects couples technical inventiveness and formal prowess with subject matter that lends itself to a feminist reading, there are nevertheless differences in approach between the two initiatives. Weya artists usually deploy standardized themes that are of generic relevance to women in the community; works by Mapula more frequently include subject matter which pertains to the specific needs, anxieties, and aspirations of their individual makers. The Weya Project The primary activity in communal area such as Weya is subsistence farming , and it is usual for women to undertake all aspects of food production while simultaneously caring for children and maintaining their homes. Attending to their farms, fetching water and firewood, preparing food, cleaning their homes, and caring for children are daily duties for females in the region. A scenario in which women undertake onerous duties on an ongoing basis stems to some extent from practices and belief systems operative in precolonial Shona societies, but these difficulties were exacerbated by laws and practices introduced by...

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