- I Could Be Happy with You, if You Could Be Happy with MeThe Playful Inventions of a Visionary Headrest Artist from the Msinga Region of Kwazulu-Natal
In the early 1970s, a migrant laborer from the Msinga district in present-day KwaZulu-Natal created several highly idiosyncratic headrests using a variety of industrial off-cuts while working somewhere in the greater Johannesburg area. Taking them home as wedding gifts or selling them to other rural migrants from the same region, he probably lived in one of the single-men's hostels erected on the city's southern border, returning home every year for short breaks over the Easter weekend and at Christmas. At least six of these headrests have survived. One is in the collection of the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg (Fig. 1), four were found at a single homestead near the Dlenyane school on a gravel road between Pomery and Tugela Ferry in the 1990s (Figs. 2–4), and the sixth, which is now in the British Museum (Fig. 5), was purchased at the African Art Centre in Durban before being donated to the museum along with several other items obtained from the same source. Known as izigqiki (sing. isigqiki),1 headrests were used historically by both men and women as neck supports when sleeping and by married men as stools. By far the majority were acquired as wedding gifts (Fig. 6), bought by the father of the bride for either the bride or the groom, or both.2 As such, they usually formed part of the dowries women brought to their new homes, which customarily included other items such as beer pots, sleeping mats, blankets, and a large chest (ibbokisi).3 Although widely commissioned in the course of the twentieth century, the practice of purchasing headrests from skilled carvers had all but died out by the 1980s.
Some migrants are known to have produced carvings on a part-time basis during their brief annual return over Christmas to the rural homesteads of their extended families (Newman 1999: 1). But the artist who produced these examples probably assembled his headrests on site while in the employ of one of the first suppliers specializing in the processing of fabricated acrylic sheeting, such as the Nameplate Centre (now Armco Signage), which was established in about 1970 to produce durable road signs. Other companies, like Mr. Plastic, made signage and cut-to-size plastics, primarily for use in the chemical and auto-manufacturing worlds, while Plasticsworld, which supplied laser-cut and engraved plastics and letter work for display signs, was established a little later, in the course of the 1970s. The raw materials required by manufacturing companies like these were sources from firms such as Perspex South Africa (Pty) Ltd., founded in 1966 in Johannesburg (now located in KwaZulu-Natal), which made acrylic sheeting in a range of colors, thicknesses, sizes, and textures for cut-to-size industry use. Many of these companies were located to the south of Johannesburg, in industrial areas that also housed factories producing synthetic Ozite carpeting and related manufactured goods that relied on the use of plastics and aluminum.
It was here in the bleak outskirts of Johannesburg that most of the migrants from Msinga lived, confined to squalid, overcrowded, single-sex dormitories that were built to support the labor needs of the local gold mining and other industries during the apartheid era. Despite these residential conditions, interpersonal violence was surprisingly uncommon. Instead, migrants seem to have channeled their energies creatively, participating in rural art forms like isicathamiya choral performances (Erlmann 1990) and ngoma dancing (Meintjies 2017), which flourished in part because they were nurtured by a widespread sense of nostalgia for home (ekhaya). Male migrants also developed systems of support that built on established rural networks, thereby creating strong bonds of belonging and community despite the inhospitable physical environment and the grim realities of debilitating poverty. Policed by elders, these networks ensured that younger men for the most part avoided contact with outsiders, especially women (Park 2010: 62). [End Page 52] Long annual separations from rural families also encouraged a keen interest in established art forms associated with the practice of...