The Norman Conquest embroidery from the 11th century has inspired communities all over the world to stitch their own histories in fabric, writes Sarah Woolley.
For thousands of years, communities have used textiles to preserve their cultural heritage and chronicle their past, writing history with a needle. Several of these projects have recently drawn inspiration from the Bayeux Tapestry, an 11th-century embroidery depicting the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.
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The Keiskamma Art Project is one such example: an award-winning collective of 140 artists, mostly women, based in and around the village of Hamburg in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Their massive, hand-stitched work is now the subject of a major retrospective at Johannesburg’s Old Women’s Jail. The exhibition Umaf’ evuka, nje ngenyanga / Dying and Rising as the Moon Does brings together works from two decades; their masterpieces fill the walls that once housed anti-apartheid activists such as Fatima Meer, Albertina Sisulu, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
The Keiskamma artists consider a wide range of local experiences in their work, including climate change, HIV/AIDS, and the struggle for racial justice and gender equality. The Keiskamma Tapestry, the first chapter in the Keiskamma Art Project’s story, takes centre stage in the exhibition. It is a landmark in community embroidery, having been completed in 2003 and preserving 300 years of Eastern Cape history across 120m of red-ochre hessian.
At the beginning, we see San bushmen, whose silhouettes resemble those depicted in their own ancient rock art. Scenes of colonial invasion and atrocities committed by Dutch and British soldiers in the 18th and 19th century Frontier Wars are remembered alongside scenes of everyday rural life and Xhosa culture. Nelson Mandela is burning his passbook in protest of the Sharpeville Massacre further down the tapestry, sewn defiantly next to the “architect of apartheid,” Hendrink Verwoerd. Before we see hand-stitched ballot boxes from South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, we see images of torture and resistance, including the Soweto uprising.
“When we look back, we’re sort of reinstating our history for the world to see who we are,” says Veronica Betani, a long-established Keiskamma artist. “Hamburg’s history is also South Africa’s history, with all of its unresolved colonial legacies and difficult epidemic histories,” says exhibition co-curator Azu Nwagbogu. “The people’s resilience and will have been woven into tapestries.”
The power of the process
When people gather to sew local history, they create a space that can be just as important as the finished product. The Keiskamma Art Project began in 2002, when the Keiskamma Trust opened free embroidery training workshops. Women were paid for everything they sewed, and the Keiskamma studio became a gathering place for learning about local history, sharing memories, and weaving those stories into tapestries. Today, Keiskamma arts are a vital source of local income, but Nobukho Nqaba, a visual artist and educator, explains that Keiskamma artists also “share, stitch, and write personal and collective trauma – experienced by the majority of black South Africans – as a way of healing.”
“We lost so many colleagues on the road,” Betani explains. I thought I was going to die a few years ago after being diagnosed with depression and then epilepsy. Following that, I discovered that I am HIV positive. All of these things led me to believe that this was the end of the road, but it was not. So I’m the one who rises and falls like the moon.” Because of the success of the Keiskamma Tapestry, Betani and her colleagues created other commemorative works, including the Keiskamma Guernica and the Keiskamma Altarpiece, which are also included in the retrospective. Both express their thoughts on the impact of HIV/AIDS in Hamburg. The Guernica tapestry incorporates blankets from the Keiskamma Treatment Centre, while the Altarpiece honours local grandmothers who cared for their families during the epidemic.
The Keiskamma Tapestry is not woven on a loom like traditional tapestries, but its name purposefully invites comparisons and contrasts with the Bayeux Tapestry. The original Bayeux Tapestry, thought to be a work of propaganda commissioned by William the Conqueror’s half-brother, is a subversive source of inspiration for the Keiskamma artists, who are stitching history for the people, by the people. Little is known about the Anglo-Saxon nuns who are thought to have created the Bayeux Tapestry, but the same stem-stitch used for king titles was used by the Keiskamma artists to stitch their own names across every metre of the Keiskamma Tapestry.
Such communal textiles offer a democratic medium through which shared values, celebrations and concerns can be distilled – Clare Hunter
“History is not just what we see in the news,” says Eastern Cape performance poet Lelethu ‘PoeticSoul’ Mahambehlala, who collaborated with Keiskamma artists on the aBantu Development Agency’s History Re:imagined project. “They were calling out the names of everyone on the tapestry as they walked us through it. These ladies are writers.”
Reimagining history is a common goal for Bayeux-inspired community embroidery projects. Over 4,000 people stitched England’s Quaker Tapestry to create a history lesson that doesn’t shy away from Conscientious Objector persecution, the Peterloo Massacre, and the British transatlantic slave trade. The Ros Tapestry in Ireland reminds us that the Norman Conquests were about more than just English soil. in contrast to The Last Invasion Embroidered Tapestry in Wales brought together women ranging in age from 30 to 82 to depict French forces landing in Pembrokeshire, Wales in 1797. They echo the Bayeux Tapestry in saying, “our past matters, and so do we,” as the Keiskamma Tapestry does.
The significance of sewing
When we thread a needle and make a stitch we mimic the hands that moved like ours across thousands of years. As you continue to stitch, your mind begins to wander: What were the nuns whispering as they pierced the linen of the Bayeux Tapestry? Did the suffragettes experience the same tension in their wrists as they made protest banners? As we record our own message for the future, the steel between our thumb and finger becomes a little antenna, receiving voices from the past.
Clare Hunter’s book Threads of Life examines the social, emotional, and political significance of sewing around the world through the lens of a needle. Hunter invites us to examine the Keiskamma Tapestry more closely. but also the Aids Memorial Quilt and the Plaza de Mayo Mothers’ headscarves embroidered with the names of their kidnapped children. They speak the same language as shell-shocked World War One soldiers who learned to sew in hospitals and Hmong women who invented “story cloths” in refugee camps to keep memories of home alive.
