Shweshwe and African Heritage Textiles

Heritage in Three Threads

 

Ukanyi/ Marula

Tatreez inspired Marula Tree The Marula (Sclerocarya birrea) is an important southern African tree, known as ukanyi in Xitsonga. Its fruit, bark, wood, leaves and seeds have long been used for food, medicine and material purposes. Here, Ukanyi represents land, nourishment, continuity, belonging and connection to ancestry.

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Palestinian Tatreez/ اﻟﺘﻄﺮﻳﺰ اﻟﻔﻠﺴﻄﻴﻦ

Palestinian embroidery is a social and intergenerational practice, traditionally passed between generations of women. Its geometric patterns and motifs can communicate regional and social identity. In 2021, Palestinian embroidery was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Here, Tatreez provides the cross-stitch language through which the Marula is translated into stitch.

 

Isishweshwe/Shweshwe

Shweshwe has complex transcontinental origins. Blueprint textiles have roots in East Asia and were later circulated and adapted through European textile traditions, colonial, missionary and trading networks before becoming embedded in Southern Africa cultural practice. Its history encompasses colonisation, adaptation, resilience, innovation and cultural identity.

 

The Materials

The Marula is stitched onto steel wire mesh, surrounded by a Shweshwe border. The wire speaks to hardness: colonisation, apartheid, occupation, forced displacement, inequality and structures that constrain. The thread moves through that hardness, speaking to resilience, memory, identity, belonging, reclamation and creating beauty through difficulty. The Marula inspired by Palestinian tatreez cross stitch emerges as a symbol of life, rootedness and continuity.

 

The Marula Design

The Marula tree is inspired by Tsonga embroidery practices shared by Khensani Mohlatlole, using photographs from www.kaross.com as a visual reference. Tasneem Behardien then took the Marula form and created a Tatreez-inspired version specifically for this workshop. This is therefore a contemporary act of cultural translation: bringing a Tsonga-inspired Marula form into the cross-stitch language of Palestinian Tatreez.

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Reflect

1. 1.What does belonging to a place mean to you, and where do you feel most rooted?

2. What has life made hard in you, and what has allowed you to remain soft?

3. What stories, practices or ways of being have been carried to you through your family, community or culture?

4. What have you inherited that you want to preserve, and what have you inherited that you want to transform?

5. What structures have shaped your experience of identity, belonging or displacement, and how do you create possibility within them?

6. What are you creating through difficulty, rather than waiting for the difficulty to disappear?

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