The Ninevites was a resistance movement who scoured the South African frontier during the late 1900s. Having started the collective under The Ninevites name in 2012, Nkuli Mlangeni would do so because of how fascinated she was in its story, which was shrouded in so much myth.
What the Kagiso native found crazy was that so many people didn’t even know of their story. The Ninevites lends its name from the Bible, whose people were religious rebels who challenged God. These young men engaged in criminal activities under a colonised South Africa and sought to challenge the injustices faced by themselves as well as their people.
Yet what pushed the artist, designer, and collaborator to choose this name was the context in which she found herself working at the time. She worked in the media and curated pieces in Cape Town, and started to see how in spaces, advertising in particular, black culture was being misrepresented.
Fashion as the political
Nkuli decided that she wanted to make things, things like those made during fashion week, but would use “normal” looking people as her models. It is in the normal that she finds her inspiration. For her, black style and how she sees it occurring on downtown Johannesburg’s streets and walkways is being shown in “Move” and “Drum” Magazine. She believes two different styles are at play: those represented in Fashion week and those where she get her inspiration, from such streets and her neighbours.
The artist draws her style from Ausi Lele, from her mother’s friends, guys, the people who hang out in Kagiso. She loves the kind of style that you don’t pay too much for, the kind that requires you to work with things you already have and are most practical.
Yet there is another goal within her work, and that is about wanting to bring people together through fabric.
Nkuli recently came back from having done research in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. For her, South American cultures have similarities to those found in South Africa. Her interests lie in south-to-south collaborations where our histories are similar: there is a shared sense of a colonial history and a sense of responsibility to our waning traditions. She wants to make collaborations within this space, learning from each other’s ideas and the techniques of each other’s crafts.
It is in such a space that The Ninevites function to bring artists, designers and crafts people together. Nkuli uses this name as a facilitator in making such projects come to life. She spends her time researching and looking for artists, and then working with them to move an idea forward.
In her latest project, Nkuli worked within the collective to create intricate handmade rugs. Under the collective’s name, she brought two graphic designers, one from Brazil and the other from South Africa, to work on the styling of the rugs. She also brought in a weaver, Mario – a resident in the city of Lima in Peru.
Tradition made for now
It is through such works that we see Nkuli’s obsession with tradition, drawing particular inspiration from the way it is worn by those who follow it. She gives the example of Zionists, whose religion is steeped in traditional beliefs. She loves how their followers wear their uniforms with such pride, taking care to keep them crisp and white. Right now her biggest inspiration comes from her Ndebele heritage, paying much homage to their motifs in her works.
Nkuli’s latest works with textiles yielded a piece titled “Mangaliso rug” – a modern take on signature Ndebele design. Its name contains a history, yet its function as a rug makes it applicable to our every day lives.
Nkuli explains that in her previous works she would print the images of black heroes on children’s T-shirts. She does so to remind people that these people exist. In giving these works the images and names of people in black history, the designer has brought their story back into our lives. She sees such names as a good entry point to having the much needed conversation about our past and to make people question their own understandings of it.
Her other works also hold the names of Mangalizo, Queen Zinga, and Thomas Sankara. Nkuli is interested in such stories. She says many are not happy ones, yet they are stories that need to be told and are still relevant, as many black men and woman go through such hell, still today. They are “garden boys” during the day and then fathers at night. Many of them have grown without fathers and yet we have judges who proceed to throw stupid comments about black men, knowing nothing of the many lives that she knows nothing about.
Yet Nkuli does not consider herself political. As much as her references may be seeped in the political, she does not think of herself as knowing or being educated enough to talk about politics. She wants to work from intuition. She does it because it looks good and because it is accessible to those who would make use of it.
Black life as living history
In creating such works of homage to black life, Nkuli also hopes to move away from the misrepresentation and commodification of black life. Citing the works of Thabiso Sekgala, Santu Mofokeng, and her favourite photographer of all time Sabelo Mlangeni, she sees their works as showing the lives of black people not as objects for consumption. She draws much inspiration from the works of Alexia Webster who documented pantsula life, seeing their works as the celebration of black lives.
Looking at her work we see a creator unashamedly and beautifully borrow from local crafts and culture. We see her work as paying a type of homage to a living culture under threat in South Africa but by also remoulding it. She creates art that we can wear and use in our homes so as to re-introduce us to black heroes of our past. In doing so, Nkuli shows us how our culture can evolve to suit the complex interactions that youth have to engage in. As black bodies, we wear our history in our skin, in our clothes, and our ideas.
Nkuli’s work is tantamount to such an expression. Her work reflects a navigation of black selves in a post-colonial space in search for our own spaces. She sees fashion, textiles and style as very much being inspired by her love of cloth. Yet for her, it also plays a much deeper function of connecting people and their ideas to a common purpose.