Nov. 15 -- Muziwandile Sibongiseni Gigaba, who goes by Muzi Gigaba, doesn't remember telephone wire art being considered as art when he was growing up in Kwa Zulu Natal. Nor was it prominent. Unlike pottery, woodwork, or textile arts, working with wire was what people did to pass the time or to make quick money. Gigaba used to take a train to school and while on the train he'd see men weaving telephone wires around traditional Zulu sticks (iwisa).
During apartheid (1948 to 1994), Black people were not allowed to carry weapons, including sparring sticks. "A lot of South Africans tell us that it's [the sparring stick] this icon of the night watchman, the iwisa," says Elizabeth Perrill, Ph.D., a professor at the school of art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "There were also rickshaw drivers, they were allowed to have sticks as well. So, it's almost like these were the only Black men in urban spaces who were allowed to walk around with a stick. That was also the only thing that they had to defend themselves, to defend the property of mostly white South Africans who they were employed by."
The sticks also became a form of artistic self-expression. "They [night watchmen and security guards] wanted to have their own staffs, but ones that were beautifully made, rather than just having a wooden stick," Gigaba says via WhatsApp video from South Africa. "So, they'd commission these telephone wire weavers to decorate them.
"When I went to the community where these wire weavers [on the train] were from, I found that almost the entire community could weave," Gigaba adds. "People who came from a rural area to an urban area, they wanted to but couldn't work. So if they couldn't find work, people would assist them and teach them a [wire weaving] technique so they could make a living out of it."
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iNgqikithi yokuPhica/Weaving Meanings: Telephone Wire Art from South Africa
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Telephone wire art has gained prominence and popularity since its early origins. Gigaba, who holds a master's degree in fine art, is the Museum of International Folk Art's community curator and lead Indigenous Knowledge Expert from broader Nguni and specific Zulu cultures for the museum's new exhibition, iNgqikithi yokuPhica/Weaving Meanings: Telephone Wire Art from South Africa, which opens Sunday, November 17, and runs through November 17, 2025.
The exhibition is curated by Perrill, an expert on Zulu ceramics who's been collaborating with artists in KwaZulu-Natal for 15 years and who has researched art and art-related topics in southern Africa for a quarter century. The Folk Art Museum's telephone wire art exhibition is also the first major one of its kind at any museum in North America.
Gigaba's role as Indigenous Knowledge Expert makes him a consultant and cultural go-between with the different master weavers and artists whose work will be on display for the next 12 months at the Folk Art Museum. He traveled to Santa Fe with two master weavers -- Bongeleni Mkhize and Ntombifuthi (Magwaza) Sibiya -- as well as musician and songwriter Thokozani Mhlambi. Gigaba helped set up the exhibition and assisted with speaking for the artists, among other tasks.
Gigaba, however, is not a weaver, but he wanted to make sure he did everything he could in his role to support the master weavers. "I even learned how to weave [with wire] so that I'd be able to connect with the weavers and understand better the concepts behind their work -- so that I wouldn't just be someone who represents them, but someone who is trusted to help in representing them," he says. "I wanted to be knowledgeable enough to assist them better."
He accompanied the master weavers to buy wire and learned how different wires work, and the weavers taught him how to weave his own basket. "It was a learning process for me for sure," he says. "I also learned that some of them had been taught by other weavers, and that others had been exposed to wire art but were self-taught."
BOOK ON A WIRE
Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone Wire Baskets by David Arment and Marisa Fick-Jordaan, originally published in 2005 by Museum of New Mexico Press, 211 pages; a new fully updated and redesigned edition will be released in winter 2025, published by Radius Books, 254 pages, available for pre-order now.
It took Gigaba five months to weave his basket. "It was intriguing being with them and then walking that journey with them, because they'd be watching TV, for example, and weaving at the same time," he says. "But I couldn't watch TV and weave at the same time. They already knew how to do things, they'd be counting without even looking, but I was always looking [at my basket] and still making mistakes."
The Folk Art Museum exhibition is largely based on the David Arment Southern African Collection, which David Arment, an art consultant and collector based in Santa Fe, started building with his husband, Jim Rimelspach, in the early 1990s.
"On that first trip to southern Africa, Jim and I spent a few days in Johannesburg, and we stumbled upon a little brochure, like a travel brochure. On the cover was this picture of these weird, zigzaggy telephone wire baskets," Arment says. "I was attracted to them, because as you know, when you go to Africa, there's so much color, and everything is so vivid. And my vision of African art wasn't really that colorful at the time. So I saw these baskets, and I said, 'You know, these look like the Africa that we're experiencing.'"
The gallery on the brochure didn't have any of the baskets, says Arment. "But a little switch went off in my head that I had to find them. So we went back the next year, and I found a couple; we made some friends in Johannesburg, and they'd send me some baskets too. It became my hobby to track these down and collect them."
His collection, the bulk of which Arment keeps in his "vault," as he calls it, now includes some 2,000 pieces of telephone wire art: baskets, beer pot lids (izimbenge), vessels, platters, and plates, as well as sparring or fighting sticks like the ones Gigaba saw the men decorate with wire on his train. Arment donated about 400 pieces to the Folk Art Museum, which is the first phase of the donation.
"They talk about this being the art of night watchmen," Arment says. Two master weavers he met on his early trips to South Africa, in Durban, were in fact night watchmen: Elliott Mkhize (1945-2020) and Bheki Dlamini (1957-2003). Their work went beyond decorating sparring sticks. On his collection's website, Arment describes Mkhize as one of the "true originators of telephone wire baskets."
"When you hear the stories of the night watchmen making baskets," Arment says, "they are talking about Elliott and Bheki Dlamini.
"They worked at a place, I believe it was called Air Sales, and Elliott and Bheki were the night watchmen there," he adds. "With the encouragement of a collector in South Africa and Marisa [Fick-Jordaan], they started making them bigger and finding that they could make more money making these baskets than doing their night watchman shift."
Arment became friends with both Mkizhe and Dlamini, and whenever he could, he'd buy art pieces from them too. Mkizhe preferred a tightly woven geometric style in his weaving, and he'd sign his work with his initials ("EM"); Dlamini favored images of sports or Zulu traditions.
"They started training their friends and family, and Vincent [Sithole, 1970-2011] was one of the people they trained," Arment says. "Vincent was one of the first weavers, after Bheki and Elliott, to start making things. Vincent was very talented and liked looking at nature books, animal books, bird books, things like that, where he could see images. He actually came to the first International Folk Art Market here in Santa Fe."
One of Arment's most beloved pieces in his collection -- and on display in the exhibit -- is one that Vincent made with bird designs. "That is absolutely one of my favorite baskets," Arment says. "It has a deep meaning for me because I'm a birder, and one of the things I do in South Africa is go birding.
"So Marissa and I were talking, and I said, 'Could Vincent do a basket with birds?' Marissa went out and bought Vincent the bird book that I use, Newman's Birds of Southern Africa. Vincent went through the pages, and you can actually connect the birds in that basket to the pictures in that book. It has a lot of meaning to me, because it just reinforces that he was one of my friends. He was one of my favorite weavers."
Many of the weavers Arment met over the years in South Africa have since died. "Since 2000, when I first went to Durban and I met a lot of the master weavers, only two or three of them are still with us," he says. Many have died from common health issues that plague South Africa, including tuberculosis and HIV. "I've lost a lot of people I considered friends," Arment adds. "This exhibition is an opportunity to make sure that we keep them alive through their art, and the museum's doing a wonderful job of curating a story from this collection that I think is going to break some new ground."
He pauses to reflect on more than three decades of traveling to southern and South Africa and meeting master weavers. "I got some boxes in the mail this week," Arment says. "We ordered some party favors for the opening at the museum. And you open the box, and you smell that charcoal. These weavers were working around a fire. And it just brings a sense of southern Africa with it."