potmaking

Julia scoffed when I complimented her youngest daughter for her careful work on her mother's pots, and she based her prediction that the girl's interest in potmaking would not last on the example of Julia's two elder daughters, who had married and gone off to live in "Xilunguine" (Maputo city):

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

An explicitly female domain, home-based potmaking is not exactly scorned by men, but it is regarded with a degree of condescension as part of the mundane domestic world with which males from puberty on should not concern themselves.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

99 Even two women who engaged in potmaking for mainly instrumental purposes, then, understood this activity to embrace far more than the production of a utilitarian article of trade.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Julieta Chavango and Tamara Khosa, born in 1916 (Facazisse) and 1918 (Makuvulane) respectively, are Swiss Mission-schooled women who learned potmaking when they were young but then gave it up after they were married, each to a man from a prominent Christian family who divided his working life between wage employment and commercial farming.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Comparing what we know of N'waXidyula's potmaking activities in the rural border area of Magude district with women's memories of pottery in the communities ringing Magude town underscores both the evidentiary importance of such details as ceramic decoration and the profound implications, for women's lives and women's histories, of changes in these practices over time.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

In this regard, younger women's disdain for the hard labor and dirt involved in potmaking (a disdain fostered by mission Christianity, colonial education, and urban living, especially during the war) threatens not only a venerated female craft but the phenomenological power, in everyday life, of the ways of long ago.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

In chapter 4, "Autographed Evidence," I turn to clay pottery, one of the most ancient forms of female cultural production in southern Africa, and draw on archaeological, oral, and ceramic evidence to explore how and why women in the Magude area have tried to preserve, in as unchanged a manner as possible, the potmaking practices of their foremothers.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Tamara Khosa identified a more pressing reason for her own decision to take up potmaking: As the eldest daughter in a large family, she felt compelled to help her mother, Natália Hobyana, when she began to make pots to sell in order to feed and clothe her children after the sudden death of her husband in 1927.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Like Elena, Julia first learned potmaking from her mother, Nkotassane Xixava, a Xihlahla-born woman who (like Elena) married locally.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

They also furnish a revealing example of the relational context and consequences of potmaking for rural women.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005