Elias Mtshengu
Elias Mtshengu was born in 1945 on the Stendahl Lutheran Mission, near Weenen, KwaZulu Natal. His parents died while he was a boy, and he grew up poor, leaving school in grade 3. Uncles would help to pay lobola for his wife, Audrey, a local girl who got as far as grade 6 at the mission school.
Mtshengu always worked with his hands, and in about 1985, he got retrenched from a furniture factory in Johannesburg. It was a difficult year, for the Stendahl community discovered the church had sold the land under them, and they were moved to an isolated encampment in the bush about 40 km away.
The government offered metal prefabs as temporary accommodation, and Mtshengu, Audrey and their five children settled down to a life in what would become the village of Waayhoek. It didn’t take long for the Stendahl people to find they were living in an area of endemic violence, and Mtshengu would lose count of the local wars that sent him into hiding for months at a time.
In between conflicts, he struggled to make a living while repairing tables and fixing doors. He had been forced to withdraw his children from school when Tessa Katzenellembogen started a craft group at Waayhoek in 1988, and Mtshengu began learning to weave copper wire. In time his wife and son, Thamsanqa, would join the growing number of craft groups in the village, although work tended to be sporadic, and there were long periods with no orders at all.
Mtshengu was building mud houses for a contract fee of R 300 each when a stray order from Paris got him busy on a large, coiled copper bowl known as sungulo. In November 2000 his sungulo won the copper section of an exhibition of Contemporary Zulu Basketry in Johannesburg, and Mtshengu used his prize money to send Thamsanqa back to school.
He continued to make sungulo bowls on order until succumbing after a long struggle with throat cancer.
The sungulo’s bowls, mastered by Mtshengu, are made with sterling silver and Shaduku, an alloy of gold and copper (typically 4-10% gold, 90-96% copper), woven in a continuous length of thick wire, coiled and labouriously stitched with a thinner wire. Mthsengu was the only artist in the community to excel in the sungulu stitch and, although he passed the skill on to his daughter, no one has perfected it in the same way yet.
Text adapted from correspondence between Creina Alcock and Julia Meintjes, 2011.