Surviving Swedish exceptionalism: Allina Ndebele’s wedding tapestry, 1963

Focusing on Allina Ndebele’s tapestry My wedding (1963), this study recovers the events of a craft-therapy project initiated at Umpumulo Art School in South Africa in the early 1960s. As few realise, it was out of this Swedish initiative that the better-known Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre, Rorke’s Drift, developed. Exposing the segregated, patriarchal nature of life on a Lutheran mission field, the article interrogates mid-century concepts of “Nordic-ness” as a source of cultural and social excellence. More specifically, this study excavates an episode in art history, the sensationalising of My wedding in Sweden. It also implicates the idealistic understandings of Svenska kommittén för stöd åt afrikanskt konsthantverk (The Swedish Committee for the Support of African Arts and Crafts), which funded two Swedish graduates to train black South African women as Art and Craft Advisors for mission hospitals. Showing how this Committee of “experts” constructed their isiZulu-speaking beneficiaries as a counter-identity to Europeans, the article reveals how they evolved development priorities for local women–sometimes with catastrophic consequences. If the ACA project left a legacy of inventive tapestries, this was due to the resourcefulness of the couple who initiated the project and the agencies of their students, particularly Allina Ndebele.