A contemporary Madonna from the Eastern Cape : Female agency in the Keiskamma Art Project ’ s

The Keiskamma Art Project, based in Hamburg in the Eastern Cape, produced the Rose Altarpiece in 2005. A work modelled on the Virgin of the Rose Bower altarpiece in the Church of the Dominicans in Colmar, France, that features a panel made by Martin Schongauer in 1473, the Rose Altarpiece substitutes the fifteenth-century rendition of the Virgin Mary in an enclosed garden with a representation of Nokwanda Makubalo, a project member, with a child whom she had adopted. The Rose Altarpiece may best be understood as a “parody” of the Virgin of the Rose Bower altarpiece in the sense that this term is defined by Linda Hutcheon (1985), including her concept that the various likenesses between a representation and its source serve in fact to emphasise their differences from one another. Particularly distinctive in this instance is the difference between the idea of virtuous womanhood conveyed in the two works. Whereas the iconography that informs the Virgin Mary’s representation in images such as Schongauer’s panel was not grounded in the empowerment of females, the Rose Altarpiece represents women as having agency and capacity to effect social transformations. Made in the context of escalating HIV/AIDS infections, the South African work gives visual form and shape to “feminist ubuntu” in its suggestion of the way in which women have sought to negotiate this health crisis.

The Rose Altarpiece is 201cm high (see Figure 9 for a sense of its scale), the same size as the Schongauer panel. While it does not refer to the pinnacle on the Virgin of the Rose Bower altarpiece that was added in the late-nineteenth century, it includes side wings that are a counterpart to the tracery by Klem and his studio, as well as the paintings by Fuerstein. Although a functional altarpiece in the sense that it has side wings that can open and close, the Rose Altarpiece is an art object rather than one designed to operate within liturgical practices. The Rose Altarpiece may best be understood as a "parody" of the Virgin of the Rose Bower altarpiece in the sense that this term is defined by Linda Hutcheon (1985). For Hutcheon (1985:6), postmodern parody involves 'repetition with critical distance which marks difference rather than similarity'. This is true of the Rose Altarpiece's relation to its source in the sense that various likenesses between the two art objects serve in fact to emphasise their differences from one another.
As I reveal in this article, both artworks speak of the hope for deliverance from suffering, but whereas the Schongauer's panel (and the altarpiece constituted from it) addresses an impetus to seek redemption in the afterlife, the Rose Altarpiece is focused on securing continuity and rebirth is this life specifically. Perhaps most crucial is the difference between

Making the Rose Altarpiece
When the Keiskamma Art Project produced its first large-scale work, the Keiskamma Tapestry, endeavours were made to involve all needleworkers in its design. Workshops were held in which the artwork's narrative was discussed, participants were invited to draw scenes, and then selections were made from these and translated into the work of art itself. But by the time the Keiskamma Altarpiece was produced, the process had changed -and design work was the preserve of those who had aptitude in drawing. The image of the Virgin and Child in Schongauer's altarpiece has been adapted in the Rose Altarpiece to represent Nokwanda Makubalo, a project member who was one of the leaders of the Bodiam group of needleworkers, and a child she had adopted. In an autobiographic commentary prepared for the project, Nokwanda Makubalo explained how she came to adopt the youngster in the context of an AIDS crisis, People were dying around us. These people included my sister in law's daughter -my niece born in 1979 -who had just finished a management diploma and who also had a baby of her own. She came home one Christmas and she was so skinny and that night I discovered that she was also coughing a lot. Carol came and took her in her own car with me to Nompumelelo Hospital [in Peddie] and they found that she had TB. We persuaded her to be admitted to Cecilia Makiwane Hospital [near East London]. She was so short of breath that she died soon after that but at the time all she was worried about was her baby so I promised to take care of it. I still have that baby in my care now. Her name is Zusake and her biological gran and I both take turns to look after her. 8 In a photograph of three generations of family members, probably taken in the first half Those designing and drawing the Rose Altarpiece undoubtedly referred to reproductions of The Virgin in the Rose Bower altarpiece that Hofmeyr brought back from Colmar, including a paper foldout reproduction that imitates its form. But their more immediate source was a photograph taken by Jackie Downs that represented Makubalo seated on a bench in the doorway to her home, with her arm around Zusake ( Figure 12). Blown up to approximately human scale, the photograph itself has been used for the faces of the two figures, while the appearance of their garments has been approximated through appliquéd fabric. A tea towel that has been used to represent a cloth wrapped around Makubalo's midriff (rather than the crisp white cotton in the original photograph), along with the child being shown with bare feet rather than sandals, convey an impression of   This cult, Moxey (1994:109) suggests, may have had 'special resonance for women', as the brotherhood of the rosary admitted females, unlike other confraternities, and in fact included more women than men. Hall (1974:323) suggests that the growth of a Marian cult in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 'was to some extent countered by the Church's traditional hostility to women, an attitude that was very much alive among some earlier theologians and monastic institutions who used the figure of Eve, the temptress, by way of justification'. But, notwithstanding the spectacular beauty of images of the Madonna and Child, such as that of Schongauer, nor the fact that the brotherhood of the rosary admitted women, one might argue that discourses that structure the Virgin Mary as an object of veneration are in fact as embroiled in pejorative constructs about women as are images of Eve. As Marina Warner (1985:336) has suggested, Mary, as a construct, does not only represent an impossibility (the woman who was both virgin and mother) but also translated that impossibility into a contradictory 'moral exhortation' to ordinary women. Through the figure of the Virgin Mary, Catholicism 'affirms the beauty and goodness of the natural world and insists that man's purpose is to cultivate fully his God-given gifts on earth; but on the other it endorses the most pessimistic world-denying self-sacrifice as the state of the elect, and accords virginity, the symbols of renunciation, the highest accolade' (Warner 1985:337). And if the Virgin Mary is linked to imperatives that are impossible to reconcile and therefore necessarily constructs women as deficient, she is additionally part of a circularity that is intrinsic to religious fear -in other words, a religious system that creates terror and then offers itself as the only mechanism to negotiate it, Mary's virginity underlines the pollution of intercourse; her freedom from the pangs of birth focusses exaggerated attention to them. In addition, the Church's teaching on contraception and abortion, which stems directly from the same misogynist ideas about women's role contained in the myth of the Virgin, exacerbates the terrors of sex and childbirth by maintaining pregnancy as a constant and very real danger. In turn, this reinforces the believer's need for solace, and swells the Church's authority and power (Warner 1985: 338).
While theology has worked to de-historicise her, and thus to obfuscate the way the concept of the Virgin Mary has served as 'the instrument of a dynamic argument from the Catholic Church about the structure of society, presented as a God-given code' (Warner 1976:338), the myth of the Virgin Mary is, for Warner (1985:339), less likely to be adaptable to 'new circumstances of sexual equality' than to eventually ultimately lose her hold on humankind. interviews with a range of female leaders revealed consensus that motherhood shaped by ubuntu values involves not only nurturing one's own biological children, but also those of others, 'The participants concurred that a mother has the responsibility of taking care of her own children, children from the extended family, friends' children, and neighbours' children' (Ndlovu 2016:110). She refers to statements by participants in which the mother is envisaged as an umbrella who provides 'shade or protection to all those under their responsibility' (Ndlovu 2016:111). This sense of the mother as a nurturing force who shields the child against danger and threat is conveyed visually in the Rose Altarpiece where, in addition to the woman literally shielding the child with her skirt as well as her arm enfolded around the youngster, the idea of providing an "umbrella" over others is invoked through the bower of roses and the arch shape constituted through the embroidered wording. One might also interpret the use of fabric in the central panel in the light of metaphors associated with care. Connoting a quilt or bedcover, it is suggestive of an item which provides warmth and nurture, and through the stitching used within this section of the work, there are perhaps also allusions to suturing and thus to the healing of wounds.
But if the work can be interpreted as representing an instance of motherhood shaped by ubuntu values, might it not also be seen to sustain traditionalist values that are not in keeping with feminism? The value of the concept of ubuntu has, in some instances, been challenged, and suggestions have been made that it functions as a tool for sustaining patriarchal control. Sinehlanhla Chisale explores, for example, how a supposed interest in prioritising community needs over those of individual females has been used as a vehicle for justifying and perpetuating violence against women in isiZulu-speaking communities in KwaZulu-Natal, 'Ubuntu is a porous, fluid and complex social and political theory that may be used in a biased and gendered way to control young women's behaviour through wife battering that was justified as love, discipline and punishment' (Chisale 2016:7281).
But ubuntu has also been conceptualised as having potentially transformative and activist applications that may be useful for feminism. Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle have proposed the concept of "ubuntu feminism". For them, ubuntu involves the individual making an active contribution to a larger community (rather than simply being part of a larger community) as well as doing so in ethical terms. Ubuntu 'encapsulates how we know the world, as well as how we are in it through the moral obligations as human beings who must live together. It implies the moralisation of all social relations' (Cornell & van Marle 2015:1444 shortly after her discharge from hospital, she began working to become a sangoma (healer). Viewing this new role as a commitment to her community, she made the following comment in her unpublished autobiography, 'Leaders are not taught -they are born.
And I pray to God to make me like Solomon, to be a leader. This is why I became a sangoma and was elected as one by my people'. 14 But to the shock of the community, Makubalo -so resilient and determined -died in 2010, some two or three years after making this comment. Zusake, whom she had been so committed to looking after, was subsequently placed in the care of other relatives. While these events make evident that the dedication and fortitude of women would not in fact be enough to sustain a community battling the effects of HIV/AIDS, the Rose Altarpiece nonetheless remains a powerful and inspiring image. Replacing an iconography bound up with pejorative understandings of womanhood with one suggesting how females are agents for social upliftment, it may also be understood to give visual shape and form to a concept of "feminist ubuntu". I examine the subject matter and the implications of using the Schongauer source in far greater depth in this article -with the intention of revealing its hitherto unacknowledged complexity and significance..

Hamburg is part of Ward 12 within the Ngqushwa munipality. A census study undertaken in 2016
indicated that the population of the eight villages constituting Ward 12 consists of, in total, 6051 people, 53% of whom are female. The site indicates the following: Nearly all of the people (99%) in the municipality are African, and the remaining 1% is comprised of Coloureds, Whites and Indians." This figure is indicated to be 8.1% lower than when a previous census was taken in 2011 (see Ngqushwa 2020).
5. Background information on the project provided here is a summary of the fuller account in Schmahmann (2016).
8. Unpublished and undated autobiography by Nokwanda Makubalo provided to me by Carol Hofmeyr. 11. The version used here is that of Matter (1990:xxv).
12. Hofmeyr is a practising Anglican. Other participants in the Keiskamma Art Project mostly describe themselves as 'Christian' even though they may also participate in customary practices. See Schmahmann (2010:47) where I explain the syncretic relationship between Christian and customary belief systems.
For example, I quote commentary by Nozaliseko Makubalo (2008): 'When it is time to do traditional work, I'm there. And when it is time to go to church, I go to church. But I can't leave traditional work at home and go to church'.
13. They were likely based on photographs by Barbara Tyrrell, although the exact source is unclear.
14. Unpublished and undated autobiography by Nokwanda Makubalo provided to me by Carol Hofmeyr.