South Africa | Vintage portraits of the Xhosa c early 1900s | Photos by AM Duggan-Cronin
When Nelson Mandela wore the costume of a Thembu King—including leopard skin and a beadwork collar, similar to the collar shown above—to his trial 1962, he stunned the courtroom. The wearing of this costume was seen as affront to the European suit and was part of Mandela's wish to delegitimize the authority of a European court in Africa. .
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Broad Beaded Collars in Africa, did they originate with the Egyptians or in South Africans?
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Ingqosha Collar SOUTH AFRICA (Ingqosha or Icangci)
The Thembu, are a group in the Eastern Cape who speak Xhosa language but are a separate tribe.
After circumcision, the men wore, and still wear, skirts, turbans and a wide bead collar. A waistcoat, long necklaces, throat bands, armbands, leggings and belts are part of his regalia. The dominant colors in the beadwork are white and navy blue, with some yellow and green beads symbolizing fertility and a new life, respectively Thembu, also spelled Tembu , a Bantu-speaking people who inhabit the upper reaches of the Mzimvubu River in Eastern province, South Africa. The Thembu speak a dialect of Xhosa, a Bantu language of the Nguni group that is closely related to Zulu.
The Thembu tribe reaches back for twenty generations to King Zwide. According to tradition, the Thembu people lived in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains and migrated toward the coast in the sixteenth century, where they were incorporated into the Xhosa nation … The Nguni can be divided into a northern group - the Zulu and the Swazi people - and a southern group, which is made up of amaBaca, amaBomyana, amaGcaleka, amaMfengu, amaMpodomis, amaMpondo, abeSotho, and abeThembu, and together they comprise the Xhosa nation The Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela 1994: 1 The Nguni people are Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi (Thembu are Xhosa speakers) They predominantly live in South Africa.Swazi people live in both South Africa and Eswatini, while Ndebele people live in both South Africa and Zimbabwe. In 1825 a group of Mfengu refugees, fleeing southward from the Zulu, defeated the Thembu. At the same time, the Thembu were pressed by a growing Xhosa population that was unable to expand into new lands because of the steady expansion of European settlers from the west. The Mfengu (also Fengu) also have the beaded collar.
Usekh collar ANCIENT EGYPT
Broad collar of Senebtisi, 1850–1775 BC; faience, gold, carnelian and turquoise; Metropolitan Museum of Art Broad collar, Senebtisi The Usekh or Wesekh is a personal ornament, a type of broad collar or necklace, familiar to many because of its presence in images of the ancient Egyptian elite. Deities, women, and men were depicted wearing this jewelry. One example can be seen on the famous gold mask of Tutankhamun. The ancient word wsẖ can mean "breadth" or "width" in the Ancient Egyptian language and so this adornment is often referred to as the broad collar.
The usekh broad collar was wrapped around and supported by the neck and shoulders. It is typically adorned with closely placed rows of colored stone beads, or it is made entirely of metal. The collars were connected with clasps of gold.[1]
A scene in the 4th Dynasty tomb of Wepemnofret at Giza connects the usekh collar with dwarfs and the deity Ptah. Bernd Scheel has argued that Ptah, who is sometimes depicted wearing the broad collar, protects the deceased through the collar and that dwarfs had access to that protective magic because of their work making these types of collars. In the 5th Dynasty tomb chapel of Akhethotep (originally located at the Saqqara burial ground, now in the Louvre), one scene distinguishes between two types of collars: the broad collar and the šnw or "encircling" collar
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stay on topic with this thread please, minimize further pictures. The point is made, that there are similar collars in both cultures. But where did they originate, with the Egyptians or in South Africans or elsewhere in Africa? It may not be possible to answer this question to establish how far back it goes in South Africa. I don't find the idea it came to South Africa from dynastic Egypt because then there probably should be more things in South Africa culture which correlate to Egyptian culture. This type of collar may have been worn in Southern Africa prior to Egyptian civilization and the Egyptians adopted it
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Data shows us that there was a migration to the Southern parts, with that perhaps also culture. Perhaps vice versa.
quote: "The analysis of M78 subclades among Sudanese suggests that two subclades, E-V12 and E-V22, which are very common in northern African (Cruciani et al., 2007), might have been brought to Sudan from North Africa after the progressive desertification of the Sahara around 6,000–8,000 years ago."
(Hisham Y Hassan, Y-Chromosome Variation Among Sudanese: Restricted Gene Flow, Concordance With Language, Geography, and History November 2008American Journal of Physical Anthropology 137(3):316-23))
(Mary E. Prendergast et al., Ancient DNA Reveals a Multi-Step Spread of the First Herders into Sub-Saharan Africa, Science. 2019 Jul 5; 365(6448): eaaw6275.)
posted
This is a over simplistic question..... It implies that Africans did not have jewelry or beads until after it was invented in the Nile Valley. That is false....
quote: Diamonds are a girl's best friend, but shell necklaces were all the rage in the Stone Age. So say archaeologists who have unearthed what may be the oldest jewellery ever discovered.
The 75,000-year-old beads were found in the Blombos Cave on the southern tip of South Africa. A team led by Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen, Norway found over 40 pea-sized shells with bored holes and worn areas showing that they had been strung on a necklace, bracelet or clothes.
The beads predate jewellery excavated from sites in Europe and Africa by at least 30,000 years, they report in Science1.
quote: The presence of exotic materials in funerary contexts in the Sudanese Nile Valley suggests increasing social complexity during the fifth and sixth millennia BC. Amazonite, both in artefact and raw material form, is frequently recovered from Neolithic Sudanese sites, yet its provenance remains unknown. Geochemical analyses of North and East African raw amazonite outcrops and artefacts found at the Neolithic cemetery of R12 in the Sudanese Nile Valley reveals southern Ethiopia as the source of the R12 amazonite. This research, along with data on different exotic materials from contemporaneous Sudanese cemeteries, suggests a previously unknown, long-distance North African exchange network and confirms the emergence of local craft specialisation as part of larger-scale developing social complexity.
quote: Prehistoric southern Africans were trading beads made of ostrich egg far and wide for tens of thousands of years, according to a new study published Monday in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Isotope analysis by scientists at the University of Michigan has demonstrated that eggshell beads made in the Karoo desert region of southern Africa “traveled” hundreds of kilometers from their site of origin, including to what is now Lesotho.
Some of the beads found in Lesotho could not have come from closer than 325 kilometers (200 miles), writes the team of archaeologist Brian Stewart and colleagues. Some may have been made as far as 1,000 kilometers away.
The team also suggests that the beads traveled during a time of climactic upheaval, about 59,000 to 25,000 years ago.
The point is that jewelry is ancient in Africa and predates Kemet. Kemet just had the most preserved culture that people can study.
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quote:Originally posted by Doug M: [QB] This is a over simplistic question..... It implies that Africans did not have jewelry or beads until after it was invented in the Nile Valley. That is false....
I changed the title of this thread because I didn't intend it to be about beads.
It's about this particular wide collar, the shape and how it lays on the body.
So we see this South African man with this type of collar and it closely resembling the Egyptian. The question is did the South Africans have that before or dependently of the Egyptian or did it come from Egypt?
-and how far does it go back in ancient Egypt?
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similar shape but made of silver with a thin layer of gold leaf from tombs in Bulgaria, the ancient region of Thracia. 340-330 BC called a "pectoral"
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