Intimate Cartographies
by Thebe Magugu
by Khensani Mohlatlole
Intimate Cartographies, a new series by Thebe Magugu, begins in the small Eastern Cape town of Tsolo, bringing together two of its iconic residents, Simphiwe Dana and Zozibini Tunzi. Through the Tsolo Dress, Magugu continues his practice of heritage worldbuilding, using the archive as a creative generator for new histories and futures.
Last year’s edition, the Mafeteng Dress, returned to the designer’s Lesotho roots and brought his take on the iconic patterns of Basotho heritage blankets. This time, he’s looked southwards to the Eastern Cape and the sartorial history of its Xhosa-speaking communities. Simphiwe Dana was a clear-cut muse from the start. Not only because of her influential, decades-long music career, a staple in Magugu’s playlists and upbringing, but also because her approach to fashion and the intentional celebration of her Xhosa heritage have long influenced his design thinking.
Unsurprisingly, the admiration was mutual. Dana is no stranger to a good Thebe Magugu dress, and has enjoyed his ability to think outside of the box. In particular, she speaks highly of his attention to materiality, especially the development of original prints, and when Magugu was looking to the next map point for the Intimate Cartographies, it was her idea to use her hometown, Tsolo. A hometown she just happened to share with another South African superstar, Tunzi — a fact she’d only recently learned and jumped at the chance for this dress to bring the two of them together, in conversation, in person, for the first time.
The Tsolo dress itself draws from the visual language of Xhosa womenswear without attempting to fossilise it. Magugu emphasises nuance in his referencing and output. He’s not attempting to capture the wide breadth of Xhosa fashion but rather bringing together recognisable elements: the striping and braiding of isikhaka and umbhaco garments, the embroidery of iqhiya, and red ochre dye, all exploring the exchange and interactions of what we now understand as heritage and identity.
Each of these details is the result of many hands, minds, and years of work. It’s generally understood that precolonial garments amongst Xhosa-speaking communities primarily consisted of animal hides and leathers, such as mantles and breast coverings made from ox or cowhide, then decorated with ivory, shell and copper beads, and animal teeth. Through trade, missionary activity, and colonial contact, these forms were gradually translated into cotton fabrics and glass beads.
Buttons, particularly the mother-of-pearl variety, were once expensive and highly sought-after commodities. Used in abundance, they often communicated status and wealth rather than serving a strictly functional purpose. Similarly, the turmeric-hued version of the Tsolo Dress — also pictured in black and white — recalls the dyeing of store-bought blankets and cloth with red ochre by Xhosa communities.
This is a legacy to which the Tsolo dress speaks: not Xhosa fashion as a static inheritance but that clothing, like any form of communication, is always absorbing and evolving. People encounter new materials, technologies and ideas, then adapt them into their own visual languages. For instance, in some contexts, the amount of striping or braid trim on an isikhaka could communicate a woman’s social or relational position, including whether she was a wife or mother, as well as aspects of status, thus transforming the foreign material into an in-group messaging system.
This becomes particularly important when considering the visual archive from which contemporary understandings of Xhosa identity are drawn. An identity, which at times can create a homogeneous group of native traditions, a standardising which emerges from 19th- and 20th-century photography and anthropology. In many instances, colonial and apartheid-era photographers and ethnographers were not always simply documenting people as they found them; they were also producing images.
In the time before cameras could live in our back pockets, having your picture taken was a rather grand affair. People dressed up for photographs. They posed. And these curated images lived in our albums and textbooks as scenes of daily life. At the same time, some photographers and ethnographers were actively interested in producing particular visions of ‘traditional’ African life, often overlooking the complexities, contradictions and distinctions within the communities they depicted. Those images have since become part of the historical record, solidifying particular ideas about what Xhosa identity should look like.
Of course, we cannot erase that archive. But we can expand it.
The lens, the editorial and the fashion image can acknowledge the visual traditions that already exist while creating new images that move from the production of objects to the depiction of subjects and actors with agency. The past and present do not need to be separated into neat categories. Our desires in the present affect how we look at the past and what we collectively choose to remember, just as those memories shape how we imagine the future.
As a brand, Thebe Magugu sits firmly in the contemporary, but not from the vantage of “modernising” African heritage. Rather, it continues a process of adaptation that has already been happening for generations.
That ability to hold multiple belongings and histories at once connects Magugu, Dana, and Tunzi.
For the campaign, the team sourced African and Xhosa woodwork, including the uhadi musical bow and inaqwe, a smoking pipe traditionally used by some Xhosa women. The backdrops were custom-designed by Magugu. Yet the campaign’s most compelling ‘objects’ are its two muses.
During the shoot, Dana and Tunzi, for the first time, discussed their shared and differing histories. Dana recalled that, in a small town with little to do, she and her peers entered beauty pageants for entertainment: a detail that creates an unexpected connection to Tunzi’s own journey.
Tunzi observed how common it was to find Xhosa people moving, and in many ways, both women embody this idea. They have travelled across South Africa and the world, creating entirely different lives from the same small town.
Dana is one of South African music’s great success stories. Beginning her career in the 1990s, she built a distinctive body of work against considerable odds, including being one of the only Black women in her university classes. She has consistently sung in isiXhosa and drawn from her upbringing in the then-Transkei, maintaining a public presentation that has always been African-first. Long before contemporary conversations about authenticity became fashionable, Dana demonstrated that cultural specificity was not a barrier to success but could be its foundation.
Tunzi, meanwhile, became the first Miss South Africa to win in her natural hair and carried a similarly unapologetic sense of Blackness and African identity onto the global Miss Universe stage.
Both women come from Tsolo. Both are Xhosa women. Yet neither can be reduced to that shared identity. They have distinct careers, audiences, and legacies.
That tension between unity and diversity is also at the centre of the Tsolo Dress.
South African ethnohistories are, to say the very least, a complex terrain. We sometimes speak broadly of communities according to shared languages, but centuries of settler-colonial and apartheid classification frequently compressed diverse dialects, clans and subgroups into more easily categorised ethnic or political entities. What is broadly understood as ‘Xhosa’ is the culmination of diverse groups and transformations that might be better understood through the nuances of what is/was Mpondo, Thembu, Mfengu, Bhaca and so on.
At the same time, these broader identities were also strategically appropriated and developed by people themselves. Shared symbols such as umbhaco and beadwork could allow communities to identify one another, find solidarity, and visually communicate their connectedness during periods that demanded separation and isolation.
Tsolo itself is no stranger to this disruption, such as apartheid-era afforestation projects around places such as Gqogqora that sought to replace and limit indigenous landscapes and local access to land with exotic tree plantations. There’s a parallel there, wherein replacing both indigenous people and flora with alien elements reorganises both land and people to an external ideology. But just like with Xhosa fashion history, the residents of Tsolo were not passive bystanders. They fought back and worked towards better alternatives.
Magugu has always approached fashion as an intellectual tradition: a way to document, communicate and negotiate these South African histories. Here, Dana and Tunzi provide a precise geographical and emotional anchor: not the Eastern Cape, not simply ‘Xhosa heritage,’ but Tsolo.
Intimate Cartographies asks us to understand that specificity and expansiveness are not opposites. A small town can be the breeding ground for international stardom. A dress can contain a history of indigenous materials, colonial trade, missionary influence, photography, and contemporary design at once. Everything carries meaning, and all meaning is enhanced by its change and movement. Heritage does not stand still; it travels.
