The Making of Dolls and Figurative Clay Sculpture among Black Indigenous People of South Africa.

Among African cultures, the creative process is regarded as the most important because it is usually done jointly as a culturally shared communal activity. For Africans, art is normally functional and the artifacts carry more meaning when they are in use. This paper focuses on the communal making of art, rather than just the aesthetic appreciation of artifacts, in an effort to highlight this activity as an important social phenomenon among African people. The paper presents the author's own experience of making and playing with these artifacts, followed by an analysis of the interpretation of this process by other authors. It concludes with some speculations about the cultural, personal, and educational effects of the loss of this cultural activity among the present generation of the Nguni young people to which the author belongs. (BT)