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Dress is a powerful means of communication that makes statements about the gender role of an individual from birth. The concept of clothing as a principal vehicle of social and personal information presupposes a common level of understanding among the audience to whom the communication is intended. It makes dramatic statements about social categories and changes from one social category to another as regulated by place, occasion, age, status, as well as values that reflect the social hierarchy of a community. It is in light of this perceived capacity for dress to `speak' — or what has been termed the `pregnant' nature of dress — that Justine Cordwell and Ronald Schwartz urge readers to learn to read and grasp dress as `signs in the same way we learn to read and understand language', that they might more fully comprehend the complexities of cultural representation (1).

This essay attempts to place the contemporary dress of the Zulu female into a socio-political framework, and critiques the fact that despite radical social and political transformations, which are documented in the changing mode of male dress, some of the present conventions of female dress remain unchanged since the eighteenth century and thus fix women within certain `traditional' roles. The focus of the article is mainly limited to the rural Ndwedwe district — a Durban Municipality area of KwaZulu-Natal, where, unlike fifty years ago, traditional Zulu dress is largely worn during weekends and at ceremonies and festivals. Reference to Zulu dress in this article should be understood in this context.

Dress in the Zulu society traditionally varies according to one's age. From infancy to old age, there is a variety of dress items that the individual wears successively. The Ndwedwe society, like most rural traditional societies, has a tendency to concretise abstract concepts, a thinking which gives dress a strong symbolic value as pertains to the great milestones in the life cycle of a people. This symbolisation produces different kinds of dress, which are seen as outer signs for the stages of life through which a Zulu female passes and of her connection at each stage with her community.

The Conceptualisation of Zulu Traditional Female Dress in the Post-Apartheid Era