Siyazama Project

This project supports women's creation of beadwork and beaded dolls as a means to communicate about issues relating to the AIDS pandemic. The Siyazama Project uses design/arts education to transfer HIV/AIDS awareness to rural women through workshops in which women fuse alliances with cultural affirmation, indigenous knowledge systems and products, and economic empowerment - thus, organisers say, creating social transformation.

The Siyazama project workshops, held at DIT's City Campus, involve thematically based HIV/AIDS information exchange as well as creative design innovation programming in which messages are imparted on a broad range of issues affecting rural women. Women who attend the workshops interact with doctors and other professionals with knowledge about HIV/AIDS and preventative measures. These personnel provide them with information concerning nutrition, home-based care, and treatment. In this way, Siyazama seeks to build HIV/AIDS awareness by engendering a "breaking of the silence" and "straight talk" approach.

The women respond and "talk back" through the making of beaded cloth dolls and tableaus. "The workshops are lively and colourful events. Students and staff from Graphic Design often come and join in the workshops, offering encouragement and advice." The artworks that result display complexities in gender issues, traditional practices, and cultural conceptions and how they all affect the AIDS pandemic.

The Siyazama Project seeks to promote the pivotal role of design to affirm indigenous knowledge and skills as a means to disseminate information about HIV/AIDS among even the most rural South African women. The idea is that, though the sessions are aimed at a small group of doll makers, the women will go on to spread knowledge about HIV/AIDS prevention and care to larger groups. Since 2003, when the women began discussing antiretroviral (ARV) drug therapy, they have been creating beaded ARV "reminders" and bracelets to stimulate people to adhere to their treatment.

HIV/AIDS, Gender, Women.

Head of the project Kate Wells explains that, for the majority of these craftswomen, participation in the Siyazama Project workshops has provided them with their first opportunity to learn about AIDS and its complexities, other than via gossip and rumour. Even when they are thus informed, socio-economic barriers, a lack of formal schooling, and cultural taboos related to the discussion of sexual matters can render them silent and disempowered, unless they can find an alternative and permissible mode of expression. "In the beginning it wasn't easy to get the women to listen. There was lots of giggling during the sessions, and when the women started to spread the information in their homes some were beaten up by their husbands." But she found that, a few months after the project's start, the women began to gain the respect of their communities.