Most of my twelve teabag art quilts hold their shape. They are colourwash impressions — warm, pixelated, luminous when backlit. But November is different.
It is dark. Storm-coloured. A brewing sky, heavy with what is coming or what has already come. November: Lweti: When It Rains is unravelling at its base. The teabag squares at the bottom of the quilt appear to be loosening, dropping away, falling — an echo of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Nonetheless, I put mut my trust in fine rainbow-coloured threads to tenderly hold it all together.
November: Lweti
The crickets chirp most loudly during this time, signalling the time for the little iNcwala, a time of traditional purification.
The work is based on the trauma that the death of loved ones causes in life. November will always be the month when I remember the grief caused by my father’s death in a fatal car accident. Years heal, but I never forget.
This quilt, and my November 2025 exhibtion at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, is dedicated to the Fikile Gladys Shongwe — 13 March 1979 to 29 October 2023.
Fikile was due to begin working in the art department at Waterford Kamhlaba just days after she was killed. She never arrived. On a Saturday evening in late October, she and three of her family members were shot dead in a horrific act of gender-based violence.
I learned what had happened through Nomsa “Deli” Mkhonto, who works in the WK staffroom and who, for years, has been one of the quiet, generous people collecting teabags for me. Deli’s relatives. Four of them. Gone.
I asked Deli if she would allow me to make a commemorative quilt to honour them, to say their names, to not let what happened dissolve into the noise of a news cycle and then be forgotten. She said yes.
Throughout November 2023, the Times of Eswatini pieced together the story of the killings, edition by edition. I collected those clippings and inserted fragments of the articles into the teabags themselves, so that the words became part of the fabric of the quilt. They are faintly visible beneath the surface, somewhat veiled, the way news always is — glimpsed, partial, never the full picture of what a life was or what a loss means.
GBV is not a distant or occasional tragedy in Eswatini. It is a constant, grinding reality. Fikile was not an exception. She was yet another victim of senseless GBV. And I will keep keep that quiet as much as the crickets in November.