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"  This week&amp;#039;s T&amp;amp;amp;C Family Album finds Iman inside a traditional painted house of the Ndebele of South Africa. For the January 1992 issue, the Somali model, who would marry the singer David Bowie in Lausannejust a few months later, packed Natori dresses, Ciro jewelry, and Whithall &amp;amp;amp; Shon headpieces and headed to the village of Mabhokho, north of Durban, where she traded anecdotes with the Ndebele women, observed their craft, marveled at their decorative murals, and even had her body painted. When two women, Franzina Ndimande and her daughter Angelina, expressed amazement at her high fashion ensembles, Iman explained, &amp;quot;Well, you paint murals and that&amp;#039;s your work. This is mine. I wear clothes and people take my picture. But please, tell me why you paint these houses.&amp;quot; To which Franzina replied, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s cultural. Mothers teach daughters. Traditionally we have been a polygamous society, and this style of painting has been both a form of tribal identification and a way to distinguish which house belonged to which wife. You see, each woman has a distinctive style of painting, so by looking at the designs and the colors, anybody passing by would know who lived where.&amp;quot; Although the Ndebele had been in South Africa for more than a millennium, with so many fleeing to the cities for work, the tradition of painting houses was vanishing. The trip was designed to bring awareness to this endangered traditional art and Iman, at the urging of the photographer Margaret Courtney-Clarke, became the unofficial spokesperson for the campaign. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a1038/iman/>