The differences between rural Zululand and Paris are worlds greater than the 13,000km that separate them. But they’ve just been bridged in the most unlikely way.
A bench partly made by weavers in the village of Hlabisa — birthplace of Zulu monarch King Misuzulu — has been added to the collection at the French capital’s Centre Pompidou.
Europe’s largest modern art museum is the latest customer for an object designed by a young Zulu woman, Thabisa Mjo, and finished with a backrest woven from ilala palm leaves harvested in Hlabisa.
“It’s really kind of extraordinary for us,” says Stephen Wilson, whose Joburg furniture company, Houtlander, manufactures the bench from white oak harvested on the US east coast.
Wilson and co-founder Phillip Hollander don’t know for sure how the friends of the Centre Pompidou, who donated the Hlabisa bench, came across it but he suspects they saw the prototype at an exhibition in Paris in 2019.
“And there’s probably quite a lot of pressure on these institutions worldwide to reflect a little bit more of Africa in their collections,” he says.
“That’s certainly true of the fine art world, and it’s been driving prices of South African art through the roof because the institutions realised they don’t have a lot of original African art in their collections.”
The other trend he acknowledges is the elevation of traditional weaving from craft to the realms of art and design, and for that he pays tribute to the third key collaborator in the story of the Hlabisa bench, Beauty Ngxongo, 69, whose baskets have long enjoyed international acclaim.
The composition of the backrest was the big unknown after Mjo, owner and founder of Mash.T Design Studio in Joburg, took inspiration for the bench from the rolling hills of Zululand.
We’re trying to build a level of respect for design so that innovation is encouraged and there’s recognition for creativity
— Stephen Wilson
It was Cathy O’Clery, curator of 100% Design South Africa, who suggested Zulu weaving, and Mjo realised she had met Ngxongo’s granddaughter Sinegugu Mchunu. Wilson says: “I called her and said: ‘I’ve got this thing I’d like to try and I’m not really going to take no for an answer. I’m just going to drive to you and see if you can do something with it.’
“I met Beauty and she immediately got to work trying to figure out if this was something we could actually do.”
By the end of the day Ngxongo agreed to take on the job, but there was an immediate problem. “The gaps between the dowels the weaving is attached to were too narrow for a hand to go through,” says Wilson. “The needle had to be passed backward and forward between women on each side of the bench.”
Ngxongo set to work with up to six other weavers, but when she had to attend an overseas exhibition of her work she left the job in the hands of women unfamiliar with her pattern. And time was running out if the bench was to make it to the Révélations fine craft and creation biennial at the Grand Palais in Paris.
“What happened was you had this incredibly high-quality weaving to a point, and above that it started getting a little bit wonky,” says Wilson. “We seriously contemplated whether we were actually going to show this in Paris. Révélations is a collection of the world’s best craftspeople, so it’s quite something to show there and we didn’t want to embarrass ourselves.
“In the end, we decided that this was going to be part of the story, part of the charm. This was an experiment and it was actually a beautiful thing.”
After the show, the bench was bought by a member of the family that runs luxury design house Hermès. “They were happy to take it as is, and I think they understood the intention behind it,” says Wilson.
“Right from there, we decided to take the risk of making more, and it’s one of those that the Centre Pompidou has bought.” The museum website describes it as a “three-seater bench in natural fibres woven by hand by the master artisans of KwaZulu-Natal (Zulu basketry)”.
Others — three-, four- and five-seaters — have found homes around the world, but the scale of the bench means it will never go into mass production. It sparked a workshop with the weavers in Joburg though, and a chair with a woven backrest that emerged from that discussion is changing lives in Hlabisa.
Commercial viability
“Last year we sold 100 of them to a hotel, which was kind of an enormous project,” says Wilson. “The upshot is we now have something like 30 people in Hlabisa who are learning the craft of weaving. And there’s a sense that there’s some commercial viability to it.
“We feel like we’ve accomplished quite a lot in terms of the community having some income, and the beauty of it is that it’s a cottage industry. The work is basically completed by women in their homes while they’re looking after their children, their livestock and their smallholdings.
“The income from it is really good for them, and what’s encouraging is every time we go back to this community, we see this money being put to work. They’re extending their buildings, improving the quality of life. Often the first thing you see going up is a satellite dish.
“Part of our thinking over this process was to try to turn this into a project that would benefit the community economically, and find a path to keeping the craft alive and this way of working alive. The feeling is that we’re building something that’s sustainable, which we’re very proud of.”
Wilson has started paying women royalties on patterns, even if the weaving is done by someone else. “It’s a way of encouraging the more creative and outstanding weavers to come up with their own patterns that we can then market. We’re trying to build a level of respect for design so that innovation is encouraged and there’s recognition for creativity.”
France-born, Joburg-based curator Sophie Ferrand-Hazard, who unwittingly started the Hlabisa journey when she was asked to put together a Révélations stand representing South Africa, has added woven trays and tables to her Art of Connection range.
Mjo has a Hlabisa side table in her Mash.T range and though it’s not cheap at R6,325, she says it’s attracted a lot of interest from customers who are “starting to understand that the technique and the design of the weavers are incredible”.
Even Mjo’s mother, who grew up in Zululand and remembers picking ilala palms as a child for the weavers in her community, is surprised by the change in perception wrought by the Hlabisa bench. “She cannot believe that these things are now so valuable and desirable.”
Ngxongo, whose baskets fetch high prices around the world, says the bench has broadened her horizons by helping her merge a traditional skill with the advanced CNC technology Houtlander uses.
“I wish that I had learnt this before,” she told TLmagazine. “I would have diversified my craft and done many other things. But now all of the women whom I trained and worked with while making this furniture piece have gained a new perspective on just how diverse and special our craft is.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.