The Moravian mission hamlet of Elim in the Overberg is an open-air museum of tiny, thatched cottages built two centuries ago — and the epicentre of Southern Africa’s thatching skills.
Now the village is sending its sons to ply their ancient trade, handed down over the generations since the founding of Elim in 1824, in far-flung lands from the Caribbean to Europe and the Middle East.
“Our guys work all over the world,” André van Heerden, MD of Cape Reed International, tells the FM from Dubai. The company registered in the UAE in 2005 and has sister companies in Spain and Saudi Arabia.
“We have done projects in Nigeria, the Caribbean, the Maldives, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Bahrain. Our thatchers are still 100% South Africans, mostly Cape coloured guys whom we bring in. We have about 50 of the guys at the moment, they form the core skill set.”
One of the teams is in Djibouti. “We work exclusively for the president of Djibouti [Ismaïl Omar Guelleh] on his private island projects.” Other contracts range from backyard lapas to exclusive resorts and huge theme parks whose developers want an African aesthetic, such as Sharjah Safari Park (30,000m² of thatch) and Pairi Daiza in Belgium (2,500m²).
“In our heyday, pre the 2008 crash, we were doing up to 30 lapas a month,” Van Heerden says. “It was very much a residential niche, lots of European and British expats who were familiar with thatch and liked the idea of a lapa or a themed back garden, ‘tiki huts’ as the Americans say.”
Last year turnover in the Middle East for Cape Reed was about 55m dirham (R255m) and in Europe €1m. The war in the region has not disrupted the company’s operations, Van Heerden says, but the future business climate is uncertain.
If you’re a young single man who’s trying ‘to work your way up to becoming a small millionaire’, it’s a worthwhile career move
— Digan Newman
Former Cape Reed thatcher Digan Newman, 40, spent six years in Dubai and a month in Spain before returning home to Elim in 2018.
Sitting in the sun outside his thatched, white-washed cottage, one of the first built in the hamlet, he tells the FM that in Dubai “we work six days a week, we only get one day off, Friday. You have to work hard to make money.”
It’s not a life for a family man like him, he says. “You lose a lot of your married life, other people raise your children, your children become strangers, they don’t respect you when you come back, they forget what it is to have a father, they just live with a mother. Other men try to take over, insinuate themselves onto your path.”
But if you’re a young single man who’s trying “to work your way up to becoming a small millionaire”, it’s a worthwhile career move.
Van Heerden acknowledges the problem. “It’s not an easy business model when you have guys working away from home, keeping up productivity and general psychological wellbeing.” Employees get a month’s leave, and the company pays for two flights home a year.
One of the first local companies to introduce South African thatching to the Middle East was JNA Group, based in Cape Town, which was active in the region in the 2000s. But now it stays closer to home, says company director Ritz de la Bat. “The logistics of working overseas are kind of a headache. It’s a different ballgame working overseas, especially for the Saudis.”
Logistics challenges include shipping all the thatching material — a fynbos reed that grows along the coast in the Riversdale-Albertinia region — from South Africa to wherever it is needed. “You have to fumigate the stuff,” says Jasper Venter, head of client liaison at JNA.
Last year Cape Reed shipped the equivalent of about 100 40ft containers of thatching material overseas, says Van Heerden. This included thatching “tiles” that are made in a factory in Riversdale.
“Sustainability is a big thing here, so you have to make sure the raw material is FSC [Forest Stewardship Council] certified,” he says. “It’s not easy.”
Venter says all JNA’s thatchers are from the Elim area — up to four out of five men in the village of about 2,000 people are thatchers. “As long as we’ve existed, our thatchers have come from that area.” Some of the company’s artisans are the sons of men who were working for it 40 years ago.
But, Venter says, the generation now of school-leaving age is not that interested in a labour-intensive career such as thatching, and there is a danger the skills pool will shrink.
Newman disagrees. “We are the thatching artists. I learnt from my pa and my stepfather. The trade is going on. The youth must carry on with it. It’s our roots, it won’t just die out.”
