It’s a strange sight. A warehouse stacked to the roof with African art on the side of Jan Smuts Avenue, the busy road in Johannesburg, South Africa. Looking slightly out of place, in a checked black and white top with matching skirt, is entrepreneur Lara Tatley, the owner of this warehouse, togu’na.
“togu’na is the name of the meeting house found in the centre of every Dogon village in Mali. It’s a low ceiling building where the village elders sit to make decisions about village life. We chose the name because we liked the idea of a meeting house, the idea of connecting people from around the world with crafters from Africa,” says Tatley. Born in Bloemfontein but raised in Johannesburg, Tatley spent 10 years traveling the remote villages of Africa to negotiate with crafters for eyecatching bowls, calabashes and masks. It’s proved a good, offbeat business. So much so she featured in the GIBS/Goldman-Sachs 10,000 Women program for Women Entrepreneurs.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30012 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/IMG_9401-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_9401-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_9401-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_9401-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_9401-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_9401.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
Her first taste of art was on a school field trip to a bronze casting studio just outside of Pretoria.
“I remember walking in there and seeing all these mystical forms encased in the casting; the furnaces and all the old moulds in the roof. The foundry is pretty dark because it needs to get hot inside. I remember the rays of light coming in off the dust. It was such a powerful field trip.
“I always wanted to make things and I used to get very frustrated when I tried to make the things the same way the adults made them. One of the barriers in my way to being an artist was that the idea of what I wanted to make and the reality of what I made were far apart from each other.”
From Australia to New York, her pieces end up in the foyers of the best hotels and as decor in powerful boardrooms.
“I always wanted to run my own business. I studied Fine Arts at university but didn’t really feel like I could be a sculptor…I wanted to do something with handmade craft art. It is something inspirational to me and I wanted that to combine with traveling the world. I was fortunate to start with a very small business that grew into a sizable business.”
It’s difficult to say how much the African art industry is worth, says Tatley. There is very little marketing research and most crafters in remote villages don’t keep records.
“Our inventory alone you would be looking at a couple of millions, excluding assets. It is difficult to assign a value because we invest a lot of capital with crafters so they can afford to make pieces,” she says.
Dealing in African art is more than just getting goods from maker to mantel piece, says Tately. It’s a risky and unpredictable job.
“African craft is not your typical retail outlet. Stock comes in from the far corners of Africa; really rural areas and collected along many channels to get to this place. People can only collect in areas where there is no conflict. It’s very seasonal; if it’s rainy season, those rural areas where the goods are produced it’s too difficult to get to them; if its harvest season, the women are harvesting and they can’t be weaving. If there is a drought there is often an influx of things as people come into the cities to try sell their goods. There is a very long caravan until it gets to this point,” says Tatley.
Customs can also hamstring business. Delays are like mosquitoes on the Serengeti, and just as irritating. Last year, a container in Cameroon was frozen in port for four months because of a backlog. In those four months, the pieces risk being ruined by mould, amid the humid docks.
“Luckily the wood was dry. It still needed to go through South Africa customs. The turnaround time for that container was over a year.”
Another unfortunate incident at a customs office in Cameroon almost ended in Tatley’s husband, Duncan, being arrested for ‘illegally smuggling’ art out the country. Since then the couple travel with a blue hard suitcase, and if the goods don’t fit in it, they freight it.
“The process of Africa customs is just so corrupt. In Africa, no one knows what the rules are. You could get an argumentative customs official like we had…People rely on going backwards and forwards and paying bribes. Even if there is a permit there is no guarantee it won’t be confiscated. It’s all kind of a backdoor process.”
Exporting is a problem. The United States demand wood to be catalogued before coming into the country; a next to impossible task when villagers can’t name the wood they use.
The wobbling South African currency makes matters worse. Often the fluctuating exchange rate means the business loses out.
The risk is part of the allure.
“In African art, forms and shapes are reproduced within societies. The crafters’ names aren’t attached to those pieces. The shape of the piece belongs to the whole society. But you can see when a shape has been made by somebody’s skilled hands,” says Tatley.
“In Africa, typically one guy would be in charge of a few people who would go into the forest then buy a tree from a family; cut down the tree; carve the majority of the piece in the forest because the wood is so heavy and the forest is dense you can’t move it out. The cost of labor in Africa is relatively high compared to the productivity…It probably comes down to efficiency and transport. We still get things that come from villages that you can only get to via a footpath. They are very remote and the only way they can get transported is on a cart with an ox, to a place where a truck or a taxi can move it.”
Then there is the haggle.
“If you have no intention to buy don’t even say ‘how much is this?’ If you do, it’s an indication that the games have begun. It’s a cultural thing throughout Africa. To say a price that is usually too low for a person to contemplate and then walk away is a very disrespectful way of negotiating.”
The uniqueness about the products is that they do all have a story.
“None of them were made for decorative purposes. Artefacts, by the nature of being an artefact, were made for a reason to fulfil a need in the community that they were originally produced in. They’ve had one lifetime of use in that community and then get changed and adapted in this one.”
Not all African art is equal. Crafters can be crafty when it comes to forgeries and will mass-produce work for tourists, cautions Tatley. To many, an original versus a fake may not mean much, but to the true collector, that story behind the piece is as interesting as the piece itself.
“If you compare prices today to 15 years ago, there is not much difference. The prices haven’t risen. Primarily this is because of an influx of African rooftop markets where the goods are not the best quality,” says Tatley.
If it’s for the love of art, Tatley will risk customs officials to travel Africa and drive a bargain in the middle of nowhere.

IMG_9466

The Story of African Art

Picture yourself living in early 19th century Africa. What would you be clad in? Most likely an outfit made of traditional cloth, perhaps Kuba cloth.
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“We have one of the most beautiful art forms in Africa,” says Crown Prince Kwete Kwete.
Prince Kwete is the son of the 125th king of the Bakuba Kingdom, King Kot Mbueki III. Textiles from Africa are said to be one of the most important gifts to the world of art. The Kuba cloth is associated with royalty and has inspired great artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Matisse’s appliquéd techniques were influenced by the Kuba cloth displayed in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Kuba cloth originated with King Shamba Bolongongo and his son, Shaamweky. From the 16th century, the Kuba people have dressed themselves in Kuba cloth, wrapping it around their waists like a skirt. The cloth is made of raffia from the palm tree. The raffia is picked and dried, softened and woven into different lengths and sizes. The process can take three to four weeks or up to a year.
“Textiles are a sign of wealth for us and every king has a cloth that he wears during ceremonies. When a member of the royal family dies, women from the kingdom wear a certain color cloth for six months. Designs are symbolic and used for particular ceremonies,” says Prince Kwete.
When a king dies, his wives wear special red cloth with subtle patterns in velvet on the borders and openwork embroidery in the middle. Specially designed weavings made of leopard skin and shells are reserved for the king, his wives, the royal court and dancers.
The Kuba cloth is made by the people of the Bakuba Kingdom in the Democratic Republic of Congo—formerly Zaire. But it is the Shoowa, a small sub-tribe of the Bakuba who are renowned for making intricate textiles from the palm fiber creating a tuft pile-like effect using the clipped raffia threads. Weaving intricate geometrical designs can take up to a year.
Some of the designs are on display in museums around the world and have been studied by scholars like George Meurant of Belgium. The beauty and complexity of the Kuba cloth has only recently been appreciated at a time when the most elegant designs are disappearing. European collectors of African textiles started amassing collections of embroidered cut-pile textiles towards the end of the 19th century. These pieces often fetch millions of dollars at auctions. Most collectors are private individuals in America, Britain, France and Poland.
Kuba cloth is on the brink of being lost; Prince Kwete is trying to preserve it with the help of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
“The Kuba cloth is displayed in leading museums, but people do not know where the Bakuba Kingdom is located. Kuba is still existent and we are a population of approximately half a million people including immigrants. Congo is bigger than Eastern Europe and Kuba land is three times the size of Belgium,” he says.
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Together with his father, Prince Kwete is working with the central government of Congo to reach out to other Africans through culture.
“DRC is known for war, but there are attractive investment opportunities in the country.”
King Kot Mbueki III is the first king of Bakuba to have travelled to Kinshasa and Europe.
“He ‘broke away’ from the kingdom by preserving tradition,” says Price Kwete who describes the Bakuba Kingdom as democratic.
“The king is there to reign and not to rule. We have managed to maintain our culture and art because each tribe is represented in the king’s court. When selecting a chief of a village, the people of a village have to go to the king and suggest someone. My father then honors the people’s wish by appointing the suggested person. This goes back nine centuries.”
According to Kenyan fashion model Emma Too, the Kuba cloth is one of the most valuable African textiles together with the Ashanti and Kente from West Africa. American fashion designer Ralph Lauren is known to have made several designs using the Kuba cloth and supermodel Iman wore Kuba designs when she modelled for Africa Heritage. The cloth is also used to decorate homes. Because of its growing demand, the market has been flooded by fake cloth.
“You can tell an original Kuba cloth by how it has been sewn, designed and the quality. If you compare a genuine and fake cloth, the quality of material is world’s apart,” says Prince Kwete.
The people of the Bakuba Kingdom use the cloth as a source of income to support their families through school.
“Since our main source of income was farming and that can barely sustain families, you find people selling their valuable pieces,” says Prince Kwete, who regularly organizes auctions to arrange money for projects in the kingdom.
The price of the Kuba cloth depends on the year it was made, how long it took to make, the design and history of the piece. There is a museum in Mshenge—the capital of Bakuba—which is used by the royal family to display valuable pieces.
“Once any society in Africa loses its identity and adopts a new one, your culture disappears,” says Prince Kwete.

The Cloth Of Kings—For Sale

Forty-six-year-old Dean Simon is a simple man. Wearing a printed t-shirt, jeans and black shoes, his house appears as normal as any family home. Well, at least until you turn into the dining area and see three giant Wurlitzer jukeboxes shining brightly at you in their green, red and yellow colours. If you take a closer look inside, you’ll see stacks of vinyl loaded with songs dating back to the blues of the 1950s. You can pick a track, push a button and watch as the selected record slides out and the needle glides on top, playing the tune, indeed a rare sight these days.
<div id="attachment_478" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-478" class="wp-image-478 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/317-6_1-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Artist Dean Simon at his home in Johannesburg; 19 January 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff</div>
For an artist who has sold out his work before the opening of an exhibition and has clients in Africa, the Middle East and the United States, Simon shies away from the limelight. He has no website, no Twitter account or Facebook page. He says he tries his best not to associate himself with projects that require hype or media attention.
“Stay under the radar and let your work speak for itself,” he says.
Simon has done this so well that even those in the Johannesburg art world claim not to know him.
His work is confusing; one of his works on Mandela has hung for years, without drawing much comment, on the walls of the plush Saxon Boutique Hotel in Johannesburg.
By contrast, another of his works on Mandela drew fire from the media and art world. The work for a private client, called The Last Supper, depicts Mandela in the place of Jesus, with Ghandi to his right and Martin Luther King Junior to his left.
“It’s always been word of mouth and low key. I find that it is more peaceful not to stick your head out,” he says.
“The gallery scene is based on hype and ego and I’m not interested. By the time you are done with a gallery, they have taken a chunk of your salary. People come to me to buy my work.”
This explains why most of Simon’s clients are private collectors, so most of his best work is kept away from public eyes.
“It’s a double-edged sword, though, because collectors keep their stuff private, but for me it is about building a reputation with the people who are going to buy my stuff.”
Would that explain, to an extent, why he may not be a household name in his own country? Whether it does or not, Simon’s work has managed to land him an exhibition in a museum in Los Angeles in April. It is called From Hurt to Hope, a series of works he had initially compiled into a calendar. It is now to be exhibited at the Museum of Tolerance, a museum aimed at educating people about inequality and injustice.
“My theme is people who had a bad upbringing or hard backgrounds but despite that, not getting bitter, but becoming icons. It’s also based on racism; if these people had been murdered or assassinated, the world wouldn’t be the same,” says Simon.
The aim is to educate the world about people who are not necessarily famous, but who have had an impact on the way the world is today—people such as holocaust survivor Felix Zandman.
“He survived the war; he lived underground for 17 months with his uncle, who taught him maths to keep him from going mad. It’s not stuff people know about.”
Two of his subjects are genocide survivors.
The first is Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who survived the holocaust. He coined the term genocide (derived from the Greek word genos; meaning tribe or race, and the Latin word cide; meaning killing) in order to make such mass killings a crime against humanity. Lemkin died in 1959, aged 59.
Another of Simon’s subjects is Rwandan genocide survivor, Imaculee IIibagiza. Her entire family was wiped out during the war by the time she was 23, while she hid crammed in a church bathroom for 91 days. Since then, she has spread the message of reconciliation and forgiveness among victims and perpetrators, working for the United Nations, writing books and speaking on public platforms.
<div id="attachment_480" style="width: 221px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-480" class="wp-image-480 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Army-camo-Dean-Simon-211x300.jpg" alt="" width="211" height="300" />Camouflage</div>
“Had they been terminated, the world wouldn’t be the same. The exhibition says these people came from nothing and did something selfless that changed the world,” says Simon.
The amount of research and preparation for each work is crucial; the small details can make or break an image.
Talent without preparation is wasted, according to Simon; just doing research on a piece can take him anything from three to four months, excluding the actual time spent drawing. That, on its own, can take a month or more, with 13- to 16-hour days spent working on completing the image.
“You have to make sure the detail is really accurate; it’s like starting a jigsaw puzzle [in your head]. The work is very tiring, though.”
His arched back tells the tale of his labors on the floor of his office.
“I wish I had a more conventional mind, it would make life easier.”
Simon realised during his years at the School of Art and Design in Johannesburg that he could visualise three-dimensionality. Soon after graduating from school, he was conscripted into the army, as were most young white males in pre-democratic South Africa. This is where he realised he could make a comfortable living off his talent.
While being your own boss is something most people aspire to, he admits that it does not come easily.
“Working for yourself involves long hours because if you’re disciplined, it means you never take time off. You work seven days a week. My work starts at three in the morning and never ends before eight or eight thirty in the evening.”
The private client who commissioned him to do The Last Supper (and requested to remain anonymous) says he chose Simon after seeing his work in the Saxon. The original copy received a $2 million offer from a banker.
“Dean is very passionate. It’s what makes him different; he changes his topics. He always does all his work on topics he believes in. He’s a good man, but people were like, ‘How could he have done that?’ [But] when Madiba saw it for the first time, he said, ‘What a brilliant idea’, that it was important for people to learn about these people [in the picture].”
The message behind Simon’s most controversial piece to date was to highlight the good that has come out of Africa, and not to dwell on the ‘dark continent’ stereotype.
“The Last Supper was solely for the client, no one was meant to see it except [them]. We wanted to make a statement about Africa; the people [in it] represent tolerance and principles of peace. There are people in that drawing whom I don’t like. It is not about my own personal feelings, it’s about ideals, it was not meant to be blasphemous. I’m not making any apologies for it.”
<div id="attachment_481" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-481" class="size-large wp-image-481" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Final-RW-1024x696.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="322" />Imaculee Rwanda Lady</div>
His latest project, he says, is set to cause even more controversy than The Last Supper.
“I’m not looking forward to it. Next lifetime I’m coming back as an accountant.”
Surely, most people will look forward to it.

Tag: Craft

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