> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Reference:: https://garlandmag.com/craft-in-africa/ > Date:: 2025-10-21 > Tags:: #Africa #warp/talk > WeftLinks:: [[Reinventing the Wheel]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > A conversation of different African craft voices identified key differences as being the indigenous-colonial and female-male differences. ### Highlights <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-1dZlFPVOpo?si=vK5iANLpC0yUMOWe" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> A number of people involved in the crafts from across Africa came to share their views about the value of craft in their country. [[Hamza El Fasiki]] spoke about the lack of consciousness of craft among the older generation of Moroccan artisans, who are only concerns with their specific skill and material. Their identity is represented by individual guilds. General talk about "craft" for them is irrelevant. **Azzouz Boujamid** also from Morocco gave a contrasting perspective about the intangible cultural heritage of the country's crafts. This was a formalised list of crafts recognised for their national significance. **Ganiyat Sani** spoke about the way crafts help Nigerians "push through against the hyper-globalization that's happening in the world". For crafts for "technologies of knowledge preservation", as "living archives", which resists the negativity often found in Nigeria. As a "foundation of civilisation", craft helps restore the connection to ancestors. Zingha Foma found that crafts in Ghana provided a "generational way of making". She compared it to a DNA. She was particularly interested in the highly localised kinds of tie-and-dye found in different parts of Ghana. **Monica Monaia** questioned why there were so few black ceramicists in South Africa. She attributed this to the legacy of apartheid, which replicated the art/craft hierarchy of the Renaissance on to the white/black racial division. Meanwhile, craft continues to be a "space of cultural continuity", especially in rural areas and among women. Ceramics in particular continues to be a vehicle for expression identity and Africanness. But it should be noted that that mixed race populations are important in South Africa, which have their own hybrid culture. **Mohammad El Hamid** from Timbuktu in Mali spoke about the importance of jewellery for the Tuareg people. This gives them a platform to represent their culture on different international stages, such as a recent event in Japan. **Hassenan Mohamedou** spoke about the unique perspective of Angolans as a lusophone culture that experienced a Portuguese colonisation that "kill much of our culture". She worked with communities in eastern Angola who had experienced civil war as well as colonialism. >This created a type of **amnesia**. And this amnesia made them **forget their handmade product** and the importance of it, their **importance of their culture**. And we are speaking of people that **don't speak Portuguese**, that don't have access to television or a radio or internet or a cell phone because we don't have any type of connection there. So what is very sad. Hassenan spoke about the renewed sense of pride in this community when they started making baskets again, especially among the women, who gained a voice that they previously had lost. She concluded "our hands have memories." Emmanuel Solate spoke about an incident in his university when documentation was presented of a craftsperson without their knowledge. The maker was actually in the audience and contested this saying, "I didn't do this as a sculpture, I did it as a sketch." He also mentioned the women are poorly represented with talking about the crafts. Ganiyat added that "women are custodians of culture." Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba spoke about the Niger Delta as a region where women are strongly represented. Finally, Wale Ogunyale make the point that the colonial experience did make some contributions to craft. He mentioned the introduction of the broadloom in *asooke* weaving among the Yoruba. This discussion was a fruitful start to the process of understanding the complexities of African craft. The key divisions were indigenous/colonial and female/male. ### Background The Knowledge House for Craft is a place for appreciating the diversity of meanings and values attached to what we make by hand. This diversity enriches our understanding by situating craft in different contexts and cultures. The case of Africa is particularly important because of the “scramble for Africa” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when European nations drew borders across the continent to expand their empires. Art and craft played a role in this process of knowledge capture, led by anthropologists and ethnographers who presumed that Africa was a continent without history, fixed in time. Artefacts were treated as static cultural objects, housed in European museums, and studied in academic papers. Tourists—whether colonial officials, settlers, or collectors—also acquired crafts as curios. Curators often embraced primitivism, seeing African cultures as earlier, purer stages of humanity. Overall, craft was framed as evidence of a passive, unchanging culture onto which Europe and modernity would impose progress. Today, many see craft as a constraint. Art, by contrast, is considered more powerful: it gives voice to the practitioner, affirms individuality, and provides opportunities for exhibitions and sales that can be more lucrative. For this reason, many advocates encourage African makers to pursue the path of the artist, creating unique works for galleries and museums. But this view is not without criticism. Some argue that it reflects a developmentalist mindset—the idea that all cultures must follow a common path of economic and cultural formalization, aligned with Western models promoted by institutions such as the World Bank. This perspective positions the “developed” West (the minority world) as the standard, and the global South (the majority world) as “developing” or “backward.” As a counterpoint, there has been an indigenous revival that reclaims what was once dismissed as inferior or static forms of culture—such as adornment and ritual objects—and repositions them in contemporary contexts. This approach seeks to make them relevant to people’s lives today, offering a uniquely African alternative to the Western art trajectory. When considering African craft more closely, it is also important to note the range of practices. Western traditions usually define craft through a pentad of materials—wood, metal, fibre, glass, and clay—reflected in decorative arts museums. In Africa, however, practices are often carried out in open, public spaces rather than enclosed studios. Alongside work in these five materials, there is extensive recycling craft, the making of musical instruments, and the growth of maker spaces as economic alternatives. Ceremonial forms of adornment, seen in festivals, rituals, and masquerades, also remain vital expressions of cultural life. The aim is to open up discussion, to explore the diversity of African craft, and to resist reducing the continent to a single story. Recognising differences between north, central, and southern regions is essential, as is creating space to hear the many distinct voices that together shape the richness of African creativity. See Monica Monaia, [Shaping Visibility Reflecting on Representation in South African Ceramics](https://www.ceramicsnow.org/articles/shaping-visibility-reflecting-on-representation-in-south-african-ceramics/)** ### Quotes #### Kasfir, S. L. (2020). Contemporary African Art. Thames and Hudson Limited. “Bantu Education Act of 1953, a logical extension of apartheid policies of separate development, had stressed literacy and vocational training. The South African government saw no reason to encourage black artists to pursue academic study, but instead encouraged the development of ‘craft’ production in rural areas, because it fitted conveniently into a divide-and-rule Bantustans policy of emphasizing cultural distinctions among ethnic groups. But by establishing racially segregated residential areas, the government also created the conditions under which African township art would develop in the cities during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.” “When cement became available as a building material it gradually began to replace clay, and while art historians have rightly mourned the loss of spontaneity with the use of cement, local people prefer it for its permanence.” “But the Senegalese genre that has been most ‘popular’ (in the rather different sense of appealing to the broadest public) is Souwer (glass painting), which more than either Négritudist painting or avant-garde AGIT’Art could lay claim to being a ‘national’ art form in the years preceding and following Senegal’s independent statehood. The glass-painting technique was imported from North Africa in around 1900, and the first examples were brought back to Senegal as souvenirs from religious pilgrimages.” “Perhaps the best-documented example of a quintessentially urban genre enjoying both art and commodity status is the flour-sack paintings of Kinshasa, Kisangani and Lubumbashi, Congo (then Zaire), made during the 1970s” #### “An Ode to the Texts That Shifted My Perspective” by Zingha Foma [https://www.instagram.com/p/DNWSqc_tknU/](https://www.instagram.com/p/DNWSqc_tknU/) When I first encountered Ngugi wa Thiong'o's "Decolonising the Mind" as an undergraduate studying African textiles, it completely shifted how I understood craft makers – not just intellectually, but as someone who makes and designs. Ngugi argues that the  working class – including artisans and craft markers – are the historical source of fundamental discoveries and technical breakthroughs. This perspective reveals craft people and makers as they truly are: not just people preserving old traditions, but active creators of culture itself. Every technique they develop, every innovation they make, every handmade item they produce represents what Ngugi calls our "collective memory bank," generations of working-class knowledge and cultural values embedded in skilled hands. Ngugi showed me that colonialism didn't just extract resources, it tried to determine what people produced and how they produced it.  When makers work today, they're not just making objects; they're actively creating and sustaining authentic African culture through their labor, their innovations, their refusal to let traditional knowledge disappear. After Ngugi's passing this year, his insights feel more urgent than ever. Makers are cultural philosophers and technical innovators whose work creates the very foundation of our identity. Supporting locally-made, handmade goods means supporting the restoration of that authentic cultural language.