Made from the heart, feeding the belly

Something I love to do in Cape Town is check out the latest in locally-created arts and crafts. What's being sold on pavements, at traffic lights, in market stalls, and what's made it into the shops? When resources are few and making ends meet is a daily struggle, inventiveness and creativity become a life support for many. Scrap metal, telephone wire, plastic bags, paper clips and fabric scraps are transformed into as many different functional and decorative objects as the imagination can dream of.

Can you guess what this dress is made from?

No? Sorry, you'll have to wait until later in this post to find out! ...

People with the means to do so have been quick to spot the commercial value of supporting struggling craftspeople with talent. But how much of the profits return directly to the artists and their communities?

Heartworks (above and below) has been a favourite place for me and my daughters for ages. Started by Margaret Woermann, with the intention of promoting "artworks made by the heart, but with the ultimate objective of feeding the belly", giving talented but marginalised people the opportunity to earn a living,  she travels all over the country looking for talent. As well as finding stock for her shops she develops relationships with many crafters that help them grow their businesses.

A new discovery for us on this trip was T Bag Designs, right next door to the township of Imizamo Yethu, in a corner of this historic building in Hout Bay ...

... where a group of 20 previously unemployed township residents work on a collective creative project making artefacts exclusively from used tea-bags.

Friendly and welcoming Russell Chitanda, above left, showed us around their workshops. As this group has become better known, local residents of Hout Bay and even people from far-off countries (Hillary Clinton was one well-known visitor) send or bring in stashes of used tea-bags. The dried tea-bags are  (clockwise from left below) emptied out, ironed flat, painted and/or cut out in shapes ...

They're then decorated, glued, embossed, embellished in a hundred different ways to make cards, notebooks, découpage boxes, coasters, tea-light holders, placemats, wrapping paper ... even the dress in the first pic above!

(Did Hillary buy the card at bottom right, above?)

Finished products are sold in the factory shop, above, as well as at the craft emporium at Cape Town's Waterfront. I think my favourite of all are these delicate, hanging tea-bag angels ...

You can find out more about the people who make TBag Designs work over here. And just a few more organisations that promote South African craft fairly and responsibly (as far as I know) and have beautiful products include Monkeybiz, Montebello (will be a later post), and Streetwires. To read and for photos that inspire, look at Shack Chic (and here), or Craft South Africa. Go take a look - you might get as hooked as I am ...

Township Life: Imizamo Yethu

From the vineyards to the townships ... this is a land of contrasts.

Hout Bay, in a valley on the Atlantic side of the Cape peninsula, is home to a mix of people from the very rich to the very poor. You reach it either via a road that winds down the mountainside from Constantia's highest vineyards, or via an equally winding but vertiginous coastal road with spectacular ocean views (Chapman's Peak Drive) ...

Down in the valley, extending from the town's pretty main road up the mountainside, is the sprawling settlement called Imizamo Yethu (in Xhosa 'our collective struggle/efforts'), also known as Mandela Park.

Somewhere between informal settlement and fully-fledged suburb, it has shacks made of corrugated iron sheets and random found-and-resurrected house parts, alongside more solid brick houses built mainly through funding from a charitable housing foundation.

Some look so precarious that you wonder how they can possibly survive the Cape winter rains and storms ...

This is home to 20 - 30 thousand families. Most have come to Cape Town in search of work - either from the Eastern Cape (many are from rural Transkei, birthplace of Nelson Mandela) or as refugees from other African countries - Zimbabwe, Congo, Zaire...

Over the last two decades that have seen this settlement grow exponentially, local government has provided roads, some (extremely) basic water and sewerage facilities, schools and a health clinic.

There is pay-as-you-go electricity (monitored via the numbers you see painted on shacks). In the photo below right you can see a satellite TV dish! Below left, a makeshift open drain pipe carries water from an inside sink to the ground outside.

What strikes you overwhelmingly about this place is its life. It practically heaves with activity. There's music everywhere, coming out of bars, shops and homes. Cars (literally the only thing that made me afraid here) roar up and down the steep roads, windows open and music blaring, causing people and dogs to scatter. Conversations were happening everywhere in the streets ...

This grandpa was supervising the kids' play in a fenced-in yard ...

while others played on the sidewalks ...

Best friends? ...

Small businesses thrive here. Spazas (convenience shops) like the one below mean that many essential items can be bought close to home ...

Small-time entrepreneurs abound, as people are willing to offer just about any service if it can make a small profit ...

Hair salons do brisk trade. Here is a glimpse inside one of these, in a converted container ... 

Barbed wire doing double duty as a clothes line, below, and around a pre-school is a reminder that crime is also rife ...

Iziko Lobomi (centre of life, though iziko means 'hearth') community centre, run by a local Christian group, provides skills training, a soup kitchen, social services, and a venue for people to make and sell arts and crafts.

The dogs caught my heart too, especially as one of my own started life in this township 

My favourite pic of all? This little girl who waved at us from the window of the bus taking her home from day-care (her friend's hand waving like a starfish above her head)...

Vineyard dreams

Just a twenty minutes' drive from the centre of Cape Town gets you here ...

the Constantia wine estates, where I used to walk my dogs. Did I take all this beauty for granted then? I don't think so, though now it seems incredible to me, a distant charmed life.

Here at Constantia Uitsig (above) is where I'd been dreaming of coming, in grey winter days in London, to sit on this low-walled stone terrace (below), with this view (uitsig) over the vineyards towards the mountains.

(rather more specifically, while tucking into their legendary tomato tart with a glass of Uitsig sauvignon blanc). And so all of this came to pass, on a perfect early autumn day shortly after we arrived, when the vines were already turning colour ... 

but the bougainvillea was still blooming.

(the prawns were pretty fantastic too)
A meander through the gardens between courses was all in order, since nobody rushes you here.

La Bella peruses the vege options, above; garden views and a glimpse of the interior, below.

A few minutes down the road is the neighbouring estate of Groot Constantia, with views down to the sea at False Bay ...

where you can drop in to taste and buy more wine, or have tea and scones if you're not totally over-indulged from lunch.

Groot Constantia is the oldest wine estate in the country. It was part of a massive endowment of rich fertile land in 1685 by the Dutch East India Company to Simon van der Stel, Dutch governor of the Cape. Van der Stel planted the land as vineyards and named his homestead Constantia.

But it was a later owner of the estate, Hendrik Cloete, great-grandson of a German settler, who put Constantia wines on the map in the 1700s. His Vin de Constance, made from Muscat blanc à petits grains, became a hit with European royalty. It was shipped by the crate-load to Napoleon Bonaparte in his final years in St Helena, as it apparently eased the misery of his exile, bless his dictator's heart. (Supposedly, his dying request was for a glass of the stuff). 

Jane Austen must have had a taste for it too. In Sense and Sensibility, Mrs Jennings recommends a little of "the finest old Constantia wine" for "its healing powers on a disappointed heart."

Today, Vin de Constance is reproduced, by the neighbouring Klein Constantia estate, using vines from the original three century-old plantings. With a history like that, how could you resist?

Beads & bottle-tops: rainbow nation creations

In a cobbled square in the heart of downtown Cape Town ...

... surrounded by historic buildings

... is Greenmarket Square, with a history going back to the 17th century when the first European trading ships berthed at the Cape of Good Hope en route to the east. 

It's been, more or less successively, a slave market, a trading place for goods and supplies for ships, a fruit and vegetable market, a parking lot, and a site of political protests in the apartheid era. 

Today it's a flea market with a distinctively African flavour, a venue for craftspeople, traders and dealers to sell their wares. 

In the maze of tightly packed stalls you can find everything from clothes, masks, hand-painted fabrics, glassware and curios, to a range of creative artefacts made from recycled materials ...

Batik paintings, wooden bowls and soapstone heads, above, and below right, chickens made from coloured plastic bags, porcupine quills, paper maché bowls made of labels of canned pilchards, wire and bead bowls.

Boy lost in thought (I liked his hat), above, and Zulu glass bead ornaments, below.

Colourful animal creations made of wire, beads and cans, below.

A Sengalese trader, below, shows off his collection of wooden masks from West Africa.

Anxious about sales?

No worries here ...

Buying and selling is only half of the story, though. This is a social and sociable place ...

(pull up a drum if you can't find a seat)
 a space to meet, hang out and chat ...

see and be seen in colourful threads ...

looking sharp ...

This man (below) demonstrated his battery-operated radios made entirely of telephone wire, bottle tops and strips of cans with a resurrected antenna ... they work perfectly!

T-shirts and ganja were on the menu here ...

This elderly craftsman, below, was busy making sculpted heads from stone ...

burnished, polished and painted ...

... the finished products laid out to dry on newspaper ...

What did we buy?

That will have to wait for another day ...