Silk route out of looming odds

A few miles past Dordabis, a dusty, empty town in Namibia, the Ibenstein weaving centre sits in a grove of thorn trees that sprout from the dry, red earth.

“You found it,'' Wolfgang Ramdohr says cheerfully, walking across the courtyard that divides Ibenstein's low-slung, aluminum-topped buildings.

Ramdohr and his wife, Anne, run this weaving centre, the first place in Namibia to make what are now the country's trademark wool carpets.

They are only a few hours from Windhoek, Namibia's capital, but in many ways, they are in another world. There was no electricity here until 1990 and, until recently, a telephone operator had to connect farms to outside lines.

Many of the looms are the same as the ones Anne's grandmother ordered built when she started the business in the 1950s; outside, spinners twirl wool by hand.

It is not, at first glance, the sort of place one would imagine as a barometer of global tastes and trends. But, in many ways, that is just what Ibenstein is.

The story of what has happened at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, to Ibenstein, to Namibia's rug art and to the weavers who make it, is a lesson in globalisation.

It shows how, in today's connected world, even African folk art is affected by changes in regional industry, the whims of Parisian fashion houses or the shifting values of middle America.

“What people here make is definitely connected to trends in other places,'' says Louise Casserley, an assistant at Johannesburg's Art Africa, a store that highlights indigenous art from around the region.

For instance, she says, recycled and “green'' African art is becoming much more popular, in large part because of a growing European and American inclination to buy “sustainable'' pieces.

And as regional industries ebb and flow — partly because of global demands — local crafters change how they use materials.

Namibian bracelets made of PVC pipes, colourful South African bowls made from telephone wire and Zimbabwean sculpture made from hubcaps — these all rise and fall with waves of consumer demand.

“People have used ingenious things for art,'' Casserley says. “They use things that are around. The Ibenstein story starts the way many of these African art tales do: with a byproduct.''
In the early 1900s, colonists were struggling with how to make vast and arid German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) productive.

When they found that farming wasn't working, they tried importing Karakul sheep, a central Asian breed whose pelts were considered the height of fashion in Europe. The sheep flourished, as did the ranchers.

By the 1930s, the ten ewes and two rams imported two decades before had become 1.7 million sheep; by the 1960s, there were over 5 million. And demand was ever growing.
“All of southern Namibia's development was financed by the Karakul,'' Ramdohr says. “The sheep were called ‘the black diamonds of Namibia'.''

The popular sheepskin coats were made from lamb pelts. But to have a steady supply of lambs, the farmers needed breeding sheep. And adults need shearing twice a year.

To most farmers, the wool was useless — too coarse for clothing. But at the large Ibenstein farm near Dordabis, Marianne Krafft decided to try to use that wool for weaving.

Krafft was an artist and wanted to come up with some sort of employment for the farmworkers' wives who lived on her land. She hired master weavers from Germany to teach her staff and later built looms for making carpets.

Soon, others followed her lead. By the time Anne Ramdohr's parents — Krafft's daughter and son-in-law — were running the weaving centre, there were as many as 15 similar businesses in the area.

Isaak Gameb, a farmworker's son, started at Ibenstein in the 1970s. As a child, he would stop here during his five-mile walk home from school. Eventually, Krafft's daughter, then running the centre, gave him a job — first as a spinner, then as a weaver.

“My speciality is animals,'' Gameb says. “Now I make my own designs.''

Today, Gameb sits at one of Ibenstein's massive looms, working with two other men to finish a carpet for a Windhoek business. He says he loves his work — but that a decade ago he had more company.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Ibenstein employed as many as eight weavers and a few dozen other employees. Today, Gameb is one of only seven Ibenstein workers.

The downsizing happened in the 1990s, Ramdohr says, but the problem had started a decade earlier, when consumers in Europe and the US started to reject fur.

In Dordabis, the Ramdohrs are searching for new ways to appeal to foreign buyers.

Anne Ramdohr says she is trying to incorporate silk from the empty cocoons of a local moth into her wares; a number of non-governmental organisations have already dubbed “Kalahari silk'' projects good for the environment and a way to promote sustainable development.

“We are competing with Asia now,'' she says, glancing at the decades-old looms. “We have to find a niche.''