PARR 2024 Reflections on “Afro-Sustainability” – Lesiba Mabitsela

All images: Bongani Tau

Afro-sustainability is a concept and theory proposed as the curatorial theme for our trip to Uganda.

The key ideas for this theme emphasise sustainable methods of producing textiles and crafts on the African continent that are inherently tied to an African sense of being. This sense of being is also connected to our relationship to the earth—as custodians. This way of knowing, called “indigenous,” comes from centuries of knowledge passed down by our elders. Whilst the jury is still out on whether the term is conceptually correct, for now at the very least, Afro-sustainability asks us to think differently about Africa’s role in the conversations on sustainable fashion and textile practices, that we do not need to just simply follow the UN Sustainability Goals but play a leading role in contributing or challenging those goals by studying and educating ourselves in the ways that we are already engaging in. Afro-sustainability calls for an understanding of ecosystems in the growth and cultivation of raw materials; that Africans study their relationship with the Earth through our own ways of knowing and our history and innovate new methodologies through pan-African collaboration and/or with Indigenous communities.

Eco-systems & Ecology:

According to National Geographics, ecology is a study of the environment helping us to understand how organisms live with each other in unique physical environments (National Geographics Society, 2023). With this definition established, one has to mention how the Pan-African Research Residency and the concept of Afro-sustainability has asked us to rethink our roles as artists, designers and sustainable activists. It requires us to be more than a brand name and calls us to engage with the science of living organisms, support conservation efforts and live amongst those who know conservation as a way of life.

What became clear during the residency was the importance of indigenous knowledge in the natural ecosystems that are involved in the production of not only Barkcloth but also other plants and fauna. Our visit to barkcloth artisan, Bosco Ssemiyingo in Masaka located South of Kampala and of the equator highlighted this knowledge. In the presence of three generations of barkcloth artisans; Bosco, his father and his two sons (still being taught but ever engaged and present); our day, spent on Mr Ssemiyingo senior’s farm alerted us to the importance of the soil that the Mutuba tree grew from with Banana, Pau Pau, JackFruit and Coffee trees. The Mutuba tree’s growth was equally as integral to the growth of the other plants due to its size, growing to heights of 20 metres – tall enough to provide shade from the sun (Bamwerinde, 2013: 1). Its fallen leaves and strong root systems fertilize and stabilize the soil, preventing soil erosion (ibid). Beyond its ability to earn its farmers an income through barkcloth, Mutuba trees are also excellent sources of firewood (ibid). The Mutuba tree is also drought-resistant and a good source of fodder for domestic animals such as cows and goats. On further inspection, ongoing research and projects are looking into sustainable farming methods such as the Ficus Natalensis-based agroforestry system which emphasises the benefits of growing the Mutuba tree within an intercropping system. The research conducted by Professor Wilson Bamwerinde is worth a mention and may offer some solutions to mitigate flooding and soil erosion in the Kwa-Zulu Natal region, whilst offering other opportunities to create employment through sustainable production methodologies.

The importance of soil health could not be empahsised enough in the benefits of growing Mutuba Tree but also in thinking about craft-making methodologies on the African continent as I had come to learn on our last visit to Kwa-Zulu Natal. Other than poorly planned settlements and poor drainage infrastructure, the reasons why flooding in the Kwa-Zulu Natal region have been so devastating during 2022 and April of 2024 is attributed to changes in weather due to global warming and unsustainable agricultural production methods (Cuénod, 2022). In an article interviewing Professor Pardon Muchaonyerwa, an expert on soil ecosystem from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, a few of these methods were pointed out; the unique composition of sandy soil in South Africa, irresponsible waste management, overgrazing of grassland, deforestation, loss of nutrients and carbon due to poor agricultural practices including a lack of “cover crops” which are crops that slow erosion, enhance water availability, increase soil health and increases biodiversity (Cuénod, 2022; Platt, 2022). According to Professor Muchaonyerwa, agricultural farming in South Africa is geared towards a cash-crop system which is a highly commercial single-crop, mechanicalised process contributing to a lack of soil biodiversity. From Professor Muchaonyera and Bamwerinde’s understanding, ecosystems such as the inter-cropping of Mutuba, Coffee and Banana trees show us an example of indigenous knowledge at work and become a reference point for future sustainable projects in Kwa-Zulu Natal. The residency also offered us a window into the growing influence and importance of Banana trees (part of the Strelitzia family) and where its benefits in the production of barkcloth had been described to us during part 1 of the residency.

Following our visit to Kampala, it was quite evident how central the banana tree was to the population of Uganda, who rank amongst the highest in banana consumption globally (World Population Review, n.d.; World Economic Forum & Ibrahim, 2023). Ugandans grow and consume many variants of banana, whether it be the staple diet of Matoke, Kivuuvu, Bogoya, Gonja, Mbidde and popular Plantain, it is not uncommon to see homes with a healthy growing banana tree on the property. During the Kwa-Zulu Natal leg of the residency in 2023, we had only known of banana tree leaves being used as a giant plaster to wrap the skinned Mutuba Tree trunk post-harvesting but we had yet to see the stem of the banana leaf harnessed and cultivated to produce fibres and textiles of its own. This is where our visit to TEX FAD founded by Professor Kimani Mutiri opened our eyes further to the importance of understanding ecosystems in sustainability efforts. Understanding that most stems from the cultivation of Banana’s were usually discarded, Prof. Mutiri established a business that transformed banana stems into fibre and other forms of renewable energy. Nothing is wasted; from the stripped fibres used to make textiles, the making of briquettes made from banana peels and stem pulp to the sap being used as fertilizer to feed the next crop of trees. In addition, we were equally as impressed by the impact of Professor Muturi and TEX FAD on localised innovation and the improvement of artisanal craft and skills in the region. This was made evident through the men and women tasked to weave carpets, and textiles from banana fibre and Ugandan cotton.

The craft did not end there as one has to mention the analogue machines built in collaboration with local welders and carpenters to strip banana fibres from the stem and large weaving looms to weave the fibres respectively. Following our visit, I realised how the design and engineering of machinery is hardly mentioned or taught as part of the design process in fashion schools in South Africa. Because Uganda’s civil service delivery is inefficient in comparison to South Africa (i.e.healthy water and roads) people are compelled to do things for themselves and are constantly innovating. The boda boda system is an example of this despite the chaos accompanied by the traffic chaos they cause. “A tool to make a tool” was a borrowed phrase I found myself mentioning quite extensively since our first trip to Durban and I left devoted to the idea after seeing the wooden giant looms Professor Mututri had made with members of the community in Sonde based in the Mukono district of Uganda. TEX FAD is also a research institute due to the university graduates who often seek the advice of Professor Muturi in developing their own sustainable ideas that respond to daily issues in Uganda i.e. the charcoal briquettes. In spaces such as these, a lack of infrastructure forms part of the ecosystem that drives innovation. Workers are paid for what they produce and are not obligated to fixed working hours, an incentivised system taken advantage of by the most productive.

Workers also come from far away to seek working opportunities or to learn new skills which, at times, they take back home to their communities. Professor Muturi encourages this as he is aware of how many have come to him already possessing skills from which he benefits. TEX FAD has become a lab creating impactful work on par with some of the most technologically advanced in the world, where every person involved is as much a student rather than a cog giant in a manufacturing plant.

Lo-Tek Design:

LO–TEK reframes our view of what technology is, what it means to build it in our environment, and how we can do it differently, to synthesise the millennia of knowledge that still exists,”- Julia Watson

Much of the work and knowledge we have encountered speaks to the concept of Lo-TEK, coined by award-winning researcher, author and designer Julia Watson. Watson introduced the abbreviated term of what is referred to as Local Traditional Ecological Knowledge, to highlight the biases that the so-called modern world still possesses against indigenous knowledge and innovation, whilst advocating for the potential advantages designers of the future may have in solving issues such as climate change by working collaboratively with indigenous communities. Lo-TEK plays on the racist tropes left behind by Western imperialism and the notion of primitivism bestowed on the global South. To continue with Julia Watson’s concept, fashion-led research requires a “re-wilding” of the term ‘fashion’ and destituting of universities, expanding what we mean by institutions of learning.

These are ideas I have repurposed from a combination of thinkers from various disciplines. The idea of rewilding, for instance, is influenced by queer theorist and author of Wild Things – The Disorder of Desire, Jack Halberstam whom I liberally extracted from during my punk provocation for the Defashioning Education Critical Thinking and Making Conference 2023 held in Berlin and hosted by the Berlin University of the Arts and the American University in Paris arguing for the reinterpretation of punk identities and citing how black and indigenous aesthetics pre-date the same aesthetic hallmarks of a subculture white-washed by the Euro-American fashion system. In the same vein, I also question punk’s role within “the institution” and that punk identities as Halberstam suggests have always found themselves on the edges of society. Halberstam, a self-confessed former punk, whose academic work stemmed from understanding the refusals and critiques of imperial culture in the 1970s, proposes the ‘wild’ or a ‘state of bewilderment’ as a new way of thinking about being in the world and knowledge production. Universities have ceased to be a space for alternative thinking and instead has become a tool to sustain the status quo (Vazquez, 2019; Halberstam, 2020). I suggest that Indigenous spaces have now become the new/old/omnipresent punk, presenting new/old/omnipresent spaces for radical ways of being. The provocation echoes thoughts I have previously written about inspired by the concept of Decolonial Aesthesis by Walter Minolo and Rolando Vazquez. In this way, I highlighted the use of universities and museums as spaces meant to control our senses and connection to the world; that Indigenous crafts from around the world but more specifically Africa, in this case, have always been looked at through the lens of a narrow scientific lens meant to affirm Western societies as superior to all other ‘primitive’ nations; that all Western institutions have been built to affirm their superiority over their colonial subjects through the control of how we perceive the West in comparison with other civilizations through the control of the study in aesthetics also known as ‘good taste’ and lastly that the system of capitalism is intrinsically connected to the extractive nature of colonialism and the industrial revolution which might I add lies at the route of our troubles with sustainability (Mignolo & Vazquez, 2013; Mabitsela, 2021: 4–5).

Fully aware of the challenge of re-establishing the ‘wild’ away from its Western and colonial historical interpretation, Hallberstam, like Watson confronts the Western world’s stigmatizing, scientific, sexualizing and racialized form of ‘othering’. This othering which echoes Rolando Vazquez’s thoughts on how colonialism renders other societies outside of the Western modern-colonial machine as wordless, adds to the stereotype of a perceived distant primitive past, an orderly idea of proper human conduct, an unconquered, undiscovered space and by extension the idea of nature which we as the human race have managed to convince ourselves of, as separate from (Vazquez, 2019: 182–183; Halberstam, 2020).

Lo-TEK Methodologies of Making

Through our travels I had been pondering on the similarities of paper making, the cultivation and the making of barkcloth, the making of Isidwaba and another interest of mine, felting. Despite the apparent lack of felting history on the African continent (Laufer, 1930a), felting, which could be defined within multiple processes of making; rolling, beating and pressing – bears remarkably similar processes to the rolling and beating of wet barkcloth. The fibres of the bark are matted/pressed together through this process, making the cloth thinner and stretching it further to more than double its size. I believe that the definition of felting as a method of pressed fibres opens up the application to more than just the art of making textiles from animal wool or hair but also considers paper making and the vast amount of knowledge in African hair which was often used in making regalia such as the tunics of the Grassland’s kingdom of the Oku (Sieber & Herreman, 2000: 68).

The processes of making barkcloth and the Isidwaba were quite similar as well, from how the bark is skinned, how the skinned tree bleeds tannin-rich sap as one of our travelling team members, Thabiso Ncanana, had identified and then stretched and laid down to dry such as is done in the stretching and drying of animal hide. It doesn’t strike me as a surprise thinking about Bantu migration and the similarities in processes between the Buganda and Nguni-speaking tribes of South Africa. We had already thought about this as a travelling team, not only through the similarities of words, but as we had learnt in the previous residency in Durban, through the tutelage of Umlazi-based Isidwaba artisan, Mam Khethiwe Memela who had noted that the ancient process in making Isidwaba softer by burying it in the ground is similar to the process of making black barkcloth which is submerged in mud for a sustained period giving it its dark hue through a chemical reaction. Through the act of identifying, sharing and reflecting on these similarities we achieve the main reasons for this residency in fostering pan-African cultural exchanges and expanding the definitions of Local Traditional Ecological knowledge on the continent.

Kampala has birthed an impactful crop of designers responding not only to the cultural legacy of barkcloth but also to the socio-political landscape of Uganda. I think of the impact of Colonialism on the country and its people and what the contemporary relationship to textiles such as barkcloth, banana fibre and cotton has had. In this way, I mention the work done by researcher and fashion designer, Doreen Namatovu, who has been leading research on expanding the durability and natural dying possibilities of Olubugo. In her additional roles as a part-time lecturer for universities such as Makerere University, Namatovu has worked with multiple international universities in barkcloth research and has already started experimenting with felting applications onto barkcloth itself.

Fashion designer, Kitende Godfrey from IGC Fashion, formerly short for Ibrahim and Godfrey Community Fashion, is another designer working with Olubugo. Through his Yohji Yamamoto-esque layered construction and heavily cowrie-shell beaded costumes, Godfrey seeks to harness the impact of fashion and redefine Olubugo away from its tabooed relations to death and witchcraft. One of the ways he has done this is through the brand’s community-driven activations such as their market-like fashion cyphers usually held at popular Japanese restaurant and cultural hangout based in Nakasero, Yujo Izakaya, founded by Hanif Rehemtulla.

Both continue the legacy of Ugandan designers who have been working with barkcloth, such as Jose Hendo – an icon in the field. Hendo, a London-based Ugandan fashion designer and sustainability activist established her brand to promote the use of eco-textiles and recycled materials. The award-winning designer has shown her avant-garde works of art at London Fashion Week and museums worldwide. In 2014 Jose started the Bark to the Roots foundation which works with barkcloth artisans in Uganda to responsibly grow and harvest Mutuba tree. Together with her niece who has a background in architecture, Isabella Asiimwe who established her barkcloth fashion label, Isabella Isabeau, ensure a future for the tradition of Olubugo.

Histories

Thinking broadly on the theme of similarities and Lo-TEK design as discovered in Kampala, I would be remiss to omit the D.I.Y attitude of local designers in the region. Uganda used to be one of Africa and the world’s biggest cotton suppliers. In many ways, the move to farm cotton may have displaced the connection to Barkcloth. This also meant that the connection to the land and its methods of making had been displaced as single commodity cash cropping was favoured over the multi-crop system being used and witnessed on our visit to Masaka. The impact of cotton on Uganda was a subject noted by Professor Muturi including the duo of Nikissi Serumaga and Bobby Kolade who together with South African-based producer, Lesedi Oluko Moche, run the Vintage or Violence podcast.

Vintage or Violence was started initially as a documentary and an inquiry into the history and impact of cotton in Uganda but then pivoted into a podcast series addressing the impact of second-hand clothing being liberally ‘gifted’ to the African continent from Europe and other so-called first-world countries. The second-hand market in Kampala is so big that it has marginalized the role of local fashion designers in the region. Vintage or Violence engages with local citizens of Kampala, asking them for their thoughts on the second-hand clothing market and the impact that these clothes have had on the country’s once-promising textile industry. Vintage or Violence grew synonymously with Buziga Hill, a conceptual clothing brand named after one of Kampala’s twenty-one hilly regions and founded by its creative director Bobby Kolade. The concept of the clothing label is deceivingly simple but smart and involves purchasing bales of second-hand clothing, meticulously deconstructing them by hand and then methodically reconstructing them into new garments to be sold back to the European/first-world market or as their concept would put it ‘return[ed] to sender’. Bobby together with his team notes where each bale of clothing has come from and the textile composition of each garment used in making a new creation which is then printed on the label sewn onto the garments. The brand has rightfully attracted global attention for its soft but clever activism, turning the sustainability mirror back onto the “first world” to relook at its consumer habits.

Cultural & Skills Exchange

Our time at our residency saw us produce a first-ever Hybrid Workshop between our Durban cohort and our new group from Kampala who we hosted at Afropocene, an exhibition and workshop space located on the busy Gaba Road in Kabalagala founded by visual artists Letaru Dralega and Martin Kharumwa. These were students from different disciplines, interests and communities in Kampala. The exchange began with an introductory session by Erica deGreef on positionality (being aware of oneself and internalised biases or beliefs), as one of the main tenets of decolonial thinking and a foundation of how we conduct research. We were then treated to lectures prepared by our Ugandan research contributors, Sheila Nakitende, Liz Kobusinge and Doreen Namatovu who all talked through their practices. We were then joined by Mam Khetiwe Memela and Mam Phumzile Nkosi from Phansi Museum who presented their joint session via Zoom. Our residency winner for 2023, Thabiso Ncanana, was retained by AFRI and asked to facilitate this presentation with both knowledge bearers showing an example of how raw and mature thinkers can come together to produce compelling and engaging research. These are connections that we hope will grow with the future of research into cultivating barkcloth in the Kwa-Zulu Natal region and furthering knowledge on the significance of isidwaba both culturally and materially. The two-day workshop culminated with a natural dying and cow-dung dying workshop in Kampala led by Doreen and Thabiso respectively.

To date, the residency has grown in leaps and bounds, becoming a space for a transdisciplinary cohort to meet and exchange ideas. The residency has seen a meeting of minds between designers of all disciplines, artists of all disciplines, indigenous and self-taught makers, researchers, thinkers, horticulturists and botanists and it keeps growing. We had also thought it was important to build communities through research hence the hybrid workshop. In addition to the workshops, we held two separate round tables where local creative communities or interested parties were invited to discuss the similarities between barkcloth and isidwaba. The round table in Kampala took place at the British Council offices based in Kitante, whilst the round table in Kwa-Zulu Natal took place at a private gathering in Umlazi at Mam Khetiwe’s home. The round table in Umlazi was conceptualized and produced in collaboration with eKhweni Residency Space founded by Russel Hlongwane.

The Pan African Research Residency events were made possible with support from Business and Arts South Africa @bizart_za, South Africa Department of Sports and Culture, Presidential Employment Stimulus, British Council ( @eastafricaarts )