South Africa’s craft industry could be a gold mine, but its potential remains untapped, reports HAZEL FRIEDMAN
IN a recently released document dealing with the future of the arts in South Africa, Dr Ben Ngubane, Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, paid tribute to the positive contribution made by the crafts industry to the national economy in “creating jobs, promoting tourism and generating foreign exchange”. He could have been talking about crafts in another country.
No one would dispute the craft sector’s potential to become a major player in the Reconstruction and Development Programme. The small business arena accounts for approximately 84 percent of South Africa’s workforce (and one third of the GDP), of which the crafts sector employs about 15 percent. And this estimate is conservative, given that there are approximately 340 000 craftspeople currently active in the informal sector — most of whom operate in a rural context, and many of whose activities remain unrecorded.
But right now, the industry is underdeveloped and unco-ordinated; its potential is untapped by a market that believes craft originates in an exotic place called overseas and comes to South Africa via a Stuttafords container.
As for the craft community itself, like its fine-arts siblings, these days it is less a community than a contradiction in terms. Within the industry, the cracks between the different interest groups resemble the surface of a Raku vessel. Each stakeholder, from the potter to the weaver to the knifemaker, is scrambling for a small slice of a rather meagre funding pie and kicking up a lot of mud in the process.
Pehaps one of the main problems in developing this industry lies in its diversity and broad definition. Craft covers media, materials and functions ranging from glass, textiles, ceramics and jewellery to curios, industrial appliances and everyday utility objects. It lives in galleries and museums, flea markets, on sidewalks, at trade fairs and outside airports. Craftart embraces the so-called higher realms of arts and culture through its production of traditional and contemporary artefacts, yet it also penetrates the arena of mass production, intersecting at the point where art and business usually meet.
Yet, just as there has been the tendency in the art world to prefix township art and artists with the word “community”, so is there the equally patronising habit in the world of craft production to clump all crafts-related activities into the amorphous category of craftart. This might be convenient in the context of exhibitions and trade fairs. But it is not just nightmarishly difficult to centralise such a diverse sector — it’s downright naive. As the South African Crafts Council (SACC) has discovered.
Established in 1991, the SACC has assumed the self-appointed task of co- ordinating existing associations, craft guilds and community centres, as well as promoting all aspects of the discipline on a national and international level. Inevitably, perhaps, for a body consisting of members plucked primarily from urban technikons and galleries, the council has failed in both objectives.
The SACC is regarded by many stakeholders as hopelessly out of touch with the divergent needs of the urban and rural craft sectors. Critics also argue that by modelling itself on the British, American and Australian crafts councils, instead of taking its cue from initiatives in developing countries, the council will continue to remain a representative body only in the nominal sense. This was borne out at the recent conference organised by the SACC, at which only five of the nine provinces were represented.
But Phillip Todres, owner of Cape Town’s Primart Gallery and a member of the council, insists that change is afoot. “We’ve realised that we cannot continue as we were, that we need a mandate to fulfil our responsibility to the craft community and function effectively as an umbrella body. This has resulted in the establishment of CAB (Craft Action Body) which will serve as an interim body to co-ordinate funding for craft from the Ministry of Trade and Industry as well as start a database accessing all the different stakeholders.”
Yet in its first press statement, CAB does little more than echo the sentiments expressed in the recent Actag recommendations on the future development of the visual arts, craft and design, without tackling the question of how the industry can be developed.
Even in its more promising objectives — the establishment of a resurce centre and data base to access the craft diaspora — CAB has run into snags. For example, the Western Cape Montbello Centre has registered its refusal to be turned into “a local craft service centre”. Furthermore, the CAB document does not explain what role it envisages for the private and public sector in the crafts industry, and whether support should be in the form of intervention or facilitation.
So what is the prognosis for the development of crafts in this country? The Actag report stresses the importance of the craft industry for the RDP. It also articulates some guidelines for defining current problems and proposes the development of national and regional arts councils and local agencies to support the crafts and design sector. But again its focus is more on the whys than the hows of implementation. And it fails to fulfil the most basic prerequisites of craft development: recognising and identifying the different craft stakeholders.
It has been left to two of these stakeholders — Kevin Mansfield and Philicus Olivier — to devise a comprehensive plan to tackle these issues. Called Access (Allied Craft and Creative Enterprise Support Programme), their proposal outlines potential mechanisms for identifying the diverse components of the crafts industry, particularly in rural areas, ways of favourably developing the market response to local crafts and building partnerships with the public and private sector in order to develop the income and employment-generating potential of the industry. The proposal also stresses the role of agriculture and women in rural crafts development, and makes recommendations on the structuring of service provision channels through co-ordinated development infrastructures and information networks.
Copies of this proposal have been sent to the Department of Trade and Industry, as well as to the relevant regional and national government ministries. To date, a formal response to the Access plan has not been received.
“We’re tired of flogging the same old horse,” says Mansfield. “It’s time to overcome our legacy of non-delivery.” If this does not happen, the South African craft industry will remain an empty vessel, with little chance of being filled.