The Little Traveller beaded dolls produced at the Woza Moya craft centre in Hillcrest outside Durban all carry some part of their maker — their miniaturist talents and their longing to escape from poverty and the ravages of HIV/Aids.
‘I’m inspired because the work gives me money and the money inspires me,” says beader Joyce Mthethwa (54), who specialises in making rasta and sangoma dolls smaller than a middle finger.
There is no hint of capitalist voracity when Mthethwa — who is also a sangoma — talks about the money, merely the matter-of-factness that comes from a gogo whose family has been hit by Aids and who now supports her husband, two children and three grandchildren with what she makes from beading. Mthethwa says she can earn R1 000 a week if there are large orders.
Woza Moya (isiZulu for ‘come spirit”) is an income-generating project of the Hillcrest Aids Centre Trust. Woza Moya craft coordinator Paula Thomson says that about 200 ‘people affected by or infected with HIV/Aids” participate in the various craft projects, which include ceramic and wire work, fabric painting and quilting.
The handiworkers are earning a reputation in the South African fashion industry and have made accessories for garments designed by Karen Monk Klijnstra and Amanda Laird Cherry for various runway collections.
‘They have talent in their fingers,” says Laird Cherry. ‘I love working with them and it’s an amazing project to promote and make sustainable because it is such a worthy cause.” Laird Cherry says the most recent collaboration, a range of T-shirts to which the crafters added their own graphic touches, will be unveiled at the Design Indaba in Cape Town at the end of the month.
Thomson says the Little Travellers were born five years ago and proved not only popular but economically sustainable. ‘Items like necklaces require a high level of skill, but the dolls don’t. Everybody can make them and usually quite quickly — the beaders say between 30 minutes to an hour for each doll — so the large quantities allow for sustainability. And who can resist them?” she says, laughing.
Not the Canadians, it would appear. Thomson says that of the 25 000 dolls ordered in the past three months 9 000 were exported to Canada, with the rest spread around Germany, Japan, the United States, Australia and South Africa.
With each Little Traveller toddling off to seduce the wide world, passport from the Republic of Woza Moya South Africa under the arm, Thomson says there was an increasing need to document the dolls’ birth and early lives.
The 100 beaders were given disposable cameras to capture their lives, and these pictures, with the beaders’ work and personal histories, form part of the Little Traveller exhibition, which opened at the Durban Art Gallery on Wednesday.
‘It is important to show where these dolls come from and how purchasing one has helped change the lives of the people who made them,” says Thomson.
‘My favourite picture is the one [I took] with the red stool, because it shows my house and how it is. It shows how I am poor, I am not rich. I stay in two rooms made with planks,” says Thobile Ndlovu (44), who makes little dolls with skirts like Marilyn Monroe’s billowing number in The Seven Year Itch.
Ndlovu, who has been on antiretroviral treatment since 2005, is delighted her CD4 count is improving, but is concerned that it will affect her monthly budget because she might lose her disability grant.
She hopes more orders will come in: ‘The next time will be the last for my disability grant, I think … The money helps; if I am not working with dolls I will die,” she says. ‘I am not working for myself, but for my children. My son, Sbonelo (17), is a slow learner, but he is very clever — he can fix the radio at home — and I want him to be able to look after himself once I am gone.
‘He moved back to an Indian school where the fees are high — R1 200 a year — because he was too clever for the children at a special-needs school and education is important.”
Pointing to the lumps in her finger, Gladys Mzimela (42) says the hardest part of making the dolls is having to work at night, under the light of a paraffin lamp. ‘The needle keeps poking me,” she says. This perfectionist talks about stuffing the dolls’ foreheads: ‘It must look like a human head, it must be just right,” she says.
As Mzimela, who is also a home-based caregiver, talks it becomes apparent that the dolls also appear to weave some magic over their makers, something removed from the material gains, that illness, poverty and death are not mutually exclusive to restoring pride, creativity and hope. ‘I am very proud of myself because they showed my work at the high school. I like to work in a group that works hard with their own hearts. I work with my heart,” says Mzimela.
Little Traveller exhibition is on at the Durban Art Gallery until March 30