Meet Philisile, the Shwe-shwe Poppi. A label removed from her front before this photograph was taken tells us that she has a taste for chicken and rice and that she likes lions. Her favourite colour is green. She is happiest when playing a game called “buddy” with her friends.
Of course, these anecdotes are true only of the real Philisile, the doll’s human creator. This Philisile is about five years old, lives in Soweto and attends a crèche where Shwe-shwe Poppis runs a doll-making workshop for the parents and grandparents who take their children there. Unlike her stuffed avatar, Philisile the girl has arms and hands, which she used to draw the self-portrait on which the Philisile doll is based.
In 2007 Shwe-shwe Poppis, a not-for-profit organisation, started a craft workshop with the mothers and grandmothers of children who attended the African Children’s Feeding Scheme’s (ACFS) Malnutrition and Rehabilitation Crèche in Zola, Soweto. The idea was that a selection of portraits drawn by the children would be used as designs for a range of stuffed toys that could be sold in toy and craft shops. The profit from these sales goes back into the feeding scheme, a programme started by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston in 1945.
The dolls take their name from shweshwe fabric, a type of patterned cloth that was among the first goods imported into South Africa when the Cape of Good Hope was established as a trading post in 1652. Today shweshwe is used to make traditional garments in many South African cultures and also drapes over the sewing tables of top local fashion designers.
Each Shwe-shwe Poppi is made from a motley combination of different pieces of shweshwe fabric. Although so far only eight characters feature in the Shwe-shwe Poppi family, each doll is uniquely handmade. The dolls inherit the names of their diminutive designers and each one comes with an introduction card that tells the buyer about its origins.
Noble purposes aside, the immediate appeal of the Shwe-shwe Poppis is their unusual appearance. One doll, Hope, has four arms on one side of her body and only one on the other. Long-legged Faith seems to have webbed feet. Three-dimensional emissaries from the bizarre universe of children’s drawings, Shwe-shwe Poppis appeal mostly to adult imaginations. Both Vogue and Cosmopolitan featured them as hot new buys in 2008, and the Norwegian design magazine Bo Bedre raved about them in January of the same year.
South African consumers have been slow to catch on. Surprisingly, these dolls are not widely available in stores in South Africa — their main markets are overseas. But they can be ordered directly from the Shwe-shwe Poppis website and collected from ACFS in Soweto. For more, visit www.shweshwepoppis.co.za.