This short video showcases the garments constructed by trainees of Fashion For Change Portable Skills Training conducted by Ree-Joy Designs, at The Klerksdorp Museum.
"These two stories have remained very close to my heart as a filmmaker and activist who always strives to expose those voices that would otherwise be not heard. They are a culmination of expressed resilience of the two families documented in the films."
Filmed in 2013, the two documentaries capture rural lives of two families living on the highlands of the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. Told through unobstructed observations of occurrences and events in lives caught within the continuum of time, it is a record of hardships as they unfold and stagnation of aims and dreams. On this journey we encounter faces and voices of those seemingly forgotten communities braving the brutal winter in a landscape of immense beauty. We glimpse into a realm that will soon be relegated to nostalgia, while unlearning some myths woven about lives of people deemed to be defeated by poverty.
For centuries, the global fashion industry has referenced African fashion, but it has not always done so without blatant appropriation without acceptance of the origins of these fashion trends.
Often misconstrued as ‘tribal’ or ‘exotic’ or simplified to leopard skins and mud cloths, the African perspective of fashion has been trivialised by many cultures, and it has become a scapegoat for sentiments of Africa’s backwardness.
But the truth has always been the country because Africa, over and above a vast array of civilisations and cultural expressions has given humanity its identity and vote, and taught humanity how to conceal it’s nakedness before the majesty of the natural world.
When many “civilised societies” pursue their consumerist urges to destroy the natural world for self-gratification, Africa is now looking to re-evaluate its relationship with the planet through its dress, food and means of shelter.
It is often said that in Africa garments communicated status or marked a ritual or passage of time as people moved from one communal state to another; but can these ideals become also objectives for contemporary garment makers for present generations with transient cultural trends?
And having witnessed how the COVID-19 epidemic turned the global fashion industry on its head, what new interventions can African fashion designers endeavour to resuscitate the ailing industry which on the other hand can lift many people from poverty? Even post-COVI-19, designer production is halted, fashion shows and events are postponed or moved online, and brands have had to scramble to set up proper online businesses to make up for sales lost to store closures. As the global fashion industry grapples with the effects of the pandemic, Africa’s network of designers is particularly vulnerable to disruption.
But what innovative strategies can be used to resuscitate this otherwise fossilised industry, which is also facing a variety of socio-economic challenges steeped in local markets sentiments that have put many African economies under duress?
Solutions, of course have to come from fashion practitioners themselves, and while the future is bright for African fashion, it will only be if fashion practitioners they take hold of the narrative and get in front of the current boom. In order to avoid another tale of exploitation, designers must also learn to be business savvy, putting the correct infrastructure in place for the manufacture and sale of their products, as well as training a new crop of creatives who will carry the touch into the future.
When I first read a media release from a fashion design company that was conducting portable skills training in Matlosana, I was intrigued and at the same time enthused by the notion that there is an initiate that is taking eco-friendly and sustainable fashion to the masses. Naively, many fashionistas assume that under-resourced communities have no notion of preserving their environment through their means of subsistence, dress and shelter, and this initiate which is dubbed for Change is doing exactly that. Transforming minds at grassroots level, and conscientizing them of possibilities of up cycling, and recycling, thrifting for pre-loved garments to create even more strikingly fresh trends.
“Each one, teach one, we found that an appropriate motto for the Portable Skills Training because it speaks to Ree-Joy Designs not giving the youth fish, but teaching them how to fish, says Tebogo Mgodoyi, the training facilitator for the Fashion For Change Portable Skills Training Initiative. And she further alludes to the idea that through the initiative, the trainees are now becoming skilled to confront the ravages of unemployment, which they now can confront with skills that can be turned into livelihoods.
The training initiate, in its fifth month has trained seven abled women and youth, together with three trainees from TechFord Disability Centre, and this audacious one to impart skills to the disabled is also an essential objective for the initiate. And through the support of BASA PESP Grant, Fashion For Change is clearly making waves within the Matlosana Municipality, as now the trainees are preparing for a fashion show to be held on the 14th of February 2024 at The Klerksdorp Museum.
With their audacity and indelible efforts and the hard work they have put into the creative garments they constructed, they will have an opportunity to exhibit for their community, proving their true grit to a number of fashion industry stakeholders attending to witness the resurgence of fashion talent with “The Platinum Province”.
“Through this show, we will be exhibiting proof that with resilience and passion, our arts can become our saving skills and take us out of poverty. And with the garments that are bro be seen, the theme of sustainable fashion and eco friendly practices will be clearly displayed with the hope that may people will move towards recycling and upcycling their garments for upcoming trends”, concludes Ms. Mgodoyi.
A derelict geography strewn with dead statues and monuments of colonial self-gratification, sterilised museums of European affluence and plunder, exhibited as trophies for the natives to envy or vicariously mimic.
Africa is where they mined for fossilised relics that people their architecture, filling mausoleums with skulls of ancestors of erased civilities and artefacts of seances with divinity now desecrated.
Africa is a locale of bruised psychologies, lived double into dreams created by falsities in galleries and malls, advertised through cathode tubed LED screens, like windows spying on lives which Africa was deprived.
Africa is a mirror reflecting the tyranny showered on Mother Earth through acid sprinklers spewing toxins from mine-shafts onto fields of de-nutritionalised vegetations, an arid burial grounds of the nameless.
Africa is named after elites of trophy kingdoms built on bloodshed and diseases exported through exploratory missions ordained by monasteries and their patron lords.
Africa is home to the lost remaining among their outspoken dead, ghosts possessing children born in a new century, those speaking in tongues of misery learned from disgruntled parents.
Africa is mother and cradle to a new breed forged through spare parts stolen from ransacked cargo ships scattered on shores whitened and bleached, and her oceans wrung like an endless sheet painted with fish and coral.
Africa is mapped by jail-bird descendants of rogue royals in castles sieged through godly wars, ruins labeled for the memory of killers, a tomb for a billion dreams squandered and forsaken for the prize property.
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With a resilient pandemic of Afro Pessimism spreading to every corner of the globe, it takes artists of African descent to concoct remedies that will inoculate many more generations from that sentiment.
And only through an elaborate exhibition of Africa as the centre of a positivist future, through exploratory questioning of the past to correct the present, can there become version of Africa that would once again be the guiding light of wisdom for the rest of the world.
That Africa, at this juncture might seem a fiction, especially when the continent is cloaked in darkening bloodstain of colonial wars, wars for liberation, guerrilla wars and the insurgency of terror that is displacing millions.
Yet, there are new horizon looming with every technological innovation, and even though Africa hasn’t tapped into the full potential of these technologies, it is best to prepare for them with robust representation of a truer and not romanticised identities, not vicarious avatars that depict Africa as should be in light of western vision of the future.
Africa to me becomes the remaining frontier for humanity to re-invent itself in regards to relations to earth as mother and home; Africa can be a breeding ground for a new humanism that does not deem humans superior to the natural but a seedling of our threatened earth.
