Learning the Art of African Beading in Classes in Cape Town, South Africa

African beading classes in Cape Town, South Africa, to learn the art of African beading was high on my list of things to learn during our stay. I’d long loved colourful African beaded jewellery and once we arrived in South Africa I was staggered by the beautiful beadwork and the creativity of the artisans.

“Beading has always been a part of Xhosa tradition and culture,” our guide Sabelo told us on the way to our first stop on our African Beading Workshop with Cape Town tour company Andulela.

With experiential travel one of the pillars of Grantourismo and one of the reasons we launched the project and site, learning has been an important part of our global grand tour this year.

I knew as soon as we arrived in Cape Town and I saw the abundance of beautiful beadwork around (starting with the Pan African market) that beading was the one thing that I wanted to learn here, even if it was just how to make beaded earrings or a beaded necklace.

I set about researching beading classes in Cape Town and discovered that Andulela, one of the small, local, ethical Cape Town tour companies that we’d wanted to do tours with, also offered a tour focused on the art of African beading, which included a beading class.

“Traditional healers and doctors used beads as part of their healing practices,” Sabelo explained. “Beads were also used to trade in the way that money is used today. And women, especially elderly women – a young maiden wouldn’t wear many beads! – used beads to decorate themselves.” There was a reason for me to learn the craft!

“In our culture, beads tell stories about who people are, how old they are. The amount of beads you wear indicates your age, and the older you are, the more you’re respected because of the wisdom you have,” Sabelo says.

Hmmm, I thought to myself, it was actually my birthday week… perhaps that was a good excuse to buy some beads, and given my age, the more beads the better… but first I had to learn the art of African beading.

Where to Learn the Art of African Beading in Cape Town, South Africa

Monkeybiz

Our first stop on my quest to learn bead-making in Cape Town is Monkeybiz, a sustainable, income-generating, non-profit organisation that provides skills training, support and self-employment opportunities to bead artists in the townships.

Monkeybiz also has a gorgeous shop with glass shelves crammed with colourful beaded artworks made from beautiful glass and plastic beads.

Normally, our tour would include a visit to the workplace and homes of some of the 450 artists who produce these stunning beaded crafts. But many of the craftspeople live in the township of Khayelitsha, and because of some trouble there yesterday due to warring workers union factions, Andulela tell us they cannot take us there today for our own safety.

As we wander the Monkeybiz store admiring the array of beaded products – cute beaded dolls and quirky animals, bright coasters and placemats, and kitsch replicas of local icons, such as jars of Marmite – Saki, the shop manager, tells us a little about Monkeybiz.

“The 450 women artists all work from home to avoid the transport costs of coming into the city,” Saki explained. “We go to them to save them the expense of coming here, and we provide them with the beads, stuffing and other materials, and then we buy the finished products back from them.”

“Each product is a unique one-off creation,” he says. “There are set prices, but each price varies depending on the originality, complexity and quality of the design and its size.”

The more interesting, beautiful and complex a design is, the more income the bead artist makes. The idea is to encourage bean artists to be innovative and to continually enhance their skills.

Monkeybiz buys the products from the artists rather than employs them in order to encourage entrepreneurship. If a product isn’t made well enough, they’ll send it back to the artist to begin again.

After a tour of the store, we head upstairs for a look behind the scenes, where we meet Siya, who is shaping the wire frames around which the women wind the lustrous beads.

Products that require stuffing, such as the cute colourful animals and dolls we’ve seen downstairs, are stuffed with recycled fabrics or discarded cotton clothing off-cuts obtained from manufacturers. The company is eco-friendly too!

We have a tough time deciding what to buy from Monkeybiz. Our Samsonites are already bulging at the seams. But we select a cute little crimson, blue and burgundy horned fella that looks like a cross between a gazelle of some kind and a zebra that might have been created by an artist on acid. He’s adorable.

Note that if you can’t get to Monkeybiz or Cape Town, you can buy beaded products from the Monkeybiz website (link at the end of this post), where you can also learn more about their bead artists and the work of Monkeybiz. While Monkeybiz profits go back to the artists, Monkeybiz appreciates donations, which can be used to buy beads and beading materials or food parcels.

Streetwires

Streetwires may be just around the corner from Monkeybiz, but it is worlds away in terms of its operation and objectives. Streetwires shares similar goals to Monkeybiz in that one of its aims is to provide skills training, support and raw materials to its bead artists, who complete a National Certificate in Craft Production as part of their training.

Where Streetwires differs is that its main aim is to create sustainable long-term employment for as many destitute people as possible, rather than to develop entrepreneurs like Monkeybiz. Streetwires currently employs more than 100 formerly unemployed men and women.

Although some of Streetwires’ best artists design and produce their own products, most of the artists work together in teams, each producing beaded bits that come together to make up a number of products, rather than individual artists producing a one-of-a-kind piece.

We start at the gorgeous shop upstairs before getting a tour of the production process and the studio downstairs. Streetwires receives large, commissioned orders from South African companies and when we visited artists were working in groups to make beaded airplane wings for tourism trophies, each team making the ‘wings’ for a different airline.

While the set-up may have resembled an assembly line, it was probably the most relaxed of any ‘factories’ we’ve seen, with the artists clearly looking like they enjoyed their work, chatting, flirting, listening to music, and texting on their mobile phones.

They made beading look fun and look easy, however, I was about to find out that beading was a little more demanding than it seemed when we headed upstairs for my African beading class.

The Art of African Beading

My instructor was Jethroe, one of Streetwires’ senior bead artists, who designs and produces his own beaded products, such as beautiful beaded lizards. Jethroe presented me with a couple of small, simple, wire frames – nothing as fancy as the animals or dolls I’d seen so far, just a heart and a flower – and some beads already strung on a wire.

“It’s easy,” Jethroe assured me, as he quickly and expertly demonstrated how to push the beads to one end of the galvanised iron wire, wrap a section of beads around the shape, and squeeze the beads in before wrapping them around the wire again, to make nice, neat lines of beads.

It looked easy when Jethroe showed me, but it proved trickier when I tried it myself. It also involved a bit more concentration than I thought. I couldn’t imagine chatting or flirting, let alone texting on a mobile phone while doing this.

However, with each line of beads that I created for my wire flower, I became more adept, more confident, and faster.

I was still excruciatingly slow (poor patient Jethroe), and it took me a good half hour to finish a flower that Jethroe said he could create in a few minutes (practice makes perfect, right?) but by the end of my first lesson in African beading, I had finished my beaded flower, even if Jethroe helped me with one petal.

I got to take my beautiful beaded flower home with me too, as well as the heart-shaped wire and beads.

“Your homework,” Jethroe told me with a wink and a smile.

I may not have got to make one of those funky beaded animals – it probably took a week for a bead artist to make, and would take me a month, so I bought one instead – but I did get to learn a skill and appreciate a craft that not only has a rich long history within African culture, but a strong future as far as employment and entrepreneurship goes in Cape Town.

Andulela

+27 (0) 21 790 2592
www.andulela.com
Update 29 January 2023: Andulela does not appear to be operating anymore; when we confirm we’ll leave an update here.

Monkeybiz

43 Rose Street, Cape Town
+27 (0) 21  4260 145
monkeybiz.co.za

Streetwires

77 Shortmarket Street, Cape Town
+27 (0) 21 426 2475
www.streetwires.co.za