CULTURE-AFRICA: Weak Dollar, Civil Wars Hurting Arts Business

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 18 2004 (IPS) - Foundiku Ousman started his arts business with three friends, after raising a small capital of about 700 dollars, at Founmban in western Cameroon, in 1997. Today he is regarded as a wealthy man in a trade where only hard work opens the door to success.

Ousman runs a shop in South Africa’s commercial hub of Johannesburg. He also maintains the store at Founmban, and travels around Africa to collect antiques for sale in South Africa.

‘’Arts is a very difficult business anywhere in the world. In South Africa, only a hard-working man can live well. A lazy man suffers if he does not work hard,’’ he says.

When IPS visited him, the 32-year-old Cameroonian, born in the Republic of Congo, was standing in front of a six-by-ten-feet stall wooing tourists. The stall, located inside the African Craft Market, near Johannesburg’s popular Rosebank town, was opened in 1999.

Ousman hopes a tourist would pop in and pick an item. He has recorded no sales in a week because of hard times. But he has to pay his rent of about 260 dollars a month.

‘’Come in sir. I have crafts from West Africa, Central Africa and South Africa,’’ he says. If he was disappointed when this reporter introduced himself as a journalist wanting an interview with him, he did not show it.

All the other craft and arts dealers in the complex are having a tough time due to low business since 2000 when the South African currency, the rand, began a steady climb against the dollar. Four years ago a dollar was fetching 13 rands, now it only brings between 5.6 and six rands.

‘’With a very strong rand forcing down the dollar, tourists are reluctant to spend their money on crafts. For us craft dealers, it ought to be a time for good business but there are no buyers,’’ Osman says.

On a lucky day, Ousman could sell one piece of arts work for between 862 and 1,731 dollars.

Ousman, like other antique collectors, also faces difficulties in buying and exporting arts work banned in Africa.

Nigeria, for example, has since 2001 intensified efforts to check the illegal smuggling of artefacts to foreign countries. It has introduced severe penalties including prison terms for anyone caught attempting to export antiquities without a permit issued by the country’s National Council of Museum and Monuments.

The commission has succeeded in retrieving 44 artefacts removed from Nigeria more than a century ago. The items, worth millions of dollars, were handed to the National Council of Museum and Monuments in Lagos by Jean David, director of Zurich Galarie Walu, last year.

But Ousman has found a way round the ban. He only needs a photograph of such a piece and his workers in Cameroon would replicate it.

‘’In Nigeria, for example, it is difficult to take terracotta and Yoruba pieces out of the country. But I ask the artists to make a replica,’’ he says.

His stall is fully stocked with arts work and antiques from Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Congo and South Africa.

In the stall are bright and beautifully coloured beaded Ndebele arts from South Africa, made from plastics. Other beads on display, from Nigeria and Congo, are glassy. Also on display are terracotta from northern Nigeria, Bamoun spears as well as traditional drums from Cote d’Ivoire.

According to Ousman, 75 percent of the items in his stall are replicas of arts from other countries, carved at Founmban. Ousman is Bamoun, one of the largest ethnic groups in Cameroon. The Bamoun live on arts and crafts. Most of them know how to chip arts and Ousman grew up with it, although, he does not carve, he paints carved items to make them more attractive.

Ousman and his tribesmen need not go to school to learn arts. In fact, most of them never went to school. Arts is passed on from generation to generation. Carving has become their source of livelihood apart from agriculture.

‘’Most of our tribesmen are very clever in arts and any arts work they see just once, they can replicate. Arts comes from their mind. When they wake up, any concept of art that comes to their mind they do it,’’ he explains.

The ingenuity of the Bamoun craftsmen is seen on a replica of an ancient arts work from Southern Nigeria, which Ousman shows off proudly. The piece is the bust of a man with four horns shooting out of the head. The horns represent the limbs and are covered with animal skin.

‘’Five centuries ago, in Southern Nigeria a powerful chief skinned people alive and use the skin to build this kind of fetish object which he kept in his palace for protection. But now, we use animal leather which is not so authentic as that one in Nigeria, but which reminds people of history,’’ Ousman explains.

Ousman also faces the problem of fraudsters. Some middlemen, who assist him in buying antiques from the villages in the hinterlands, have disappeared with his money which is usually paid up front. He also faces challenges from civil wars rocking some African countries.

The conflicts in Cote d’Ivoire and Congo, for example, have prevented him from traveling to those countries for security reasons.

Despite the current setbacks, Ousman says he is hopeful of the future. He says he is working hard to set up large galleries on African crafts and antiques in South Africa and Cameroon. ‘’I am happy with the progress and growth of my business. I am hoping for a brighter future,’’ he says.