The Zulu Mama chair is both comfortable and striking, with a sleek stainless steel frame and an egg-shaped seat hand-woven from recycled plastic strips in a riotous range of colours, from black and cream to pink, green, turquoise and chocolate.
But the chair is more than just a piece of furniture. Designed by 27-year-old Cape Town resident Haldane Martin, produced by craftsmen living in a remote and impoverished area of Limpopo, and sold mainly to European buyers it also symbolises the socio- economic tensions that continue to define South Africa.
The Mogalakwena Craft Art Project is where the Zulu Mama’s frame is bent into shape and where the plastic strips – previously polyurethane milk bottles – are transformed into seats. It was set up by Elbe Coetzee, one of Martin’s friends and the author of Craft Art in South Africa, who moved to the area with her husband to set up a game lodge and was dismayed to find 60 per cent unemployment rates and a serious HIV-Aids problem. She discovered, however, that the locals were skilled weavers, so set up the project to put them to work, as well as to provide health care, child care and literacy training. Martin visits two or three times a year to unwind, design and touch base with his producers.
Investing in and maintaining South Africa’s craft tradition has long been important to the designer, who studied at Cape Technikon (now Cape Peninsula University) and worked for Richard Sparks, one of the country’s best-loved furniture makers, after gradution. Like many of his contemporaries he first took his business to the US and the UK, showing CD storage racks at New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair and earning royalties from designs licensed to a British manufacturer. But he soon returned to Cape Town to tinker with “big” ideas for chairs and other furniture, forging relationships with more than 20 small businesses to execute his collection.
“The four-year process of arriving at the Zulu Mama design helped me shed the shadow of self-doubt that has bogged down so many creative souls in this country,” he says. “Cape Town has the highest concentration of skilled artisans in southern Africa. I love the personal scale on which business is conducted here.”
His distributors, Swala Line and Springbox, are based in Spain and Sweden, respectively, but he has rebuffed an overture from an Italian company that wanted to manufacture the Zulu Mama in Buttrio. “I’m committed to keeping the jobs in South Africa,” he explains.
Production capacity currently stands at 50 chairs per month, although Patricia Ohayon of Swala Line would like to treble that in the coming year. “Our customers really appreciate the combination of contemporary lines with South African soul they find in Haldane’s pieces. They are buying into a whole philosophy, rather than just a piece of furniture,” she says.
Aside from the Zulu Mama, Martin’s other pieces include the Riempie Collection, a new take on Cape Dutch cottage chairs, dining tables and benches, and the Songololo couch. The latter is fun, robust expandable soft seating, inspired by the wooden snakes that vendors sell at busy street intersections in Cape Town. It has a sturdy steel spine but can also bend into a curve, an S-shape or a circle. The former arose from Martin’s memories of childhood visits to Johanesburg antiques shops with his mother, the aroma of fresh worked timber in his oupa’s (grandfather’s) carpentry workshop and nostalgic books such as Max du Preez’s Of Warriors, Lovers, and Prophets: Unusual Stories from South Africa’s Past. But Martin has refreshed the design by playing up the Malaysian mandala pattern used on the old-style riempie chairs, relaxing the angle of the back and using the bright recycled plastic developed for the Zulu Mama chairs instead of traditional leather strips.
The benches are now used in the farmyard museum of winemaker Spier Estate, which Martin sees as confirmation that he has captured the essence of the traditional design but put it in an African fast-forward context. His next plan is to create work and play stations for students, so he’s hired a Cape Peninsula University graduate to videotape young people studying, relaxing and interacting in their residential spaces.
Martin himself lives in Mutual Heights, a celebrated art deco building in the city centre with kiat wooden floors, double volume ceilings, long vertical windows and exterior relief stone sculptures of leaders from every major South African tribe carved over the west facade.
He discovered it while scoping out a commission for clients. Now the light-filled fifth-storey loft space is anchored by a Jenny Gifford-designed saffron Lotus cushion and filled with a host of other South African artists’ works, as well: spiral-shaped baskets by Sparks, which influenced the Zulu Mama seat shape; curtains in a Wire Basked Essence print designed by Cathy O’Cleary; a Zimbabwean wood Nativity carving of Mary and Joseph; and Hash Neath’s flower lights, fashioned from old plastic milk bottles.
Martin’s own work is also present, though the only Zulu Mama chair in the flat, located next to his bed, doubles as a transitional laundry basket. There is also a drawing of a rocket by his “investor-inclined” eldest son, who is nine. (His two other boys are three and seven, and his daughter is less than a year old.)
Martin is unsure as to whether they will follow in his footsteps. “Who knows what they will end up doing,” he says. “It will be a different country than the one I inhabited when I had to make those choices.”
Regardless, he is setting an example for them: reaching out to the world while still acknowledging his roots.
