David Stairs
Malian terra cotta beads
Bling. When you start seeing it on Nike sneakers you’ve got to know it’s everywhere. But there are alternatives to manufactured bling if you know where to look for them.
When I lived in India and Africa I used to hang out at the open air markets. These bazaars, so different from the Walmarts of America, often carry the sort of hand-made articles that are not polished enough for the American market. Here, if one wants craft-based items one visits a website like Etsy.
Murano beads
This is not an article comparing forms of commerce so much as levels of affluence. The items presented here are not meant to be one-to-one equivalents, but rather beautiful apples to exquisite oranges.
When I began writing comparison of industrially produced goods to handcrafted African goods, jewelry was one of the first things I thought of. The problem was, what to compare to in the West? There is so much to choose from.
Ugandan rolled paper beads
I thought of paper beads. These are an item many African women make from recycled newspaper, which is cheap and plentiful. It requires few resources other than time, an item many African villagers have in excess. The results are beautiful, inexpensive, and a secondary source of income for the woman. The Murano beads at the top of this article are unmistakably lovely. At $50, they are also ten times as expensive as these Ugandan paper beads. What is more, rather than recycling a waste material, they utilize a good deal of energy to roll, snip, and blow into shape.
Etsy Boho bracelet
Another craft manufactured item, this found on Etsy, is a “Boho” elastic bracelet composed of a combination of wood and glass beads. It could be argued that these are no more manufactured than my African comparator, a safety pin bracelet. But I’m biased here. I found the safety pin bracelet at a market in South Africa over fifteen years ago, and I’ve loved it ever since.
South African safety pin bracelet
Turns out you can now find safety pin bracelets easily online, through Etsy even. But the fact that the idea was hatched in either Sierra Leone or South Africa, there’s disagreement about the origin, is what makes it special for me. The Boho bracelet is fine as a stretch bracelet with an autumn feel, but I do love the way the safety pin bracelet reflects not only beauty and cleverness, but the African resourcefulness of making much with little.
So Bling anyone? It does not need to be made of 24kt. gold to be beautiful.
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
