The highlands above Nakuru, early morning.
The highlands above Nakuru, early morning.
I grew up in a place called Nakuru, in Kenya. This shop exists to put something of that place into the hands of people living somewhere else.
Nakuru sits in the Rift Valley highlands, about 1,750 metres up. It is not the Africa people are sold in photographs — not dust and endless savannah. It is volcanic ridges and escarpments, woodland and grassland, green right through the rains, with Menengai Crater to the north and the Mau Escarpment to the west. The lake below the town is the one famous for flamingos.
The shuka is everywhere here. It is worn, not displayed. It keeps the cold off at altitude, it is slept under, it is thrown over a chair, and it is handed down. Somewhere along the way it also became a thing tourists buy at the airport, which is a pity, because the cloth deserves better than that.
Buy good shukas properly. Describe them honestly. Photograph the real cloth rather than a stock image. Pack each one by hand and send it tracked to someone who wants a piece of home — or who simply likes the cloth and would like to know where it came from.
That is the whole business. No factory, no warehouse, no clever supply chain. One person in Nakuru who chooses each cloth, checks it, packs it, and carries it to the post office.
We are not going to tell you a story about rescuing anybody. A lot of shops selling African craft lean hard on that, and some of them mean it sincerely. We will make claims about how our suppliers are paid when we can show you the arrangement, and not a day before.
[ROSE TO CONFIRM — this section is written from three lines she sent and stands in until she has been properly interviewed. Everything here that reads as biography needs her own words behind it.]
A note on honesty. This page is a draft. The person it is about has not yet been interviewed, and nothing on it should go live as fact until she has confirmed it herself. The photographs on this site are art direction, not the actual stock.