For hundreds of kilometres, excellent tarred roads carry the adventurous tourist through the sun-baked bare plains of the Northern Cape. This is a thirsty, hot land of thorn trees, few people and mesmerising wide open spaces. Approaching the town of Upington, the visitor drives over a rise or around a bend to encounter a sight that is as unexpected after so many hours of parched empty landscape as it is beautiful: the lush green valley of the Orange River. Upington is only 900km or so from both Johannesburg and Cape Town and served by an excellent little airport but few foreign tourists make it this far.
On the banks of South Africa’s longest river, Upington is a modern town with top-class hotels and restaurants, a shopping mall and even a casino but to most South Africans it is synonymous with summer heat and sheer remoteness.
Show me the beauty
On the edge of Upington, in a building belonging to the century-old Congregational Church, an unassuming little business employs eight women making household products and accessories of exceptional prettiness. The business is called Vezokuhle (Xhosa for “showing the beauty”). Gerty Willemse, until recently an interior-design shop assistant in Upington, runs the business which she started with her former employer, Lida Eksteen. Lida is now retiring and soon Vezokuhle – and the livelihoods of the women it employs – will be Gerty’s full responsibility.
With windows wide open and fans whirring to combat Upington’s famous summers, the women of Vezokuhle use material off-cuts to make tea cosies, purses, pillow cases, wall panels and sunglass cases. Vezokuhle has two trademark lines: animals of Africa and its scenes of township life.
“Whenever people see our products for the first time, seeing is never enough for them,” says Gerty. “They always want to touch and feel them. They trace their fingers around the embroidery. They lift the clothes hanging on the lines. They almost always smile. We almost always know that they will run their fingers over our tea cosies or whatever it is. We always know that they will smile.”
The kindness of former strangers
It is thanks to the kindness of people who once were strangers that Vezokuhle exists at all six years after Lida and Gerty started it as an experimental project. “In 2005 the department of trade and industry (dti) told us that if we turned the project into a business they would support us,” recalls Gerty. “They supported us with market research and then marketing. We didn’t know where to sell our products, apart from a small space in Lida’s shop. The market research, though, was very positive.
“Soon people started to show an interest. We were taught what we needed to know about business; how to work out prices, how to do things like fill out order forms. In 2005 we got an order from Germany. It wasn’t a big order but we didn’t know where to start fulfilling it. We came into contact with Sars (the SA Revenue Service). They really helped us, sorting out the paperwork and showing us even how to package the order.”
Gerty also mentions Lekkerbly Tours and Safaris, a Dutch-owned inbound operator concentrating on the Netherlands market, which gives Vezokuhle 15% of the value of all bookings, not to mention the donation of computers and a Bernina sewing machine.
Vezokuhle, Gerty says, has been “very lucky with the support we’ve received from the dti, TEP and the Department of Arts and Culture”.
“It’s thanks to these partners that we are still going strong, that we have shops that sell our creations in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth, in England and even in Chicago.”
In July 2008, though, Gerty was having sleepless nights about how she was going to pay her ladies. That changed overnight, when Vezokuhle went to its first exhibition, the famous Decorex show in Johannesburg. “Until then we had no orders. TEP made it possible for us to be at Decorex,” says Gerty. “From the show we had enough orders to keep going. It was thanks to TEP that the future is now looking very positive.”
TEP, she adds, also assists Vezokuhle with training for staff and the production of marketing materials. “Thanks to them I really think that the business is now going to grow. I want to give the women a share in the business and to keep helping to give young women a future they can believe in.”