Cornering the market of African textiles

Woogui is an ethical accessories and tailored shirt brand was established to “reinvent the African fashion industry in Mozambique”. Picture: Supplied

“I ended up figuring out that African textiles were not, in fact, really African. They were textiles that were brought to Africa via trade,” she says. “Some of them were an imitation of textiles that existed in west Africa. So they were like the mass-production answer to handmade textiles in west Africa. There are some batik elements in some of them, but mostly they were produced in China or Holland.

“It’s kind of like a borrowed culture; it’s no longer ours,” says Zacarias. “If you look more in-depth about the design process of these textiles, there’s nothing really about African heritage in them. It’s just somebody in a company somewhere in Europe or in China or in India who is dictating what is African now.

Later, along with Mozambican fashion designer Djamila de Sousa, Zacarias established Karingana Wa Karingana, a Mozambique-based company that prints authentic African textiles, based on tradition and culture. In another print series, Zacarias pays tribute to the Mozambican capital of Maputo. “That print connects with all of us because it’s about the city we grew up in,” she explains. “It has the icons that we believe in and see every day. Like there’s a church that is very iconic. There is the public transport. There’s the dhal boat that you see here. There’s a cassia flower. So those are all things that we recognise as part of our heritage.

“On the body, they are something completely different because the dressmaker or tailor has to use that pattern in a creative way,” she was quoted as saying.“We’re fully aware that it would be very hard for us to compete with China and India price-wise, because mass production does mean more accessibility. But we are not trying to compete with them,” she explains.

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