Searching for woolly warmth
FASCINATION: MOTIFS OF ALL DESCRIPTIONS
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she’s on a Basotho blanket tour.
It doesn’t go anywhere near Lesotho. Instead we head west. The first marker that tells us we’re on the right track is a statue of a lion, dressed in a red rugby jersey. Through Randfontein, we find the next marker, a row of huge white silos with a sparkling Christian-style cross set atop. They belong to Nola, the mayo and spreads people. To the right is a squat, four and a half hectare block that is Aranda.
Along the dirt road is a nondescript Sales sign.
Neat piles of mainly Basotho blankets, on pallets with prices affixed, cover the floor of the first room. The motifs on these blankets are the fascination, featuring mielies, planes, crowns, all for interesting social and historic reasons.
I love the dyes, one familiar combination having sort of rumn-raisin colours of off-pink and brown, every blanket with its trademark bright stripe running through, once a weaving error.
While Basotho blankets are never cheap, the prices depend on the wools and yarns used and that information is on their various labels. Trade seems brisk, sales taking place in a cage arrangement near the door.
In small towns people have big positions and when Heather unbags her camera, a blonde in the cage insists it “is not allowed”. Despite Heather explaining her telephonic arrangement, we are sent “to Head Office”.
In the street, we meet a woman stuffing a black plastic bag of blankets she’s bought into a backpack for her trip. Many people from Lesotho come to buy blankets for selling back home.
Outside Head Office is an Italian flag and, inside, a magnificent 1945 painting of a Basotho wearing his gorgeous Victoria England blanket.
The painting once hung in England, where Basotho blankets were manufactured. So-called Basutoland had become a British Protectorate in 1868 and King Moshoeshoe called it a “blanket of protection”. Many designs refer to that. The Italian Magni family took over manufacture after the Second World War and located here, says Tom Kritzinger, the history fundi, while being torn away by a family member to conduct a school tour.
Back at Sales, the camera having been okay all along, we are awed to see another tall man flinging his blanket around him in as in the painting.
Aranda Textile Mills 011 693 3721