LIFESTYLE Bead mecca of Marabastad
17 DIFFERENT SHADES OF GREEN IN ONE SHOP 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 s
Marabastad is beaders’ delight. Heather and I are trailing the Piece ladies in and out of old shops and newish ones, through a closed and an open market, on and off pavements, on foot. a Eugenie Drakes is Piece’s owner and Beauty Maswanaganyi is the master beader. Currently they’re holding beading classes for the public in their Johannesburg place of handmade African-designed fashion art and there’s a need for ever more beads.
Marabastad is also where you get strong silk beading thread and those needles for angling at the tiny glass seed beads in a hundred and one exciting colours, to pick them up one or a few at a time.
For hundreds of years southern African beadwork has relied on what were once known as Bohemian beads, the Czechoslovakian ones in items like the Xhosa love letters a woman called Phoebe once taught me to make. We’d bought these very beads in alluring newspaper cones at a store on the corner of two dusty Eastern Cape farmroads. Today there are many imitations but Beauty and Eugene are sticklers for the right stuff. In Kalbro, shop 10 in 11th Street, the owner tells me the beaded casspir doing the art project rounds of South Africa used 55 million beads and that he supplied them. He seems to mention it very casually for such a mighty donation.
Within his glass counters, I am impressed that there are 17 shades of green seed beads, for instance. This is not his lone line of business. He also sells leopard cloth and linoleum and kitchenware.
We trot along a road populated with mannequins dressed in wonderful prints, past interesting early-Marabastad shops. On an open stand we pass a section of wall featuring colourfully hand drawn images advertising ministers’ collars and sacramental wine.
Within the squat redbrick Oriental Complex is another good place for beads, like Makkie in shop D4. It’s also good for all kinds of blankets, traditional and those in plastic cases, including “embossed fragrant blankets” that are rose-scented.
On a return detour we amble through the fresh produce market, smelling of pineapple and banana. In the open market women are drying groundnuts and herbs, and Beauty, much to Heather’s excitement, buys mopani worms. Marabastad is south of Tshwane central. Visit www.piece.co.za for more information.