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    Afel Aly Sarré, who comes from a long line of weavers in Mali, is searching for ways to keep his craft from dying out.Born in Timbuktu 60 years ago, Afel, a Peulh, remembers how it used to be. Not so long ago, a weaver might be hired by a family for a whole year to weave anywhere from 10 to 40 blankets for a wedding, says Afel, who works with two ropes held between his toes. The complicated patterns he weaves in brocade were once very fashionable in Lyons, France. Africans have always made luxury fabrics for religious ceremonies, weddings and for chiefs and kings to wear. Each country has a special name for them — kente in Ghana; bogolan in Benin; teratera in Niger and ndop in Cameroon. They take weeks, sometimes months to produce. In poor countries in Africa, weaving is second only in economic importance to agriculture. But modernization and poverty have brought hard times to weavers. Two thirds of African city-dwellers wear hand-me-downs and cloth imported from India or China costs half that of locally-made material. "Nowadays, if you only make one blanket, you don’t earn enough to eat," says Afel. To get by, he has four of his sons working with him. Each one makes two sections a day, enough to make one blanket. These days, when a woman gets married, her clothes are bought in Dakar, (Senegal) in France or America," laments Afel. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) brought Afel and about 40 other African weavers and artisans to Paris for a conference — "The Thread Magicians" — to showcase their work, sound the alarm about the plight of traditional weavers and find solutions. The conference was the fourth in a series for weavers from such areas as Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Latin America. Weavers are fighting to preserve their craft industry by forming cooperatives and federations and by finding new ways to make bulk purchases, secure small loans and market their products. They are also drawing on the knowledge of their ancestors to satisfy modern tastes by combining traditional designs with more discreet colours in modern fabrics such as rayon or artificial silk. Afel learned a lot at the UNESCO’s conference. Participants, including government ministers, discussed tax breaks for local producers to discourage imports. They also talked about a special status for fabrics, more government spending on culture and legal protection for crafts-people, whose copyright on their designs is sometimes "stolen" by a couturier or "appropriated" by foreign firms. "Culture isn’t some secondary activity, it’s the quickest way to development", says Senegalese culture minister Abdoulaye-Elimane Kane. FIND OUT MORE about how UNESCO works to preserve our living culture. Click onto the links next to Afel. ADDITIONAL CULTURE STORIES: Asif restores a community A treasure is safe | Raki runs her own show Source: UNESCO Sources Magazine Photo Credit: UNESCO/N. Burke |
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