Linda Camm

About twelve years ago I worked as an apprentice to a man who had worked with leather for many years and who had a huge amount of experience in leather.  His name is Bill Amberg and he lives in London.   -  When I started working for him, he would send me off to do the most complicated jobs - for example - laying leather floors - something which I had never done and had no idea how to go about.  What this taught me is that anything is possible and given the chance and with a little bit of confidence a lot can be achieved.

I came back to Kenya looking for an opening in working with leather.  The maasai people, a pastoralist tribe, have worked with leather for centuries – theirs is a crude form of working with leather, but what is interesting is that the beadwork they put on this crude leather is very creative and very beautiful.   What is even more interesting is that they use the colours to balance between dark and light, male and female, and in other words yin and yang.  Quite often in a traditional piece of beading you will see that the beading is for example made up of mostly white beads, and then at the end there will suddenly be a dark bead.  This is to balance the colour of the beads – dark, light etc.

I decided to start working with a women’s group, based on the Tanzanian border, to try and use the skills that they already have and to adopt them so that the Western world would like and be able to use the work in their own culture.  Slowly but surely the work improved and our market has expanded, so that today we are exporting our products to many different countries.

The work includes many items – one of which I will write about today – and that is the beaded belts.    We make a lot of different designs of beaded belts, some of which you can see on our website – www.beadedleatherwork.com  .    With a lot of the belts with the vertical design, different coloured beads and the leather straps are handed out to the women, who take them home, where they create their own designs using our beads.  They return to our workshop once a week with the completed belts – these belts are then handed out to our man, Daniel,  who employs his own group of people, and who put the belts together.  The belts are lined, hand stitched, bevelled and polished.  The buckle used is made out of recycled brass and is totally hand cast.  The result – a beautiful belt  of the finest quality.

One of the most popular designs we use today are the discs on the belt.  Again the inspiration of this design comes from the Maasai who use a lot of beaded disc work in their designs.  Some of the colours used are not that which the Maasai would use, but we have used these colours to suit the western market.

All the time our designs are changing and the inspiration of these ideas comes not only from the Maasai but from different groups of people living in other parts of Africa.  A lot of my inspiration comes from the Wodaabe people, a desert group, living in Mali, Mauritania and Niger.