Cape Town Street Crafts

Street Crafts

Anyone who travels round the streets of the Mother City can­not fail to be moved by either the extreme beauty or the dire poverty that makes up much of Cape Town life. Each jour­ney can be an emo­tional roller-coaster ride – joy, sad­ness, enchant­ment, anger, hope. But for me one of the most power­ful and recur­ring themes has been an abso­lute respect and admir­a­tion for the extraordin­ary crafts­man­ship and dazzling invent­ive­ness of the street artists that ply their bead work, paint­ings and metal sculp­tures around a num­ber of major inter­sec­tion across town.

Wow! These guys are good, trans­form­ing all man­ner of bits of recycled plastic and tin into won­der­fully ima­gin­at­ive gifts, recre­at­ing everything, from pen­guins to Harley Davidson’s, lamp shades to fly­ing pigs in elab­or­ate vibrant bead work, or paint­ing lively and cheeky slices of town­ship life onto the back of old cup­board doors, adding rows of tiny 3D shacks made from tin cans. Two par­tic­u­lar favour­ites of mine are the funky chick­ens made out of plastic bags, and the ingeni­ous wind mills made from old aer­o­sol cans.

One major advant­age of a dash­board deal is that you can assure that all the money goes to the artist and their fam­ily, and it’s great to be able to put a face to your chosen piece. It is also worth not­ing that these street artis­ans take com­mis­sions, and will more than hap­pily cre­ate your dream gift (a friend of mine ordered a fly­ing dol­phin mobile to hang above his unborn child’s crib). And if some­thing is a bit pricy, you are more than wel­come to haggle. Some people get over­whelmed by the sheer pas­sion with which these vendors sell their wares, and when two or three vendors approach you at once, try­ing to outdo each other. Street vendors are mas­ters of the hard sell, so just look the products over and be firm about what you want.

Street Crafts

There are a num­ber of key loc­a­tions around town, each with places to pull over, where the artists take advant­age of the lights to parade their work. The junc­tion between the M3 and Newlands Avenue is a par­tic­u­larly pop­u­lar spot, as is the entrance to Constantia Village Shopping Centre, Constantia Road, (with breath­tak­ing metal sculp­tures), and the corner of Rondebosch Common, close to the Silwood Shopping Centre.

One thing that you are bound to encounter whilst driv­ing around town is ‘Funny Money’ an A4 flyer packed with car­toons and gags and witty pro­verbs, sold on a dona­tion basis at many busy inter­sec­tions, the product of a won­der­ful piece of recip­rocal back scratch­ing between Cape Town’s poor and a print­ing com­pany called Topcopy. There’s some­thing for every­one — bazaar adverts, true stor­ies, pseudo sci­entific non­sense such as ‘How you undress reveals your per­son­al­ity’, and even a ‘Let’s learn Xhosa’ sec­tion.

Also, keep a lookout for The Big Issue, also at major traffic lights (robots), which, since its incep­tion, has given ‘a hand up, not a handout’ to over 10 000 people across South Africa. It costs R12, but feel free to give a little extra. So when driv­ing around Cape Town, it’s always best to keep a pile of loose change handy.

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