9 minute read
Farouque Abdela
He’s dressed Princess Diana and been the darling of swinging London, but fashion designer Farouque Abdela is now focused on transforming the look and lives of his homeland, Zanzibar
“Everything I wear is made in Zanzibar, except my glasses.” Fashion designer Farouque Abdela is holding court in the Secret Garden café of one of his favourite Stone Town hotels, Emerson Spice. He’s dressed immaculately in a loose black linen shirt and trousers, leather sandals and one of his own hand-printed waistcoats. The look is accessorised with a hand-made basket – bought on Pemba – and a similarly weaved fan that he flourishes to emphasise his points and battle the midday island heat.
The hottest hours of the day usually find him in the cool confines of sister hotel Emerson on Hurumzi where the staff are resplendent in the shimmering peach uniforms he designed and his interior design skills have given the rooms an opulent update.
Still, when we meet he is keen to talk over drinks at the Secret Garden. I have been looking forward to interviewing Abdela for some time and he does not disappoint. As he cuts through Stone Town’s labyrinthine lanes, fan in full effect, I hear him end a phone call with a potential client with the withering: “I wouldn’t get out of bed for that amount, darling.”
It’s an arch comment that seems to come straight from the fierce fashion scene of London that Abdela moved in for almost four decades. His Afrocentric designs, put together with the embroidery and tailoring skills that were a family tradition and fine-tuned attending the London School of Fashion, brought him success and big-name clients. Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger is said to have turned up unannounced at the designer’s Abbey Road studio to buy his entire collection of waistcoats and Abdela also famously designed for Princess Diana – the pair bonded over a love of going barefoot – as well as author Maya Angelou and jazz musician Courtney Pine.
Return to Zanzibar
Still, it is clear that Zanzibar is where Abdela’s heart is. Many were surprised when he left London and returned to his birthplace in 2004. Even the designer himself had his reservations on arrival. The still lithe and dapper 69-year-old has said in previous interviews that he felt “traumatised” on seeing what had become of the ornate Swahili architecture of Stone Town that so enchanted him as a young man. “I was getting lost in the streets they were so different,” he says. “I thought this is not my home. All the buildings were falling apart in 2004.”
But, Abdela – who left Zanzibar aged 14, two years after the revolution – has, since his return, set about reuniting Stone Town and Zanzibar with its past.
‘Kindred spirit’
Some of that work surrounds us as we talk. The Secret Garden was until recently the tattered remnants of a marketplace, but Abdela has helped transform it into a stylish open-air courtyard restaurant by day and a cool music venue at night hosting local taarab bands. An array of potted plants adds a lush landscape and modern artworks hang in each cloistered, intimate seating area, but many of the walls have been left in their crumbling original form so as, Abdela says, “to retain the link between then and now”.
Abdela found a kindred spirit in hotelier Emerson Skeens. He describes his friend as a “one of a kind who left a real legacy” in restoring such prominent, historic buildings – Emerson Spice was owned by the last Swahili ruler of Zanzibar and Emerson on Hurumzi once belonged to merchant Tharia Topan, then the richest man in East Africa – to their former glories. “Even when I am in the Hurumzi lobby it gives me a feeling of being among royalty. There is something regal about that place.”
Reviving rituals
Skeens died five years ago and Abdela sees himself as a “custodian in keeping his work and vision alive”.
Abdela has also revived one of the most glorious rituals of the age of the Sultans in Zanzibar – the Umbrella Dance. An elegant, colourful procession with dancers twirling their umbrellas high above their heads, the dance was introduced by Zanzibar’s third Sultan Seyyid Barghash – who was also responsible for introducing taarab music to the island – to be performed only on his birthday.
Abdela loves the dance for its blend of beauty and rebellion. Carrying an umbrella was a sign of nobility at that time so a troupe of low-born dancers each brandishing one while performing for the sultan was a daring move. “It was a hit back,” says Abdela. “A way of saying we’ll do what is forbidden and we’ll do it better.”
The performance is the centrepiece of a series of ‘Unique Entertainments’ Abdela curates quarterly for visitors to the island. He feels tourism has been key to maintaining a demand for the Zanzibar’s archaic customs and here guests are showered with jasmine petals and entertained with traditional music and dances, which Abdela has choreographed and designed the costumes for. “They are a headache to arrange,” says Abdela, “but they are a lot of fun.” The shows provide regular work and a good income for the dancers, who had seen interest dry up in their skills before these events.
Abdela, who still lives in family home on the outskirts of Stone Town with his two brothers, is doing what he can to keep these and other traditional art forms alive, but it is proving a battle. “You can smell and feel it,” he says. “The local culture is disappearing.” He has never followed fashion’s fickleness and hunger for the new. “I don’t understand it when someone is able to tell you what this year’s colour is – I don’t want to be dictated to on creativity,” he says. “Fashion is about individuality, colours, madness.”
Timeless, traditional African textiles have always featured in Abdela’s fashion designs. He has amassed hundreds of khanga – his collection includes examples from the 1940s – and in returning to Zanzibar, where the khanga originated, he has done much to champion handcrafted quality in his work and that of his protégés. He has a studio at Hurumzi – his work was once centred at the oceanfront Sultan’s palace The House of Wonders – where he continues to produce one-off designs “with the Farouque touch” for the local market as well as clients as far afield as Singapore, Brazil and London.
Innovate to create
Abdela has found that the restrictions of working in Zanzibar have necessitated new levels of creativity. “I have to be creative to get things done here. Some materials are not available to use so you have to rack your brain for alternatives. I recently created a collection from potato sack cloth and a collection from plastic bags here – something I never would have done in London. The plastic dresses are totally unwearable, but I sold them for a lot of money. Two Saudi princesses bought them. I couldn’t believe it.”
Usually, Abdela works with locally sourced hand-woven cotton and shares his stitching skills and years of expertise with students in his studio. Many of them have gone on to start their own businesses. Abdela has also brought trained tailors from New York and London to the archipelago to teach cutting and proper finishing here and he has been campaigning for textiles and fashion courses to be introduced at Zanzibar University. His work designing the uniforms at Hurumzi he sees as a model that could potentially transform the local fashion industry.
“There are 580 hotels on island,” he says. “If we empower our people here to design clothes for them all it will be cheaper for the hotel and create employment here. There are so many opportunities.”
For all Abdela’s work to revive traditional customs on Zanzibar what he is most proud of giving new life to is a group of young people who have become like a family to him since his return from what he calls his “self-imposed exile”.
His high profile on his return led to him being introduced to a group of young people who were all born with HIV from parents who had the illness. He was asked if he could help the group organise itself. Abdela, who had lost many friend and colleagues to Aids during his time in the UK in the 1980s, was moved to help. He co-founded the Zanzibar Association of People Living with HIV (Zapha+) to ensure the youngsters not only had long lives – all are given HIV treatment – but that their lives were full of promise.
Abdela organised English lessons as few of the group could read or write, taught them marketable skills and secured them an office to work from.
“The proudest moment of my life was when I handed over the keys to their office – the look on their faces was priceless,” he says.
Soon the group was making its own spice soap to sell – Emerson Spice was an early customer – and Abdela called in a few favours from his fashion friends to bring in sewing machines to make their own garments under the designer’s tutelage. The results were sold at the Zapha+ market stall in Stone Town.
Presidential support
The project’s good work caught the attention of US President at the time, Bill Clinton. A well-known backer of Aids charities, Clinton visited the centre and was moved to send a cheque to cover rent and salaries for four years. The gesture had a huge financial impact, but more crucially it removed the stigma attached to the organisation on the island. “After Clinton left everyone wanted to know about the building,” Abdela says.
Zapha+ has gone from strength to strength since with more than 3,000 members across Zanzibar and Pemba. Abdela’s role is less hands-on – “they don’t need me anymore,” he says – but he still puts his own money into the running of the project and visits still warm his heart.
“It’s wonderful to go in the office as there was a time people thought there was no hope,” he says. “Now they are running their own radio station and there is a photography club. There are people there who were only two years old when the project began and now they are training to be journalists. I would like to see a member of this organisation as a member of parliament one day.”
Abdela charitable efforts have continued with another cause close to his heart, the Organisation of People Living with Mental Illness, which he is a patron of.
“I like to help my own people,” he says. “There is a joy. I tell my friends in London what they have learned there they can teach others here. It’s wonderful to give back to your community. I am just one man. Imagine what we can do together.”
More information
Find out about Farouque Abdela’s Unique Entertainments, visit farouque.com
To find out more about the work of Zapha+, go to envaya.org/zapha
