Handicraft as a Way of Life

The Baba Tree is contributing to positive change in Ghana by offering hand-woven products to people all around the world.

In Bolgatanga, the weavers at The Baba Tree produce beautiful products and accessories. We met with founder Gregory MacCarthy to learn more about the creative process and the traditions of weaving in northern Ghana.

Can you tell us about the history behind your name? 

In the old days, I used to ride my bicycle around to a bunch of weaving groups, issuing contracts for baskets. Often, we would sit in the shade under a Baobab tree to do our business. Barry, my former business partner, came up with the name “The Baba Tree”. He was driving along one day and one of his gurus in India came up in conversation, his name was something like “Baba Baba”, and then he said “Baba Tree, the Baobab Tree”. Baba is a slang name for the tree in the local vernacular. So, The Baba Tree Basket Company worked. There you go, it was inspired by the tree and a former spiritual advisor from India. To make a short answer long. 

Let’s make it a bit longer. How come you were riding your bicycle around these groups of weavers in the first place?

Well, that’s how people did things. You would go to various weaving groups and check out their work. I would ride with a couple of assistants on second-hand Japanese commuter bikes – the Japanese would ride them to the train stations to catch the train going into the city to work, fabulous bikes by the way – that used to arrive by the truckload here. 

I used to go to various weaving groups, issue contracts, and every few weeks I would be going to these groups, all over Bolgatanga. There was a lot of bike riding to check on the progress of their work! It was a disastrous methodology, because people were always late for the meetings, they brought poor quality work, and time was running out. 

In these weaving groups, there was corruption and nepotism. The ambitious, high-quality workers weren’t getting the amount of work that they should. It was a model of working that I tolerated only for a very short period. Finally, I said, “well this doesn’t work for me. If you want to do business with me, you come down to my compound and if I like your basket, I will buy it. If I don’t like it, I won’t buy it.” 

Because with the old model, even if the quality was poor, I still had to fish out money. We started a new system where people would come straight to the house and if I liked it, I would buy it. If I didn’t, I would say take it to the marketplace, or sell it to another exporter. So that’s what happened to the bicycle system. I would daunt around Bolgatanga to different weaving groups, but eventually it didn’t work for me. 

And what about the step before that, what made you work with weaving groups in Bolgatanga in the first place? 

I first came to Ghana in December 1999 to study music. I always wanted to give drumming a shot, to study it very intensely, just to get it out of my system. And I did that for about five years. I was a very disappointing student; I became a good novice but nothing more. 

I had a few shekels in my pocket at the end of my journey, and so I bought some cloth and beads and whatever else it was, and filled my suitcase and took it back to the island where I lived, off the coast of British Columbia in western Canada, where there was a community really switched on to African music and African drumming. When I wasn’t doing landscaping or being a stone mason, I would sell these things in the Friday markets. That’s how it started. 

Every subsequent year, I would buy a little bit more, a little bit more, and then suddenly it became formalised. I worked in a lot of different craft areas up until 2008. I was really good at it but travelling all over the country doing quality control and designing various things, like beads and so on, was exhausting. 

There was also a lot of carnage on the road, and I’m a homebody. So eventually, I said I’m tired of travelling all over the place, even though we were doing some cool stuff, very high-quality stuff. I knew by then that the baskets were the biggest sellers. 

By that time, I had a brief marriage which produced my gorgeous daughter Precious. After a two-year sabbatical, starting in December 2010, we started again in 2012, when I was living here full time, with a completely new business model, where I focused on baskets. That’s pretty much it. 

In your products and in your communication, there is a very keen understanding of aesthetics. It’s very fashionable, for lack of a better word. Who designs your products?

I pretty much design them all. Having said that, it all finds a life of its own. There are a few of our art baskets that were designed by the weavers. People are pitching in and coming up with their own designs now. But initially, and especially after we went to India in 2013, and learned new techniques there, I came up with designs using those techniques. So, it was primarily me, but big deal, who cares.

I used to do all the colour designs but now a young lad – we’ve grown up together, I met him when I moved into this compound almost twenty years ago – he does all the colour designs now, it’s fabulous! So in terms of colour, I have nothing to do with that anymore. I might give a few pointers when I walk by, or suggest he should try this or that, but no, nowadays in terms of design I’m not in it. 

We’ve come up with a few new designs that were mine, but it’s such a collective effort.  These days, I’m mainly turning compost and planting seeds and moving biomass! 

It sounds like the design is a rather organic process...?

People assume you make a lot of money, but I don’t, because of the fair trade-nature of our business and how much we put in to mitigate our carbon footprint. I don’t get paid dividends, nor do I get paid a salary. Nor does my silent business partner. Everything goes back into the business. This requires us to move into a new market, where our products become much more fashionable, well-styled and designed, with longevity, creating timeless classics in the materials that we use. So that it would be hard for people to peg, “well that was made in 2021, that has to be from that era”. That’s what we’re going to shoot for. That’s going to require a lot more logistics. Shipping is a problem! With tongue firmly planted in cheek; Baba Tree rubbing shoulders with Gucci, that’s the ambition. But thanks for the compliment on the design!

How many people are working with you? 

There are 40 core staff members that do everything from shipping to applying leather to photography and overseeing the website. Guys on the land making compost, creating biomass, building things and buildings. 

Then there are about 200 weavers, but that number fluctuates depending on how the business is going. We used to carry a lot of stock but that was costing too much money, and now we’re making to order as much as possible, so not as many baskets are damaged and have to be sold at a reduced price. 

How do the weavers learn their craft?

It’s a tradition here. When the men would be sitting outside, keeping an eye on the crops to make sure that no livestock would come and eat them, they would sit in the shade and use straw to weave hats, placemats, various things, out of a fine, local straw. It was men’s business; men did the weaving. 

After all these years, I haven’t been able to get a straight answer of when these baskets became an export commodity, and where did the design come from for these round baskets? Was it designed here, by the Gurunsi people, or was it introduced somehow? I still don’t know! But what did happen was that a straw from the south of the country was introduced to the industry, which made the baskets a lot stronger. That is the straw that they use to weave baskets now. The finer, traditional straw that they used to weave from, is used for things like hats, and some of our smaller, tiny baskets. So that indigenous straw still has its use. 

You mentioned a trip to India, could you tell me more about that? 

We went to India at the behest of the Indian Department for External Affairs in conjunction with the National Institute Design Ahmedabad, Gujerat, as an outreach programme to five different African countries, to better the livelihood of weavers. The focus was on women. 

A group from India travelled here, so the teachers and designers from NID could check out the work. A whole group of people were supposed to then travel to India, but due to the outrageous politics here, in the end it was only The Baba Tree weavers that went. Twenty of us went to the National Institute Design in India, and they taught us new weaving techniques, but utilizing our own straw. Fabulous! They treated us like royalty. The campus was absolutely beautiful. It was a trip of a lifetime. 

Some men were allowed to, because I insisted, as it was traditionally men’s craft and, in those days, men were generally the best weavers in the industry. Some of these people had never been out of Bolgatanga before, let alone flying to India. That whole trip is a story, but that’s for another day. 

Is there a progressive development in the weaver’s profession? 

Africa is not Europe, and certainly you wouldn’t find Bolgatanga in Europe. Things are very different here. A lot of time here, it’s about survival. One does what one can. In Europe, you have your various education programmes and social safety nets, lots of food around. Things are generally efficient and well-run. Here, life is a struggle.            

Some weavers have moved on from being weavers to being in our core group, but that’s only a few. In the end, what it’s about, is learning new designs. Often weavers will earn more with their commissions and what they’re paid upon finishing a basket. If they’ve had a really good month, they will earn more than a lot of the core staff members. 

You got to understand that we’re dealing with a population here that was absolutely neglected by the colonial administration. It’s been terrible. There’s no programme to further the development of the weavers, because running a company in this area is hard enough. 

We were going to apply for funding for a new project, using the soil here and running on solar panels, but they wanted to know how many women and teenagers and NGOs were going to be involved. And it doesn’t work like that here. The struggle it has taken, and the lessons learned, to realise that efficiency at The Baba Tree requires incredible focus. We can’t add more external administration! To do things well here, our focus has to be laser-like. This is one of the poorest regions – if not the poorest – and what weavers have done to transform their lives through working at the Baba Tree, with its generous compensation, I feel that’s enough for now. 

But I would say that people in our core group have learned a lot more on the job and moved forward, but weavers weave. And that gives them the flexibility to show up at whatever time they like. 

You mentioned something in passing earlier, and that’s the next step for the Baba Tree. 

The market in Europe hasn’t grown as much as we would have liked, because of import duty to the EU. In the US, people aren’t charged duty when the products come into the country, and so we have most of our customers there. This is because George W. Bush, in 2005, wrote into legislation the AGOA trade agreement, which stands for African Growth and Opportunity Act. Any countries in Africa that dance to America’s tune were able to ship their products pretty much across the border into the US duty-free. I sense that it was one of the only good things that George W. Bush did. And Barack Obama renewed that. This separates the US market from Australia, Canada, and Europe, making the US a bigger market for us. However, when we start going more upmarket, perhaps our baskets will be finished in Italy. 

We’re in discussion with an NGO there that works with Italian refugees who are trained by Italian leather masters to do top-quality leather work, which Italy is famous for. I would love to see that come to fruition. 

How do you use what you grow on the land in your production? 

We are now growing elephant grass, which we use to weave our baskets – we’ve had a trial project to see how well it would grow here, and it grows really well! The government up here [in the north of Ghana] was concerned that, due to growing urbanisation and illegal mining activities south of the country, that the supply of straw would continually diminish over the years. They wanted the industry to have a crack at growing it, and so we at The Baba Tree did. 

We compost human manure here. We've built a fabulous, very simple system that we’re still perfecting to make sure that it’s completely safe to use. We plant trees, create biomass – that’s a big part of what we do. It’s my love.

This is our home. If we’re going to have a 100 percent environmentally good production centre, it all ties in with the land, and growing food, bringing health to a very denuded landscape, owing to population growth, overgrazing, soil erosion, and so many other things. 

When we’re going for grants, I try to explain that this is a holistic approach, it’s not just nuts and bolts making baskets. The whole land comes into play, it’s all integrated. All our discarded straw is composted. We’ve created dams and other water attachment systems that see you through the dry seasons. 

In the future, we will be creating agricultural products. The baskets are not separate from the farm, everything is integrated. 

https://babatree.com/