Symmetry Could Be A Deal-Breaker

When I lived in Kano, Nigeria, one of my friends was from Minnesota.   One day, International Telephone and Telegraph sent this guy a hundred dollars, with instructions that he must spend all of it.

Specifically, he had to spend the money on Nigerian handicrafts that he thought would sell in America.  ITT had made lots of money selling telecommunications equipment to third-world countries, and they wanted to do something to help out these countries.  Their goal was to create business by importing Nigerian handicrafts and benefited local artisans.

I gladly accompanied my Minnesota friend on his handicrafts spending spree

I had been in Kano long enough to know that there were no goods being produced simply as decoration.  Everything for sale in the market had a purpose, such as a bowl for your food and a cover to keep flies out of the bowl for your food.  The bowls were made from gourds and the covers were hand-made straw mats.  The gourds were decorated with carvings on the outside; the straw mats had designs made by using different colored straw.

A bowl cost about 42 cents; a straw mat cost about 28 cents.  I wondered how we were going to spend all of the hundred dollars.

My Minnesota friend and I covered the large markets in the city and a few of the small once-a-week markets in the countryside.  We managed to spend all of ITT's money.  (Buying blankets helped since a hand-woven cotton blanket could cost $3 and a hand-woven camel's hair blanket could cost $6).

We used the most reliable shipping company in the city, Panalpina, to ship the crafts back to ITT.  Panalpina was a Swiss company.  I still wonder what a Swiss company was doing in our corner of Africa.

And I still wonder if ITT had thought about all the obstacles to importing handicrafts.

Take, for example, importing 5,000 straw mats from Kano.  How do you get the local artisans, who are used to producing at a leisurely pace, to produce such a large number?  How do you guarantee that they will produce 5,000 mats in a hurry without any flaws?

Who are the middlemen who will see that the mats do get produced?  How much money will filter down to the individual artisan?

I had been in Kano long enough to know that symmetry was not important to the local craftsmen.  A blanket would be woven with a yellow stripe and a red stripe at one end, and three red stripes at the other end.

Whenever I see an African item that is non-symmetrical, I call it genuine.  However, when most Americans see an item that is non-symmetrical, they call it crude.  Would they be willing to buy it?  Was symmetry a deal-breaker?

We never heard back from International Telephone and Telegraph.  Perhaps that was a sign that they had started thinking about the obstacles.

It took many years, but, eventually, some people figured out how to handle the obstacles.  I don’t know if ITT was involved in creating The Fair Trade Movement, but you can now find shops all over America selling Fair Trade handicrafts from third-world countries.  

Maybe that hundred dollars worth of goods that we sent via a Swiss shipping company was the start of something noble. 

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Here is a upbeat 2-minute YouTube video explaining Free Trade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pkIW30EJs8

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com