World, here comes Africa

African Lookbook is a new website celebrating and selling the most hip-and-happening design, art, music and culture from the continent. Made by an American, Aaron P Kohn, it’s painting a funky new picture of Africa to the rest of the world. We chatted to Aaron.

Who is Aaron P Kohn and how did he come to fall in love with Africa?

When I was 14, we watched The Gods Must Be Crazy in school. I was drawn to the naïve idea that somewhere, people still lived a Utopian lifestyle in the woods. It didn’t take long for my understanding to become much more complex, and I ended up fundraising for some anthropologists who work with the San Bushmen. Then I made a documentary for school kids about how people everywhere are the same, showing San school kids as their peers.

A couple of years later, I heard about a secondary school in Botswana that I could attend and did. That’s where I met Phil Sandick, my partner on African Lookbook. He showed me David Goldblatt’s Some Afrikaners: Revisited, and I started to see that there was a side to Africa that wasn’t defined by NGOs or by bad governance – there’s a lot of amazing work being done.

When did you first have the idea for the African Lookbook website and what have the milestones been in making it a reality?

Phil has a Masters degree in Oral Histories and experience as a photographer. He was always shooting things in Africa. My film about the San had jump-started an interest in storytelling for myself. I had been writing about African designers for CoolHunting.com, and when I saw the Ardmore Qalakabusha Couch in the Design Indaba magazine… I knew I had to help get stuff like that into the US market.

We ended up putting the idea aside for almost a year. We’re both busy and have weird ideas all the time. Then earlier this year, I was staying in Johannesburg and Phil was in Europe, and we started talking about how oral histories could be really important; who else is documenting artists’ lives and thoughts? So we started collecting oral histories.

It is such an energising, upbeat, alternative perspective on Africa. What is the website’s driving manifesto?

The driving curatorial manifesto is, shallowly enough, “we do what we like”. On the design side, we decide what’s in and what’s out based on our substantial experience around the continent. A lot of times we see something we like so much that we work with the designer to bring the product to market. On the oral history side, we try to do as many of them as possible given our limited resources. Thank goodness for Skype.

Ultimately, we care about two things: sharing stories and making connections. We hope the site does both.

What is the world’s perception of Africa and South Africa at the moment?

People are still excited that the World Cup was a hit, but in America, there’s not a whole lot more exposure to what else goes on in South Africa. Africa comes labelled as “Fair Trade” or parcelled as part of an NGO campaign. That’s fine with me. There’s no “wrong” story, but there are other narratives as well.

The African Lookbook collection has some Fair Trade products and a few that support various disadvantaged groups, but people should see the products as goods that stand up to any other product in the marketplace. They’re not simply “African”.

What are your future plans for African Lookbook?

We’ve got some things up our sleeve, but we’re not yet ready to say more than the basics: we want the shop operating as smoothly as possible and we plan to keep providing interesting content.

Does your shop deliver to South Africa?

No, South Africa delivers to our shop! Most of the products we sell are currently available in South Africa – just not though a single source. When we begin carrying more goods from other parts of Africa, we’ll certainly try to make sure someone in South Africa can be a conduit.

More at www.africanlookbook.com.