Fear in Bongoland by Marc Sommers

Author:Marc Sommers [Sommers, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, General, Social Science, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9781571813312
Google: zKc_qgOuGjUC
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2001-01-15T03:20:22+00:00

Tailors entering as apprentices learned to perform the first three tasks immediately. The focus, however, was on making pants. Accomplishing this skill marked the point when a person truly became a tailor. From that point, the goal was to make a suitcoat, which was very difficult. Mastery of this skill, however, could enable a tailor to one day manage a shop or start his own. Amosi, James’s cousin and boss, explained the process for new tailors this way:

After doing [the initial tasks listed above] for a while, a long time, they can learn to make a koti [suitcoat]. That’s hard, let me tell you. After one year or so . . . again, it depends on how fast they learn, and when they think they are ready, they then ask to learn to make a koti. At that point [after learning to make suitcoats] they are full tailors, and can make anything, and so are on their own. . . .

Across more than a year’s time that I spent with John and James, the two had only started learning to make a suitcoat. William, on the other hand, had already learned this skill in his settlement prior to working in Dar es Salaam.

Tailoring shops typically contained two to four manual sewing machines, plus a zigzag, another manual machine made by Singer Company which sewed the jagged line used for inseams. A shop lacking a zigzag had to pay a fee to another shop to use theirs. Shop space was reserved for ironing clothes. Behind most shops was a cramped bedroom where tailors shared a bed and cooked their meals. I noticed that tailors in both shops each received three nails to hang their belongings.

At work, each tailor sat behind their own sewing machine. The zigzag machine remained open for all to use. Sometimes the choice of sewing machines indicated their degree of interest in social interaction with customers and visitors. In Pastor Albert’s shop, Luka always sat closest to the bench next to the front door, where visitors and customers sat. John eventually moved to the front machine across from the bench and next to the front window. William, on the other hand, always sat far in the back, his face partly hidden from view by low-hanging material samples.

The Pastor described the tailoring shop attached to his house as a church business, whose sole purpose was to employ congregation members. In 1983, the church received a government small industry loan to purchase three sewing machines for the shop. They also raised money from congregation members (called “shareholders”) to make the building and buy materials. Within six years, Albert noted with pride, he repaid the government loan from shop profits.

The issue of profits was difficult to ascertain, as neither shop allowed me to look at their income and expenditure records. But the tailors told me that their salary, usually at around three to four thousand shillings a month (about twelve to sixteen U.S. dollars) plus room and board, was insufficient. And so, like most other adults in town, they tried to make additional money on the side.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.