Moulding the Ceramic Industry One Pot at a Time

Born and raised in Ghana, Safori left his homeland at an early age when, after completing high school, he took a job aboard a merchant ship. After much travelling around the world, he eventually decided to settle in Holland, where he felt at home amongst the multiracial population. Safori started out performing menial jobs at hotels and restaurants, concentrating on his artistic talents in his spare time. Eventually his skill was recognised and his art took off rapidly – allowing him to begin focusing on it full-time.

Before he discovered clay, Safori’s work was largely limited to oil paintings of landscapes. His eyes light up when he describes what it was like to hold and mould his first piece of clay, and says that after his first encounter he knew he had found his passion. From that moment on Safori threw all his energy into discovering more about clay and its capabilities.

Safori declares that he was fortunate to have ended up in a country like Holland, because of the many opportunities that they afford to immigrants: “Because Holland has so many immigrants from Africa, they have plenty of non-profit organisations that aid immigrants in educating themselves. I was lucky to be able to attend many courses on clay and ceramics and picked up a lot of knowledge and valuable skills.”

After gaining sufficient insight, Safori decided to return to Ghana to plough back what he had learnt into the society that had raised him. Safori is extremely patriotic towards Africa and says that he found it hard to live elsewhere. He believes that if all Africans who have left the continent to be educated elsewhere were to return to Africa, the continent would be in a better state. “If money motivated me I would have stayed in Europe, but for me it is about putting skills back into Africa and helping the continent reach its potential. I want to do something for the greater good, which was my motivation behind developing the ceramics industry in Ghana,” he says.

Safori says that although the ceramics industry in Ghana goes back to the beginning of time, it has remained primitive and the country lacks the technology that is available in Holland and elsewhere. In order to succeed in his profession, Safori had to start from scratch, importing or producing state-of-the-art equipment to bring the clay industry in Ghana into the 21st century.

The Centre for Science and Industrial Research in Ghana commissioned Safori to build such equipment so that he could locally produce products that were otherwise imported from the East. Although the project was a success, Safori found that in the end they could not compete with the affordability of Chinese ceramics and crockery. Safori then decided to turn his business around and work towards producing clay bricks and tiles – a market still untapped in Ghana.

This too proved to be unsuccessful, as Ghana has a long-standing tradition of using cement to produce bricks. Enticing them to switch to clay proved too difficult. However, not one to give up, Safori began looking across the border to find an African country in which his business would be successful: “Ghana proved to be a dead end for my industry and I had to look for other countries which utilised clay bricks. South Africa was a natural choice for me after Ghana, as I view Johannesburg as the New York of Africa. Africa is not a happy story but in South Africa there is hope and we have the potential to equal any other country.”

South Africa indeed showed great potential, as the clay market was already established and flourishing. Once here, Safori realised that there was a big market for ceramics and clay art works, especially in the tourism industry, and he could once again return to his artistic passion.

It was not long before Safori opened his own art shop at the V & A Waterfront in Cape Town. Once again, he began experimenting with clay and developed a ceramic with a high resistance to heat. Using this clay, he designed and patented crack-resistant braai stands far more durable than any of those on the market.

After two years in Cape Town, Safori decided to move to Johannesburg to develop his business. This is how he became involved in the Studio Bela art gallery. “A contact of mine heard of a gallery that was looking for a partner. Art being my first love, it was hard to resist and I became a partner. The rest as they say is history,” he states.

An artist and scientist in his own right, Safori has successfully combined his innate knowledge of clay with that which he learnt abroad to produce ceramics in a league of their own. And with his arrival here, South Africa is all the richer for it.