Amechi Mandi and Kelechi Ejikeme

After greater than a decade as a lawyer at high-powered banking corporations like Goldman Sachs and Société Générale, Nigerian-British Kelechi Ejikeme left the company world to comply with her ardour for inside design.

Her rug assortment is impressed by Nigeria’s numerous terrain – rolling hills, winding rivers, sprawling savannahs and dense forests, and jogs my memory of the view from planes.

“So, while you interpret that right into a rug or a carpet, it’s symbolic,” she stated after I met her at her stall on the Decorex inside design present held in London final month.

“It’s like, each minute, that is what we’re really day by day stepping on.”

Made out of jute, a sturdy and eco-friendly materials, every rug integrates these pure parts.

Jute is usually cultivated regionally for its edible leaves, not for fibre. It comes from the identical plant used for ewedu soup, a staple in south-western Nigeria.

To convey her imaginative and prescient to life, Ejikeme has her rugs produced in India and Nepal, the place jute is extra broadly developed right into a thriving trade.

Additionally on the occasion was Amechi Mandi, a Cameroonian-Nigerian inside designer who gained Home & Backyard journal’s Rising Star award in 2022.

He was not showcasing any of his work however had simply spoken in a facet session about his transition from style to inside design.

Mandi holds a level in furnishings and product design, however after working within the style trade and later at a design agency, he turned more and more dissatisfied with the dearth of real African-inspired inside textiles.

Too typically, he discovered, they relied on “clichéd”, post-colonial motifs.

This led him to discover his Cameroonian and Nigerian heritage, with a concentrate on pre-colonial traditions.

Recognising the untapped potential of indigenous textiles fading from reminiscence -especially with the rise of “ankara” wax prints, a European import that has come to symbolise African design – Mandi got down to revive these cultural parts.

He started integrating conventional methods and patterns into his designs, and his work now features a common assortment of cushions and throws, in addition to a profitable wallpaper collaboration.

“Individuals have advised me, ‘Oh, your work isn’t African,’ as a result of they wish to see ankara prints. It has been so impressed within the minds,” Mandi advised me.

“I get inspiration from indigenous traditions and cultures, after which, I give it a extra modern spin,” he added.

Listening to Mandi made me realise how a lot I, too, had come to affiliate trendy African design with ankara materials.

This textile has dominated African style and design, making its mark on world levels in current a long time.

And so, as I wandered by means of the exhibition, it was simple to imagine that African designs have been absent from this notable gathering.

When she first began, Ejikeme juggled each regulation and inside design, working in a single through the week and the opposite on weekends. It didn’t take lengthy for her to grasp the place her true ardour lay.

“In a single world, you’re making an attempt to comprise your power or your self or your expression simply so that you simply don’t ruffle feathers, whereas in one other world your power, you possibly can’t even extinguish it,” she stated.

Since making the leap to full-time design six years in the past, she has tackled quite a lot of initiatives, from houses and workplaces to film units.

Final 12 months, she launched her personal rug assortment, including a brand new dimension to her work from her Swallow and Tea studio.

“It’s a extremely new factor and I’ve solely had two reveals however up to now I’ve had principally residential and retail consumers primarily from Europe in all probability as a result of my first present was in Belgium. Decorex was my first UK present,” Ejikeme stated.

Most of Mandi’s clients are Europeans, a pattern he attributes to a prevailing desire amongst many Africans for overseas merchandise.

“Most Africans nonetheless choose to purchase a Gucci,” he stated.

“I do have just a few Africans shopping for however they aren’t like on a regular basis Africans. They have been all individuals who have been born and bred overseas and are deep into African heritage and tradition.”

Each Ejikeme and Mandi concur that inside design in Africa continues to be in its developmental levels.

In distinction to style, which has lengthy been a big focus for Africans and has just lately skilled exceptional development, the sector of African inside design is simply beginning to set up itself.

Ejikeme mirrored on her first unbiased mission in 2013, which coincided with a brand new wave of Africans in London getting into high-paying fields like funding banking.

She aimed to create areas that not solely exuded luxurious and luxury but additionally captured a way of dwelling for her African shoppers, reflecting their heritage in a significant approach.

“I used to be stumped as a result of I am any individual who loves antiques. I like outdated design. Once I was in design faculty in London, my favorite factor was historical past of design, like studying about all of the completely different intervals – Victorian, Edwardian, and so on – and what distinguished one from the opposite.

“However there was no such factor in Africa. There’s nothing just like the historical past of African design as a result of we have not actually stored that observe,” she stated.

This realisation motivated her to start categorising African design intervals to higher perceive and protect the continent’s design evolution, an ongoing mission she started throughout her previous 10 years residing in Nigeria earlier than returning to London final 12 months.

Ejikeme visited locations just like the Bogobiri artwork gallery in Lagos, which displayed a combination of outdated sculpture and trendy artwork.

She additionally visited sellers in quiet corners of Nigerian markets, the place she got here throughout staffs of workplace utilized by Igbo elders in precolonial instances. She started categorising these objects she got here throughout in keeping with their interval in historical past, whether or not late Nineties or pre-colonial.

She has not but completed and desires to dedicate extra time to it to make use of them in her inside design initiatives.

Mandi believes that following traits in how we design our houses and different areas was traditionally by no means an African factor, particularly with the centuries of the transatlantic slave commerce.

“Historically, interiors have by no means been a precedence. We’ve got at all times been into performance. We have been extra into adorning our exteriors, like portray the partitions, portray the surface,” he stated.

“Every civilization has advanced, however we didn’t have the possibility to evolve due to the 400 years we have been arrested with the transatlantic slave commerce.”

He added that Africans have been in “fixed flight” through the slave commerce, so “how are you going to assume, ‘I’ve this home, I’ve to make the within wonderful, let me put that bench, let me weave this material’? Our society did not have the possibility to evolve like that.”

Each Ejikeme and Mandi famous that many rich and outstanding Africans, from celebrities to entrepreneurs, typically have interiors that lack a distinctly African identification.

Nonetheless, Ejikeme believes that is altering as extra Africans acquire disposable earnings, they’re more and more investing in adorning their houses in a approach that tells their private story and captures their experiences.

“In case you have a product that may be made lovely, and beautiful, and form of memorable, that tells some sort of story or has some sort of which means, it would enchantment to Africans and different individuals that aren’t African,” she says.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is a Nigerian journalist and novelist primarily based in Abuja and London.