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A VW Beetle Made in Africa

Displayed in the lobby of the Museum of Arts and Design is one of BMW’s famed Art Cars, a 1991 BMW 525i by Esther Mahlangu, a South African artist.

The automobile is part of an exhibition, called the Global Africa Project, which opened at the museum in Manhattan last week. The exhibition explores the effects of African art and design on the rest of globe — and vice versa — and includes several automotive-themed pieces among the works. More than 100 artists are represented, working not just in Africa but in Europe, Asia, the United States and the Caribbean.

Ms. Mahlangu’s art automobile is painted in the bright colors and bold forms of the Ndebele houses where she grew up, learning to paint from her mom and grandmother. “Ndebele art has, in an entirely natural way, something slightly formal but very majestic about it; through my work I have added the idea of movement,” Ms. Mahlangu stated in a statement.

The exhibition is about reuse and recycling, in all kinds of senses. The car-inspired pieces include headdresses made of braided artificial hair by Meschac Gaba, an artist originally from Benin. The headdresses evoke school buses, tanks and luxury sedans, and are used in dances which are seen in an accompanying video.

Then there is my car. I’ve visited shows as a student, a fan, a instructor and a journalist. This one I visited as a lender: one of the items on display is a two-foot long Volkswagen Beetle toy made in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s. My automobile is made of recycled material too: specifically, tin cans. It has wheels that turn and doors that open.

I found the automobile some years ago in a shop in SoHo. It sums up the global appeal of the Beetle, of course, but also exemplifies a rich genre of toys made in Africa of scavenged containers, not just by kids but by adult craftsmen. First seen as folk products, they are now increasingly viewed as products for sale around the world. A number of organizations are using the world wide web to link the makers of such items with wider markets.

Whoever made the Beetle was immensely clever and creative. He or she centered the Coca-Cola labels in happy product placement on the roof and doors, and used the corrugations of other cans to give a strength to the body, exactly like the designers of the old Ford Trimotor or Junkers airliners, or the Citroen 2CV. The hood’s latch, the wire door handles and the plastic headlights are brilliant touches. Some fiendishly clever engineering, perhaps done in Harare, a city mentioned on the can labels, gave the automobile its working steering.

But the automobile also reminds me of Mexican Beetles and Brazilian Beetles, or Fuscas. And it recalls a famous Beetle that I read about in “The Emperor,” the journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s account of the 1974 fall of Haile Selassie, the longtime ruler of Ethiopia.

According to Mr. Kapuscinski, the emperor owned about two dozen vehicles, including a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes-Benz and a Lincoln. But when the revolutionaries finally came to remove him from his palace, Mr. Kapuscinski records, they brought a green Volkswagen. One rebel courteously folded the front seat forward so the emperor could get into the back seat. “You can’t be serious,” stated Selassie. But they were.

source : wheels.blogs.nytimes.com

More Source:

A VW Beetle Made in Africa - NYTimes.com
South African VW Beetle Advert - YouTube
Volkswagen Beetle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DesignApplause | A VW Beetle made in africa.

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Submited at Wednesday, November 24th, 2010 at 12:00 pm on Automotive by ethan
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