Nama women build beautiful matjies huts in the Richtersveld

One would have to travel far and wide to find a place where the traditional Nama hut-building technique is still practised. A rare opportunity presented itself to me in Khubus, a small village in the Richtersveld Nature Park in the north-westernmost part of South Africa, where few local women demonstrated how these structures are erected.
The advantages of these traditional huts were their ideal suitability for nomadic people (which the Nama were before settling down finally, with the advent of colonisation). They were simple and quick to dismantle and re-erect, with minimal wear and tear to the material due to being transported on pack-oxen. They were extremely light, at under 100kg per structure, consisting of mats and poles. They were well ventilated, wind moving freely through the dry rush-mats but without causing a draft. The dry mats still allowed sufficient light into the huts, even though there were no windows, while ventilation could further be regulated by opening front and back doors (although the back door usually remained closed).
In the case of rain, the porous stalks would swell, letting not a drop of water through, and during winter the hut could be made snug with an inner lining of tanned skins. Anybody having experienced this type of architecture would realise how ideal it is for a Northern Cape climate, which is fiercely hot in summer and rainy in winter. And all of this with minimal impact on land and environment, as all material used is of organic origin and harvested in quantities that would satisfy any demand for ecological sustainability.
Although these attractive beehive-shaped huts appear easy to assemble, a lot of work goes into their construction. Initially, bundles of rushes are collected in the veld, mostly in ri-verbeds with little running water. However, in times of drought it is difficult to obtain rushes, which may be one of the contributing reasons why the art of building matjies huts has almost died out over the years.
Back home, the women would start the pro-cess during anything from twenty to forty mats (for a big hut) would be woven. Three simple tools would be used: A flat awl with a sharpened edge to pierce the rushes, a bodkin to pull the thread through the rushes, and a strangely shaped wooden handle, hollowed at the lower end, through which the seams of the threads would be drawn and the mat flattened in a movement that the mat-ladies call "ironing". The thread is drawn from a hessian bag, some individual threads being spliced together and twisted into a cord by rolling them up against the shin.
The awl would then be pushed through two or three rushes at a time, until the whole length of the 40cm-long awl would be taken up. Then the awl is tilted at an angle of 90 degrees, so that the thread can be pulled through with the bodkin from the other end. The entire length of the mat would be processed with the thread being pulled the same mat through up to 15 times. Two or three women working on the mat at the same time worked a seam along both edges with great skill and at astonishing speed. Finally, the edges of the mat were trimmed evenly using size with a razor-sharp knife and there it was - a beautiful golden-yellow mat between three and four metres in length.
In the meantime, the men would have been out at their favourite spot at the river to cut branches from the wag-'n-bietjie ("wait-a-bit") bush or the tamarisk. Branches were cleared of thorns, tanned over a fire, stripped of bark and bent into shape by being pinned to the ground and left for some days to set. The lower and thicker end was cut skew to allow it to be rammed into the ground more easily.
Finally the hut was erected. Small holes were dug into the ground in a circular shape, the poles were sunk into them and, working from the side towards inside, the poles were fastened crosswise at the tips forming a typical beehive shape. At all crossings, the poles were tied together with small pieces of cloth to lend a remarkable solidity to the frame. The mats were then draped over the frame in a specific sequence and fastened to it with threads while ensuring that not a single hole was left open. Finally, a mat that could hang down to cover the entrance was also tied in position, and the hut was finished.
In the old days the Nama traditionally slept on the floors on mats and skins. Sometimes the floor was covered with a mixture of clay and cow dung, which dried as hard as cement.
Observing the intense concentration of the women, the skill with which they weave the mats and apply age-old traditional house-building techniques, just confirmed that buildings do not have to be made of glass, steel and concrete in order to be to be grand. In this specific case one could add the word "sophisticated" to the old maxim of "small is beautiful".