The words run around the edge of our badge. They are not a slogan we bought — they are the shortest description we have of why the Trust exists.
Humble African Trust began in a studio, not an office. Dingulwazi Khoza — Dingx — had been painting and teaching around Victoria Falls for years, and kept running into the same problem: talent with nowhere to go. Young people who could draw beautifully and had never seen a gallery. Craftspeople selling brilliant work for a fraction of what it was worth because they met buyers at the roadside.
The Trust was the answer to that: a registered community trust with a studio at its centre, an art and craft centre being built around it, and a training programme that treats making things as a livelihood rather than a hobby.
Alongside it sits Monde Art & Craft Centre, our public-facing home, which held its pre-launch exhibition over three days in August 2024.
[Confirm: registration number, registration date and legal status]
Talent with nowhere to go is the problem we exist to fix.
Projects start with a conversation in Monde, not a proposal written somewhere else. If people here don’t want it, we don’t build it.
We would rather teach twenty people to screen-print than hand out twenty printed shirts. It is slower and it lasts.
Work made here is sold, and the money goes to the person who made it. The Trust is not a middleman taking a cut of someone’s livelihood.
No visitor takes a job a local person could hold. Volunteers work beside our team, not instead of them.
Victoria Falls draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The villages a short drive from the gorge see very little of that. Monde is one of them.
That gap — between a world-famous destination and the communities beside it — is the ground the Trust works on.
“Humble” is not modesty for its own sake. It is a working method: turn up, ask first, do the unglamorous part, and let the work speak before you do.
