Humble African Trust runs six programmes out of one patch of ground in Monde. They share a single idea: that the quickest way into a community — and into looking after the place that community lives in — is through the things people make.
The studio is the oldest part of the Trust and still its engine. Painting, mixed media, found-material sculpture — and mentorship, which mostly means an experienced artist sitting next to a younger one for as long as it takes.
There is no curriculum. There is a room, materials, someone who has done it before, and the expectation that you will finish what you start.
Studio work pays for a good deal of what follows. Pieces made here are exhibited and sold, and the studio takes commissions.
The Centre is where the Trust meets the public. Local artists and craftspeople have somewhere proper to show and sell — walls, light, a roof, and a price written on a label rather than negotiated through a car window on the Kazungula road.
Our pre-launch exhibition ran across 12, 13 and 14 August 2024 at the Community Training Centre, 9am to 12pm each day, and opened the space to the village before the doors opened to visitors.
Every sale goes to the person who made the piece. The Trust takes nothing off the top.
Short, practical courses for young people and adults from the surrounding villages, run out of the Community Training Centre. Craft and making skills first — then the part most programmes skip: pricing, photographing your work, dealing with a buyer, and keeping a simple set of books.
Victoria Falls has one of the largest visitor markets in the region on its doorstep. Knowing how to reach it is worth as much as knowing how to carve.
[Confirm: course list, intake dates, places per intake, fees or bursaries]
We are a conservation organisation that happens to work in paint.
Monde sits on the edge of one of the most important wildlife landscapes on the continent — Zambezi National Park, and beyond it the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area that links five countries. Elephants walk through this district. So do the arguments about what that costs the people who live alongside them.
Those arguments are usually made in reports. We make them in materials. Murals on school and clinic walls. Sculpture and jewellery from wire, tin, bottle glass and the plastic that blows into the bush from the road. Workshops that begin with a walk collecting litter and end with something somebody wants to buy.
It works because it is not a lecture. A child who has spent a week turning scrap into a painted elephant has thought about elephants for a week.
[Confirm: which schools, clinics and conservation partners you work with — naming them makes this programme fundable]
A child who spends a week making an elephant thinks about elephants for a week.
Artists come to us from all over — painters, printmakers, ceramicists, muralists, photographers, textile artists — and work beside the artists who live here. They go into the villages. They go out into Victoria Falls. They leave something on a wall and take something home that is not a souvenir.
This is the programme that turns a visit into an exchange, and the one we are most actively recruiting for.
The pattern languages of this part of the Zambezi valley are not in a museum. They are on doorframes, on pots, on cloth, and in the heads of people who are getting older.
We record them the only way that keeps them alive: by making with them. Older craftspeople teach the techniques; younger artists put them into new work; and the stories that go with the patterns get told while the work is being done, which is how they were always told.
[Confirm: which traditions and language groups you want named here — we kept it general rather than guess]
Volunteers, artists, partners and buyers all feed the same six things. Pick whichever one fits you.
