Top Banana

Suni Magyar never planned on owning a crafts shop. Busy with her reflexology business in Uganda's capital of Kampala, the Kenyan-born, British-educated Hungarian-Scot set up Banana Boat, her first tiny 2-sq-m shop, on a whim. "There were lots of expats living in the city with big houses, lots of wall space and nothing to put on them," explains Magyar.[an error occurred while processing this directive] "Initially, I thought it would be quite fun to sell modern art prints." She was quickly inundated by customers looking for other home products and, since 2000, has combined her love of traditional local craftsmanship — basketry, weaving, leatherwork — with her own appreciation of designs that are both useful and attractive to Western sensibilities.

Drawing on her diverse background — and a foundation art course in Britain — Magyar works with more than 90 small local producers and craftspeople who design a range of household items made from indigenous materials. The results are innovative and stylish. Bark cloth — "a wonderful material that is peeled from the trunk of a fig tree and traditionally used as clothing" — is coaxed into purses, cushion covers, jewelry bags, even Christmas stockings. Ugandan village women's basket-weaving skills are applied to banana-leaf and raffia place mats, palm-leaf cutlery trays and millet-stem and raffia lampshades and coasters, and leatherworkers fashion wine-bottle coolers and photo-album covers.

Magyar's original shop has evolved into three cool and trendy Banana Boat store locations in Kampala, as well as an export business. With Banana Boat — a nickname for Ugandan canoes — thriving, the multitasking mother of two toddlers is now overseeing the building of a safari lodge in one of Uganda's national parks, while continuing to design new products for the shops. In the works: a range of bark-cloth finger puppets. tel: (256) 772 799 555; bananaboat@infocom.co.ug