Hausa grain baskets of Nigeria.

For years we have been buying and selling and using in our bead business these beautiful raffia straw baskets from Nigeria, never really giving them any thought beyond their utility as a shopping basket for our customers to collect beads off our tables to purchase, or as a commodity to sell, as one of our products we sell are African baskets.

We would find huge amounts of them in two sizes at the African Art Village in February during the Tucson Gem Show, stacked in piles at the back of the African Trader’s booths, or stored in large burlap sacks just waiting for an interested customer to request. They were everywhere, and ubiquitious to any African Trader’s booth. You never really noticed them, they were just always there.

An African Trader's booth at Gem Mall 2015. Only one Hausa basket on his table being used as a display (not for sale). The handle basket under his table is for sale, from a different region of Nigeria.

Our booth at Gem Mall 2015. We have more baskets than the African Traders!

One of our suppliers, Mohammad, would phone us up every couple of months when he drove from Los Angeles to Seattle on his sales run and offer us these baskets for sale. They were cheap. It was never his or our main product, just an after thought, just something to have. Something useful and interesting.

Each basket has been individually hand-woven in Maidguri, West Africa by the Hausa people of Nigeria. The Hausa people collect various grasses, which they harvest every summer and weave into these grain bowls. The baskets are given as wedding gifts to save and store grain and they even double as decoration when not being used.

Our last big purchase of these baskets was approximately 2010, when we purchased about 200 small ones and 100 large ones. We had absolutely no room in our truck or trailer and were packed to the roof with our beads and displays after breaking down our Gem Mall booth and were about to head home to Northern California. But the African Village was calling us. They had one more day before closing, so we stopped in to see if there was anything we needed. Some how we were able to squeeze in all these baskets. It was crazy. We smelt like a grass hut the whole way home.

We stored them in our warehouse and took some to our shows off and on for the next few years, until we only had 10 small baskets left which we used as shopping baskets at our smaller shows, and about 50 large baskets which we used as shopping baskets at our large Tucson show and also for sale, until we realized we were running out and needed to buy more.

Mohammad had stopped calling as we hadn’t needed any baskets, and the last time I saw any at a booth and asked about prices I discovered they had increased in price dramatically. It was a half hearted request as I wasn’t really in a buying mode. It was just a curious request. The trader wasn’t someone I knew and he didn’t have a lot in stock on his table.

This year in Tucson, 2015, I was selling quite a few of our dwindling stock of the large baskets and decided we needed to make a concerted effort to buy more and consequently headed over to the African Art Village to begin the search.

No one had any!

I had been vaguely noticing over the last few years that there weren’t many around, but gave it no thought. Now I was very aware of this fact.

Several of the traders told me it was because of the activities of the Islamist terrorist group Boko Harem in North Western Nigeria that was causing the stopping of the production of these baskets at its source.

Harem is the terror group that has been kidnapping young school girls in North Western Nigeria and fighting the army of Nigeria.

I was seeing a direct correlation between the baskets I had been buying for years without thought and Islamic Jihad terrorism. Wow! Who would have thought?

Talking to other African Traders I knew at the Gem Mall, who were looking for some of these baskets for me, at my request, some gave the same theory about Boko Harem but some said it was not true and that these baskets could still be purchased but just not in large quantities like before due to rising costs and shipping. That no one wanted to place large orders and that therefore none were being produced due to lack of interest.

Really? So it is just a coincidence that terrorist activity in a region that wants to stop western influence and has brought the Nigerian army to its knees has stopped producing handwoven baskets for the consumption of the west, and high shipping costs are the true reason these baskets aren’t being made? I don't think so. If interest is shown, people seem to be able to fill that need. We will just pay more.

What we are seeing is the impact of terrorism first hand. It is not just just "over there".

In the mean time, I’m on the lookout for more of these rapidly vanishing baskets.