LEONARDVILLE, Namibia — All day Emily Rooinasie tried to spin wild cocoon silk into thread, but her stiff, arthritic hands would not cooperate.
Her eyes blurred with tears of frustration. Finally, she tore off her green plastic apron, walked out of the silk factory and home to her one-room tin shack on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, where she cried over what she thought was a wasted chance.
Jobs are practically nonexistent in her black township in southern Namibia, where thin, scabby dogs lie in the morning sunshine and defeated people are already getting drunk. It is here that Ian Cumming, an amateur silk enthusiast from South Africa, hatched the idea to use the cocoons of a local pest to make a thing of beauty.
In Leonardville, old folks would roast the cocoons of the African wild silk moth, \o7gonometa postica\f7, and eat the worm inside, but making cloth out of them was inconceivable to Rooinasie.
"I always wondered how people make clothes," said the 62-year-old. "We didn't know these things and now we know. It makes me feel proud."
Cumming chose about two dozen of the neediest people in the village to work, mainly poor widows or single mothers. Now they have a new power and status in their community, "because we work and we give them food," Rooinasie said. When the women return home in the evening, dinner is always prepared for them.
Rooinasie acknowledges that she would have given up trying to spin the gossamer thread if not for Cumming's constant prodding and advice.
"I'm very happy he didn't send me home when I couldn't get it right," Rooinasie said. "I thought I was stupid, that I could never learn how to spin. I cried and I got very angry too."
"I knew she could do it," Cumming said. "I said, 'Try it, just persevere.' "
The enterprise, 50% owned by workers, uses the cocoons of a moth that has long plagued the farmers of the Kalahari. Cattle and wildlife eat the cocoons, which form a dense mat in the stomach, killing the animals. With Cumming's factory, the cocoons have a useful -- and lovely -- purpose.
The silk factory uses only hatched cocoons to ensure sustainability, giving it a niche in the "eco-fashion" and "conscience commerce" markets.
In traditional silk production, the fine strand of an intact cocoon is unwound, killing the pupae. With the Kalahari method, some fibers are broken when the moth breaks out of the cocoon, resulting in a coarser silk.
