Oodi weavers founding fathers lament

An artist himself, (sculptor and painter) who was kicked out of South Africa by the apartheid regime where he had set up a similar project, Rocke's Drift, in Natal and Thabana Li' Mele in Lesotho, Gowenius told The Monitor that perhaps the biggest mistake he made was to leave the project unsupervised.

The very zeal of empowerment brought this pensioner back after leaving Botswana in 1974, not because he intended to, but for security reasons as South African police officers had come to him twice here.  "When the project started in 1972, my primary objective was to instil confidence in these people. I wanted them to believe they could manage themselves and make a living," Gowenius said.