A better South Africa, one stitch at a time

A book about a successful charity organisation offers leadership solutions for South Africa

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The book 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day: The Knitting & Crocheting Revolution should be made compulsory reading for anyone studying towards an MBA or wanting to run a public benefit organisation. 

Not only is it a fascinating archive of the 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day movement, it is also a masterclass textbook on how to drive philanthropy through public participation, hashtags, campaign ambassadors and a championing spirit.

The 67 Blankets for Mandela Day movement is a unique philanthropic organisation whose trading currency is not transacted through bank accounts. The currency is in the hands of thousands of supporters who use wool to weave colourful blankets that are distributed free to less fortunate people across the country. 

Each blanket is branded, documented and personally delivered by the movement’s founder Carolyn Steyn or by one of her many ambassadors across the country.

The 222 page full-colour book documents how, in 2014, Steyn took up a challenge from Nelson Mandela’s PA, Zelda la Grange, to knit 67 blankets for Mandela Day. Unable to complete the task on her own, Steyn put out a midnight call on social media for assistance. 

The response was the birth of a phenomenal movement of people who turned the art of philanthropy into one of the most democratic and inclusive exercises experienced in South Africa. It has won several awards, including breaking consecutive Guinness World Records.

The book highlights the movement’s rise to international stardom. Supported by striking photos, and endorsed by personal narratives from blanket weavers and beneficiaries, a story about ubuntu and transformation evolves with the turning of every page. 

There are moving testimonies by prison inmates who crochet blankets in their commitments to thread their lives together and to give back to society. There are narratives about rural African women who have so little but who are determined to crochet a blanket to support others even less fortunate than themselves. 

The symbolism of blankets in African communities has its own power. “A blanket can cover you from the cold. It can cover your woundedness after losing a loved one — like how women use it when visiting grieving families. 

“They wear it over their shoulders or around their waist to symbolise their solidarity with that family,” writes Sello Hatang in the foreword. Hatang is the former CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Knitting clubs have been set up at schools. Among the most ardent supporters is Jeppe High School for Girls, where Steyn matriculated. After school, she had her eyes set on a career in the performing arts and enrolled at Wits University. 

“I remember her having a bubbly personality with a quiet determination to succeed in anything she undertook, be that her academic studies, acting in various roles, doing menial tasks such as sweeping the stage or supporting her fellow students backstage,” says Fred Hageman, a retired professor from the Wits School of Arts.

Steyn built a successful career in South Africa specialising in musical theatre but she had her eyes set on Hollywood. Just as her career there was about to take off, she had to return home, first to be at the bedside of her dying mother and then again when her father was dying. After her father’s death she stayed here.

Steyn’s mother grew up in Nazareth House Orphanage. Her mother brought up her and her two sisters in the east of Johannesburg in an ordinary community but instilled in them the need for community service. 

One of the organisations that requested blankets was Nazareth House — Steyn and her two sisters went there to distribute them.

“Our mum was there from the tender age of three and when she had finished her schooling, she remained at Nazareth House until her twenties, as she assumed the role of teacher to the younger orphans. 

She used to tell us about Sundays when people would come and choose children to adopt and how she would call out, ‘Pick me, pick me!’ Nobody ever did. Walking the same corridors she did and seeing the little children arrive from crèche, I was beside myself,” Steyn recalls.

The gods, however, had a different fate for Carolyn. It was Mandela who played matchmaker between her and businessman Douw Steyn as they were close associates. It was Douw’s jet that transported South African business people to meet the ANC in exile in Lusaka, Zambia.

After marrying Carolyn for the second time, Douw Steyn gave her the wings to fly. Her first beneficiary was the Naledi Theatre Awards, which received a R2 million donation, then  she refurbished the entire Sandton Theatre on the Square. 

Several more projects benefitted from her contributions but her real fulfilment seems to have come with the birth of the 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day movement.

Championing a cause that encourages people to knit or crochet blankets, Steyn has gathered a formidable team of ambassadors who invent and manage creative strategies to mobilise enthusiasts to turn bales of wool into colourful blankets. 

Each campaign is driven by a focused social media strategy and a unique hashtag. Targets are set and performance is encouraged and rewarded. The ambassadors get behind the act and every accolade is celebrated as the achievement of the entire community that has woven the movement together.

This kind of compassion and determination to stay globally relevant, to drive transformation and societal change and progress at the most personal level, is seldom taught in an MBA lecture room. 

If every corporate organisation, every government office and every service sector in South Africa took only one page out of 67 Blankets for Mandela Day we could heal our country of the wounds of corruption, failure, inefficiency and intolerance that impede us from achieving Mandela’s dream of a better future for all.

Ismail Mahomed is the director for the Centre for Creative Arts and a multi-award-winning arts administrator and playwright. He serves on the board of several arts organisations in South Africa and is a regular participant, nationally and abroad, on cultural leadership matters.

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