Our time working with Walter turned out to be fortuitous in many ways. We were all intrigued by the papermaking process as practiced at Cartolina, including the use of the Marina bush mill, a hand-cranked device of Walter's invention for processing fibers. Some of us had never made paper and this was a fabulous setting in which to do so. We worked closely with Zimbabwean papermakers, exchanging ideas and stories about our lives and societies. We ate our lunches with Walter and his family and were able to experience their life in Zimbabwe.   While we were in Harare the Zimbabwean dollar, already in trouble, continued to fall. From the time we arrived Zimbabweans told us of their unhappiness about the price of food. Two days into our stay massive protests against these conditions began in the food markets of Harare. A national strike soon followed and a state of emergency was declared. We were lucky to be out of the city during each day, making paper, and fortunate to be with Zimbabweans, whom we could question about their country's situation.    It was a wonderful pedagogical experience for all of us. The Cartolina papermakers had never worked with a group of artists before and they were intrigued by some of the students' projects, made using materials they found and had brought. The students were amazed by the hard work involved in this very basic process as well as the pride and expertise brought to it by the Zimbabwean papermakers.    We also visited the Toriro school in one of the communal areas; a "papermaking club" had been established there and school children were leaning to make paper. There is no doubt that papermaking is a very viable cottage industry for Zimbabwe, one that is greatly needed in a country struggling to provide for all its people.    I recorded the following interview with Walter in his home. It was a perfect moment: a storm had come up and the students had gotten drenched. While they were drying out in front of a fire in the living room, I used the time to ask Walter some questions, starting with how it all began.       Carol Becker: Tell us from the beginning how your interest in paper started, why you started it, what you were thinking about.   Walter Ruprecht: It goes back a long time -- being a colonial child in this country, having grown up at a time when things were changing very fast. I have an Austrian father and an Italian mother. I was born in the Federation of Nyassaland (as it was called in those days). My parents moved to Rhodesia (Salisbury), and I was brought up here and educated at Prince Edward. I went on to study mechanical engineering. In about 1983, they wanted to send me out to work on a mine. This involved mechanical engineering designs and repairs. I took over the department for six months until the mine was closed down and I moved on to South Africa, where I tried for six months to make a life for myself. In those days, you left Zimbabwe with very little money; I left mechanical engineering completely and went into marketing. I started training people how to sell and market products. I earned a marketing diploma, starting in South Africa and finishing in Italy. I only stayed in South Africa a short period because of the tension at that time. It was the apartheid era.   CB: What time?   WR: 1985. I was doing a lot of door-to-door selling and I saw how South Africa was falling to pieces. I decided to move to Italy and find out about my background. I bought a business repairing bulletproof cars for the police. I spent five years in Italy, lost and confused. And it was in Rome that I started my "paperism."   CB: Paperism?   WR: Yes, I call it paperism; that's what Anna Vilsboll started up in Copenhagen last year. Anyone who's passionately involved in papers has a paperism in their lives. So, my paperism started in Rome. It began when I met a piece of papyrus. Suddenly I started to get curious about paper, looked at it much more closely, and looked at materials that had to deal with paper. Shortly after this paperism I decided to leave Italy and come back to Africa.   I got a very strong call to come back home. I could see the Italian economy was coming under a lot of pressure; after a few years, the whole thing collapsed. Business was boring me and I couldn't find a future for myself living there, so I moved back to Africa, to Johannesburg for two or three months, where I met up with colleagues. Coincidentally enough, the company I joined employed a former colleague who was importing papyrus from Dr. Ragab's Institute [Dr. Hassan Ragab's Papyrus Institute, in Egypt].    I started selling papyrus paintings door to door, on a direct marketing basis. I started getting very curious. When I realized what a bit of paper and a little bit of paint could do as far as selling was concerned, I realized there must be something in paper. The texture and color of the papyrus reminded me of the maize husks that grow in Zimbabwe. I decided to come back and find a way to produce a sheet of paper using maize because it is one of our most abundant fiber resources. After many experiments and failures I eventually came across a book by Marianne Saddington and through this book I managed to pick up some more information on papermaking. The mechanics of it interested me to the extent that I started to manufacture and design my own equipment here in Zimbabwe. As a result I have brought a lot of the fiber experiments to the table to be marketed, and to benefit the communal areas. The main objectives are the communal areas; one of my biggest desires as a child was to be able to go and visit them, and paper has given me the key to do this.   The communal areas are the long-term objective, to get tourists out there to support the majority of this population, the Zimbabweans who are tilling the land and trying to diversify a little bit from agriculture and those crafts that are dependent on the environment, which is fast disappearing. Paper interested me because it was a medium that could use waste, a growing resource in Africa. A lot of imported packaging and waste materials are being dumped and buried in big pits outside Harare and other main centers. I looked at this resource as a way to generate very low cost projects, projects that could start with very little expense. This is one of the reasons we started going into African papermaking: eliminating the beaters, eliminating all the expensive equipment that you usually need in papermaking so that people could do this in their own house or in their own back yard. We wanted to help generate a new tourist commodity, a new opportunity for employment, a new export commodity. The availability of these raw materials in the communal areas, especially agricultural crops like maize, sugar cane, different types of weeds and banana plants are giving very interesting results so far. We started the project off taking normal people into the project. We weren't interviewing artists or technicians or experienced people, just people from different districts in Zimbabwe who in the long term would be able to go home and start up their own project.    CB: So you brought people from those areas into Harare?   WR: Yes, that's right. They stayed with us on the farms, but it was all by word of mouth. There was no advertising, and it was a matter of sending one of the workers home to bring back a daughter or a nephew or a cousin that needed a job. We would give them accommodation and a basic income to go through the training, so that they could feed themselves. They would go through the basic, six-month papermaking training and then move to a commission structure.    CB: And most people live here today?   WR: Yes. Everyone is still with us. None have left the project or disappeared.   Imported crafts do well here, provided that the original objectives are to benefit the people who make the objects rather than the people who are coming in to sell the equipment or the tools or the chemicals or whatever it is that goes with an income-generating project. What excited me most about the paper was that you could work with just waste fiber and water. Mechanical breakdown and hydrogen bonding and the rest of it: that was nature's way of basically providing.    The Africans have been quite rich in their own right with fiber technology. We haven't come here and invented anything to do with working with masasa or the other fibers that they've worked with; they've just never transformed it into paper. Paper has never been one of their mediums. And because of the amount of waste paper around us the understanding to make their own paper is still not quite clear. However, soon we can encourage marketing and show people that they can generate an income using this, still the artist's cheapest medium. The income will give them the money they need to feed their children and send them to school and probably build up their esteem to what they dream of doing. You see, in the communal areas it's quite different. As soon as you drive fifty kilometers outside Harare you're in the bush, you're into Africa where things are still the way they were in the eighteenth century.   CB: Could you explain the term "communal area"?   WR: Communal area is an area that has one or more chiefs who have been there for generations. Some of the communal areas are original areas, some of them were developed during the colonial era under the Rhodesian regime. These were areas that Africans were given to move them off commercially productive lands.   CB: Were they like homelands in South Africa?   WR: Yes. In Rhodesia they were called Tribal Trust Lands. They were then called Rural Areas, and now they're called Communal Lands. They usually have a chief nominated by the community. Some of the chiefs sit in Parliament. The communal areas are composed of different communities, different tribes of people that have settled down, who work and live together in the environment they have left. The soil is very poor and has to be fertilized every year using imported fertilizers; there are very few irrigation schemes, very few water wells. Some of the water that comes to the school has to be carried for three or four kilometers. People have started to compete against each other in these areas. Already there's distrust. There's competitiveness due to the shortages and lack of cooperation. So, it's a matter of the fittest, the strongest, surviving.    We're trying in the project to develop, as much as the art of papermaking, the art of getting people to work together again. I've started an organization called Zimbabwe AHEAD, which stands for Advanced Health Education And Development. There were numerous organizations that approached me to start up projects in Harare, in Bulawayo, in the main centers of the country but, due to a lack of time, I didn't start up anything until Zimbabwe AHEAD came along, because they were communal-based. They had already done a lot of the physiological side of the work that I would have had to do in the communal areas. In other words, everybody had a loo, everybody had water, everybody had some sort of a crop growing in their garden. The basic needs were satisfied and the income-generating project interested them. They needed a new project in the area, and what interested them most was that we could work with fiber resources abundant in the area: sisal, grasses, banana, mulberry, water hyacinth. Using the Marina bush mill concept, we've been able to process the fibers. They were offered three months' basic training, following the syllabus designed by John Russo at the National Technikon. This syllabus involves a bit of African, a bit of Western, a bit of Eastern, and is designed to teach them how to use their own tools, like the mortar and pestle. We have been able to train twelve hand papermakers in the communal areas.   CB: When did you start this?   WR: In July of 1997. We also have a papermaking project in Umbruma, which is under Chief Chirumanzu. This project was supposed to be financed by the British High Commission but Cartolina is now sponsoring it. We agreed that as long as they gave us a site that we could keep at least five years, we would supply all the equipment and the training for generating income to groups that were interested. This training has been going on for two months already. Last year, we worked with an animal project called Wild Hunting. We dedicated one of our papers to demonstrations by artists in the painted hunting dog project.   CB: What is the painted hunting dog?   WR: The painted hunting dog is being threatened with extinction now, hunted down by farmers and run over by buses. They're a pack of animals that stick together, live together, have families ... they remind me of human beings. They're the only animal that I'm really interested in, because the animal concept in Africa is a bit too much. I think if we don't look after the people there's no way that the animals are going to survive. This is one of the reasons we've attached ourselves to the painted hunting dog.    CB: How are people earning a living in this way? What products are generating income?   WR: The paper we make now is mainly marketed through Cartolina. Cartolina acts as a trading post because there isn't any tourist trade. We're encouraging businesses like Miati Travel Tours to take people out there. We approached the council and asked them for a craft stand on the main road for our paper products. This is taking a bit of time, so we are marketing their papers for the time being. Their production is approximately one thousand sheets a month. And we've taught them how to bind books. We're trying to teach them added value, to get them to make extra money out of just a sheet. They get paid five Zimbabwe dollars a sheet but if they produce a book out of one sheet�in other words, if they cut it up and make a book of twelve pages�they can sell that for thirty-five dollars. So we teach them how to work out the value-added concept on their commodities.    CB: I just bought all that paper in the store. How does that work for them? What percentage do they get?   WR: At the moment, the papers that you have bought are stock that the papermakers at Cartolina have produced. They are paid on an incentive basis. They work in groups of three. We encourage them to work in a family situation, like a husband, wife, and son. We pay them for all paper produced at the factory, where they have Hollander beaters, and they use electricity, and they use water for the premises. So $3 that would otherwise go to them in the communal areas has to go into covering the overhead of the factory. For bigger paper they receive $2 per sheet, and they average about 2000-3000 sheets per month. So they are all earning in the region of $2000-4000 a month, minimum. Again, they do the marketing. They do all the stock-taking, they buy, they book their papers in, they do all the invoicing, and if there's ever an export order, we hand the order to them and they produce the paper and package it. Then we export it. Everything we earn in capital is directly reinvested back into the project, such as building more equipment or training carpenters how to make molds. The profits go to buying the papers for the first few months. The quality's not quite good enough, but they need to generate income so we buy the paper, keep it in stock, and recycle it at a later stage if we need another fiber source for an order.    CB: Does the "papermaking club" at the school mostly collect fiber?   WR: Yes. They started collecting sisal and banana fiber. We're very interested in educating the children about the tree situation because when you drive out to the communal areas there are fewer and fewer trees. We're trying to teach them how to collect this fiber resource and how to make paper out of it, and they use it to write on at school. The teacher's also involved. We invite schools from around the area to come and watch papermaking at this particular project, as an example for the rest of the district. We hope that people will start doing it on their own without too many workshops.   CB: Let's say lots of people are making paper. Are you worried about the market?   WR: Certainly not. Paper is something that everybody needs right now --toilet papers, cigarette papers.   CB: But you're making very particular kinds of paper.   WR: Yes, but this is only the experimental point of papermaking in this country. The paper that will come after us, after these workshops, after these projects, will be the production side of it. There's no way that Cartolina will ever be able to produce the amount of paper that schools need in this country, and the government cannot afford to supply paper any more. Parents cannot afford a textbook from a stationery shop. So we're not just educating them about how to make their own paper, but how to be self-reliant, and this is very important. Over the last thirty to fifty years people have lost sight of the fact that they are now reliant on their own way of doing things. They have to have a grinding mill to grind their maize instead of using a pestle and mortar, for example. These are being replaced by machines and paper is something that was imported from the very beginning. We have to teach them how to keep it if they want to use it.   CB: So what do you imagine five years from now? What will the project look like?   WR: The project will be in most of the communal areas that attract tourists. We'll start off with the main centers, like Victoria Falls and Wanki. In the next five years I reckon we will be very much integrated into the communal areas and the schools. The Ministry of Education has a curriculum proposal that I drew up for them four years ago, but I've not heard anything since. I know the Minister of Education is very much aware of it, but she or he doesn't know how to actually get it going because they don't have any money. The Ministry is not giving us any assistance; it's all volunteer work. I will do advanced workshops at the Teacher's Training College beginning in February for teachers who come in from the communal areas. We have produced Shona and Ndebele translations of papermaking that we are printing at the moment to distribute to schools. We're starting projects in high-density areas this year, working with women whose husbands have died of AIDS or who have AIDS themselves; they need to generate income. We're waiting for the US AID chief who is based in Angola to make up his mind [about funding the project]. If there's no sponsorship, we'll go ahead and get it started ourselves.   CB: Where do all the papermakers live?   WR: They live here temporarily and then they move out to the communal areas wherever the projects are being implemented.    CB: For training?   WR: Yes. The school will provide a house or the communal council will provide a building for them. If there is nothing, then we have little tin houses, which they put up very quickly. The papermakers are very independent. They come and go as they want, they work on a commission structure, so if they make paper they get paid, and if they don't make paper they get a basic income, which provides them with enough money to buy their food. We try to keep things as civilized as we can for them, although it's becoming more and more expensive. A lot of them are getting more interested in making contributions towards medical care, which is an encouragement. In the past, Africans expected free medical care but this has not worked out for the government, because they can't afford to give the people medicine.    I'm trying to spearhead the marketing now. I'm trying to get in touch with people who in the long term will be able to support all these projects. There's a survey committee coming up from Holland in April or May to do a survey of the project, to see the feasibility. Our sales picked up the minute we opened our doors to the public six months ago and we're getting a steady flow of customers: consumers, paper artists, and cooperatives that make cards and do prints. So our stocks are being depleted more and more, and this is encouraging because it means that we don't have to ask for money. The money goes back to the papermakers. Nothing goes into buying a boat or a trip to Australia. I'm really pleased that it has been self sufficient from the beginning. We've been able to speak from experience. We haven't had to feel embarrassed about it.   CB: And when did you begin, what date?   WR: I started making paper in 1989.   CB: And Cartolina?   WR: Cartolina was formed as a company in 1991. We realized the importance then of forming a company in order to get anything going. And since then, we've been going every day.   CB: Can you say something about how you think the African economy has to move in the future.   WR: Well, I see disintegration of the production line. I see companies breaking down into smaller companies and more small-scale production or cottage-type industries developing. I think this is the way it was in the beginning, and I think this is where it's going to head in the next five to twenty years. When we talk about employing the majority of the people we say, "If it is to be, It is up to me." The problem is that people are not being taught appropriate technologies. They're emphasizing mainly electronics, they're trying to get a lot into management. These are important areas, but there are school children who are never going to see the end of the education tunnel and have got to learn how to become self-reliant. Papermaking is one of those projects that I thought would fit in very well with all the other small-scale businesses already developing in the communal areas. You have carpenters and metal workers. These people need business cards; they need letterhead; they need toilet paper and packaging equipment, and our papermakers will be able to provide this.   CB: What is the state of commercial papermaking?   WR: Most of Zimbabwe's commercial papers are exported, and most of the paper that we consume is imported. Our biggest recyclers are Hunyani Paper. They've been in existence since 1942. They're based out of Norton, very close to the dam that supplies our water, and recently there have been serious polluting side effects from the paper mill in our water supply. I see papermaking and our hand papermakers playing a very active role in the industry in the next five to twenty years. We have already played an active role with graphic artists. We've produced several tourist brochures for Southern Africa. It was an interesting combination of artwork: graphic artists printed photographs of African objects on top of our African papers and then scanned this to print on. Tour operators are scanning our papers to put information on for their tourist resorts. A few corporations are also now encouraging us; they call our paper "recycled paper" or "home-made paper" as opposed to "handmade paper."   CB: Do you copyright the papers?   WR: No. In Africa I don't think it makes any difference to have a copyright because it's going to be copied tomorrow, and you could only sue someone who doesn't have any money. It doesn't make sense. I don't think there's any point in doing it in the hand papermaking industry because everybody makes different papers anyway. If anybody can make the same type of paper, then that's great. Cartolina was never intended to be a competitive company. It was just designed to get involved in development. I never registered as an NGO [Non-Governmental Organization], though I've been told to do it several times. It's my own sort of mission and that's how it's carried on.   In the communal areas you go into the waste basket and you find papers that were printed on in 1923. These are coming out of dresser drawers. We're not trying to clear the communal areas of their treasure, we're just trying to show them the importance of recycling and conserving their trees, and trying to give them a substitute. If you're in touch with artists who want to get involved with Africa and want to come out here and develop things, then we'll be able to give them the direction to start with and guide them. I think that everybody's got a role to play. I don't think competition is something to worry about in Africa at this stage.   CB: And that gives you the freedom to do it as you want to do it?   WR: No. My paperism is paying me back in ways that I could never afford. I mean, just this place where we are now, it's because of the paperism that came along.