FOLLOWING THE BEADS PART 1: RETURN TO THE BEADS

There was a time when the Maasai Market was part of my ordinary Nairobi landscape, perhaps more visibly than it is today. Every Tuesday, there was one particular place to go if you wanted to browse crafts, Maasai Market style. Anyone approaching town from Parklands or Ngara, past the Globe Cinema roundabout, knew the market on the hill.

There were throngs of people and a great sweep of colour. Craftspeople traded in everything from traditional objects to contemporary products made for city homes and export markets: kangas and kikoys, mudcloth, Kuba cloth and bark cloth; small pieces of furniture and carved figures; beaded bowls; objects made from horn and bone; baskets of every imaginable kind. There was jewellery and there were artefacts from across Kenya and farther afield. If you were looking for something particular—or something you had not yet imagined—you could probably find it there.

The market had a thrum, although, once everyone had unpacked and settled, it could be surprisingly peaceful. Most things were displayed on simple stands, on sheets or directly on the ground. The traders sat among their wares, talking, watching and waiting. Then someone would suddenly dart between the stalls, trying to coordinate a sale.

I never quite understood the arrangements behind this choreography. I learned only that showing an interest in an object set something in motion. If one trader did not have exactly what you wanted, someone else might. A person would disappear into the market and return with the object—or something close to it. Hence the darting. Then came the haggling.

At the end of the day, everything was packed away and the market dismantled, ready, we assumed, to return the following Tuesday. Today, Maasai Market days are held in different parts of Nairobi throughout the week, alongside several permanent markets. At the time, that Tuesday market felt singular. It was where one went.

It also fell within what I thought of as my Nairobi roaming area: somewhere between university, town and home, particularly on the days when I chose to walk. Over time, I became familiar not only with the objects laid out for sale but also with some of the makers, traders and designers behind them.

I had my favourites. There was Mwaura, who later made my metalwork range, and Omari, who knew where to find all manner of pan-African artefacts. Once, he took me into downtown Nairobi to meet traders operating from their hotel rooms.

Then there was Naiaisae, my favourite Maasai beadwork seller. She was always there, always set up early, usually seated among her work. She had a naughty glint in her eye that I loved. Years later, when she greeted me in the street, I realised for the first time how tall and elegant she was. At the market I had always encountered her seated, surrounded by colour.

I loved her, and I loved her work. I still own several of her cuffs, a choker and numerous pairs of earrings. There was also my friend Pauline’s mother, who sold beaded ornaments and kikoys, and Daudi, a Rastafarian who dealt in knitted and crocheted hats, jewellery, political posters and paintings. I liked listening to him hold forth on colonialism, post-colonialism, development and suffering. Some lunchtimes he preached in the streets near Nairobi Cinema. If he caught my eye, he would wink and call me sister or queen.

The surviving necklace from my final-year jewellery collection, made by hand in red, black, gold and white glass beads. Photograph by Linda Odhiambo Hooper.

Bangles and cuffs collected at Nairobi’s Maasai Market in the early 2000s. The large cuff was bought as a statement piece for a cultural event; the orange-and-black cuff remains a summer favourite. Photograph by Linda Odhiambo Hooper.

This was long before I understood that I would become a product designer.

I would not have described myself then as a “Maasai beadwork person.” Looking back, the evidence suggests otherwise. I was always stopping to look. I admired the colour, the scale and the confidence of the work. I owned numerous pairs of earrings even before my friends finally bought me a token to have my ears pierced.

Sometimes our future interests are visible long before we know how to name them.

Later, when I studied design and specialised in product design, jewellery became one of my areas of exploration. For my final-year work I developed projects across metalwork, woodwork, weaving, ceramics and jewellery. I designed a metalwork collection and commissioned a silversmith to make it. When it came to the beadwork collection, however, I decided to make it myself. I wanted to understand what it meant to construct something from those tiny beads.

This was ambitious. Possibly a little foolish.

I chose an intricate combination of red, gold and black. I wanted the collection to feel bold, contemporary and luxurious. I avoided white because I thought it would bring the work too close to the beadwork already familiar in the market. I wanted to see what else the material might do.

The designing was wonderful: sketching, placing colours beside one another and working through patterns before beginning the construction. I made a small sample disc to show how I wanted the colours to sit together. The collection grew to include a large plate, a smaller plate, a choker, cuffs, bracelets and several kinds of earrings—small dangling balls, flat discs and beaded hoops.

Then the making began.

Day after day, progress came in inches. The work required counting, threading, tightening, undoing and beginning again. I made a tray divided into sections for the different colours. I discovered that plastic and glass beads produced quite different effects in weight, touch and movement. I preferred glass. Even the gold was quieter and more muted; it gave the collection the quality I wanted.

Eventually I developed a rhythm with the needle. I would scoop through a small pile, gathering several beads at once, then reduce them until I had the exact number required by the pattern. Fishing line would have made the work easier, but it would also have made the pieces stiff. I wanted them to remain malleable and to move with the body.

The work was tedious. There is no point pretending otherwise. Yet sometimes I became completely lost in it, thinking, dreaming and planning while my hands repeated the same small movements. There were moments when I almost loved it.

Mostly, I wanted to finish and see the drawings take physical form. I could have commissioned the collection, as I had done with the metalwork, but that was not the point. I wanted to remain close to its development, to control the decisions and to attempt something that genuinely challenged me as an artist, designer and maker. It was the sort of project one chooses with enormous confidence, only to wonder, a few days later, why it ever seemed like a good idea.

By the time I finished, I had reached a firm conclusion: never again.

Naturally, the collection helped me secure my first job, and my first assignment involved beadwork.

I went to work for Ormolu Baskets. As I write this, I can see another thread running from those Ormolu days to the work I am doing now with PAM YO! That is another story, and one still emerging.

The irony of that first assignment has stayed with me. So has the experience of making the collection. Once you have spent hours persuading hundreds of tiny beads to hold a pattern, you look differently at finished beadwork. What appears effortless from a distance is produced through concentration, repetition, technical judgement and highly developed skill. You begin to see not only the object but the time inside it.

A contemporary beaded necklace bought from a market stall in Kenya in 2019. I was drawn to its restraint, its metal structure and its modern use of white beads. Photograph by Linda Odhiambo Hooper.

The book is not a history lesson disguised as a picture book. It is about children choosing colours, expressing themselves, making a mistake and finding the courage to begin again. Beneath that playful story, however, lies something I have understood for a long time: beads are very small objects capable of carrying very large ideas.

Colour can hold feeling. A pattern can hold memory. Making can become a way of thinking.

In the story, Mama Juju does not tell Soila and Regan what they must create. She gives them space to look again, to notice what has survived and to imagine what their broken beadwork might become. She offers language and encouragement, but the children find their own solution through their own hands.

My memories of the Maasai Market have also shaped Mama Juju’s workshop. It has something of the market’s open, generous quality: part workspace, part shop, part meeting place. She sells raw materials to women who make beadwork and provides space for their finished pieces. Materials, ideas, knowledge and people move through it.

Perhaps that is why I returned to the beads—not because I had forgotten saying “never again,” but because some materials are not finished with us simply because we think we are finished with them.

Sometimes they wait quietly until we are ready to understand what they were teaching us.

Years later, when I began developing Mama Juju’s Beads, I found myself returning to those memories.

Mama Juju in her workshop: part workspace, part shop and part meeting place. Illustration developed for Mama Juju’s Beads.

Following the Beads

Following the Beads is a three-part essay series accompanying the forthcoming publication of Mama Juju’s Beads. It traces a journey through memory, material and value: from Nairobi’s Maasai Market, across the trade routes that brought glass beads to East Africa, and into contemporary questions of ownership and cultural exchange.

VUMBI

Stories rooted in African imagination.

mama juju

An independent publishing house creating illustrated books, stories and cultural projects inspired by African imagination.

© 2026 VUMBI Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.

EXPLORE

HOME

NOTEBOOK

BOOKS

ABOUT

CONTACT

JOIN THE VUMBI LIST

Be first to hear about new books, behind-the-scenes stories, exclusive downloads and publishing news.