Nkanyeziyethu Malunga, 37, is a designer based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, who is converting plant-based dyeing, basket weaving and the expertise of rural women into modern clothing. Through her label, GANU, she shows that skills inherited across generations can inspire current design, generate jobs for women and sustain cultural traditions.
Inside her workshop, Malunga builds colour into cloth from leaves, roots, bark taken from trees and similar natural matter collected from the surroundings. Picking a shade or devising a pattern is just one stage. Every material comes with its own story of how it was harvested, readied and changed, and Malunga weaves those details into modern fashion.
Plant dyes at the heart of the label
“My dyes are mainly extracted from plants such as mnyii and hibiscus. Although I also use many other plants, including tubers, that have properties suitable for dye extraction. I love hibiscus not only for its petals, which produce beautiful dyes, but also for its tea.”
Nkanyeziyethu Malunga is pushing back against fixed ideas of what a fashion collection should be and of where creative knowledge begins. With GANU, she turns native resources and crafts into garments and accessories, showing that inherited, generation-to-generation knowledge can shape contemporary design, open up opportunities for women in rural areas and safeguard cultural customs.
How a grandmother's baskets shaped Nkanyeziyethu Malunga's craft
Her approach rests on lessons from her maternal grandmother, the late Ngatsha Nkatha, who lived in Tsholotsho, a countryside district of Zimbabwe. In school holidays, Nkanyeziyethu Malunga and her brothers and sisters journeyed from Bulawayo to stay with their grandmother, and watched her shape reeds, sedge and sisal into baskets used for winnowing.
“When I was a child, I often visited my grandmother in the village with my siblings. She was very dexterous with her fingers, and that passion eventually became mutual.”
Malunga began trying out fashion as a teenager, and GANU came to life in 2013. Its name comes from iganu, which is the Ndebele word for the marula fruit, and it stands for her bond with local resources and her African identity. Her pieces combine basketry, crochet, beadwork and batik with plant-based dyes, hide and other materials produced nearby.
Local materials at the heart of GANU
To Malunga, these materials matter for more than how they look. Basketry draws on sedge, reeds, sisal and bamboo, while she raises Angora herds for their fleece, which she smooths out and colours before making it into garments. Cowhide sourced from nearby slaughterhouses gets softened at a tannery and then worked into her leather pieces.
“I keep Angora goats for the fur needed in garment production. However, for raw materials such as cowhide, I usually source these from local abattoirs while sisal and tree barks are either harvested by me or sometimes extracted by colleagues I work with, who are based in the rural areas.”
Desmond Ntini, an entrepreneur in the cultural sector who lives in Bulawayo, regards Malunga's output as one strand of a wider change in the way African history is understood and put to use.
"Malunga is reshaping the fashion industry by blending traditional African influences with modern inventiveness. What she does demonstrates how cultural identity can inform current design, and how it can lead to sustainable fashion, business ventures and a tribute to the continent's heritage," Ntini said.
Matobo's Hut Art Moves Onto Clothing, Taking Fashion In New Directions
Her efforts reach well beyond her own brand. She set up Matobo Goes Fashion And Beyond in 2024, a venture in which women from Matobo collaborate with Ekhaya-gaia, which the article describes as "my beautiful home in Zimbabwe", and with the Amagugu International Heritage Centre. Through this programme, designs drawn from traditional hut paintings are reworked into contemporary garments.
Preserving culture is the problem the scheme sets out to tackle. Rainfall can wash the paintings off traditional homes, leaving local people exposed to the loss of motifs that seldom get written down or recorded. Putting these designs onto cloth offers a further means of capturing and circulating them, and of bringing them to people beyond the places where they began.
The scheme also gives women a chance to pass on what they know and to take part in interpreting their own cultural inheritance. Instead of treating traditional ornament as something that belongs only on rural homes, the project places it in a fresh setting, while keeping it tied to the people who first made it.
Seen this way, Zimbabwe's own materials and skills can be given added worth, instead of being treated as something separate from the formal fashion industry.
Why Nkanyeziyethu Malunga's work matters to Zimbabwe's creative economy
Research published in June 2026 put the contribution of Zimbabwe's arts, culture and creative sectors at US$2.7 billion in 2024, equal to 5.92% of the country's GDP. The sector was also estimated to support 22,223 jobs.
Dr. Florence Sebele lectures at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, holding a senior post and serving as interim head of the Department of Art, Design, and Technology Education. Her research centres on the indigenous know-how found in textile technology, and she sees Malunga's approach as a chance to confront preconceptions about creativity on the continent.
Malunga takes traditional knowledge that was for years overlooked and recasts it as modern fashion. In so doing, she reflects who we are as Zimbabweans and as Africans, touching on our sense of self, our customs and our inheritance. Her designs serve as a firm prompt that we have plenty to be proud of. Beyond our borders, it challenges accepted ideas about the meaning of fashion and the source of innovation, demonstrating that genuine African knowledge, grounded in its own soil, matters across the globe.
The problem matters all the more in a field where African cultural motifs appear on international runways, while the skills and the people behind them are barely acknowledged. Malunga starts from techniques and materials that come out of local culture, then reworks them for contemporary uses.
Sebele believes the approach has uses far beyond fashion, including heritage tourism, scholarship and creative business. In her view, its value lies in bringing indigenous knowledge into plain view and showing how it can steer later research as well as commercial ventures.
Learning from other elders, and taking GANU abroad
Malunga's grandmother passed away before handing down the full extent of her knowledge, and so Malunga went looking for other keepers of traditional crafts.
“My grandmother's death came early, before I could master everything on the use of indigenous knowledge in creating contemporary fashion. As a result, I have also learned to tap into the wisdom of various elderly women that I have come across since embarking on this journey.”
Beyond Zimbabwe's borders, her designs have found a stage. Among the milestones in her reach and recognition are the following:
- the Durban Fashion Fair in South Africa in 2016;
- a nomination for Outstanding Fashion Designer at the 2018 Bulawayo Arts Awards;
- dealings with buyers in Ghana, Europe and the United States;
- an exhibit at this year's Zimbabwe International Trade Fair, held in April, at the ZimTrade stand, where SheExports, a programme run by the agency, is supporting her as she looks at markets abroad.
Even so, the deeper significance of Malunga's work lies in the stages that come before a garment ever reaches a customer. Natural plant dyes, basket-weaving techniques, traditional paintings and the know-how of women in rural areas all feed into a way of making that links generations and opens fresh routes for cultural expression.
“…we learn everyday, we learn as we go, and we learn from everyone,”Malunga reflected.
The task before Nkanyeziyethu Malunga is to make sure that this body of knowledge is kept alive, that the communities who help sustain it receive due recognition, and that the openings it creates reach well past the runway.
Credit for the story goes to Rapelang Immaculate Ncube of Bird Story Agency.
