From fridges to furniture

For 15 years Ousmane MBaye repaired fridges in Dakar, Senegal. One day he made a chair out of recycled steel, the first of a series of furniture made of steel and recycled oil drums.

"Some like to call what I am doing African Art, or primitive. I call it design, providing a casual object a soul. To make an everyday object beautiful, to move past simple functionality to give it a spirit, an attitude, a direction – that’s defining design, to me" explains Ousmane M'Baye.

Today Ousmane has 10 people working for him, two of them doing nothing but exploring Dakar's junk yards to find good steel parts and oil barrels that can be used for his designed furniture.

"It's been an amazing journey. I grew up in this district and it has always been a creative environment where people makes something out of nothing. But I had no idea that I would become a designer" Ousmane M'Baye laughs.

He left school as a 15-year-old dyslexic and started working in his father's small workshop to repair refrigerators, freezers and air-conditioners. "In retrospect, I have thought that I subconsciously influenced by all home visits to various customers. I saw many different types of designs that I think I carried with me into my own creations", he says.

After 15 years as frigoriste, the French word for refrigerator mechanic, he went through a mid-life crisis. He began experimenting with various steel and iron parts he found to make different objects.

"Then I had no money to buy materials for. But it taught me that all materials are unique with unique properties. For me, metal was a means to expand my horizons, to think differently".

At first, he worked with whatever materials that were within reach — drums of petrol, old water pipes that he found around town. Anything that involved a formal plan, he didn’t follow.

"I never do well with following other people’s methods. I prefer to create my own method, and by doing that, I developed another way of thinking, one that was different from the academic kind".

A friend of him saw a chair he made of steel and an old cap to an oil drum. The friend, who has a house on the famous slave island Isle de Goree, just off Dakar, saw the potential in MBaye's ideas and ordered several chairs, tables and cabinets.

Once a year, all houses on the island, protected as UNESCO World Heritage buildings, opens to the public. MBaye's friend encouraged him to make more furniture that he could sell when the tourists came.

In order not to loose his roots he sticks to his run-down refrigerator workshop where all his designed furniture are produced which eventually ends in chic boutiques all over the world. The success has made him buy a bigger house, which also serves as a showroom for his furniture, but it is only a few hundred metres from the workshop, in the same area, Médina, where he grew up.

"Here are my roots, this is where I learned to think creatively without large resources. I do not want to loose touch with these roots just because I am successful" says M'Baye. From when he was 12 years old, he had already started to tinker with bits of tubing, with bits of aluminum: "I didn’t know then how much it would come to influence my later life".

And if you walk around in the infinite district of Médina you soon understand what he talks about. Row after row after row of makes and sales of beds, chairs, tables, dollhouses, bureaus and shelves in both wood and metal. And here and there stores with hundreds of products made from soda cans, tomato cans and other recycled metal that becomes a trivet, picture frames, trays, toys, lampshades, ashtrays and so on.