From Pok Pok to Aseho | The Madagascan raffia bags with a story to hand down
Updated: 5 days ago
Last year I came across a luxury brand from Madagascar called Pok Pok on Instagram. I was drawn in by the intricate detail of the bags, zooming in to get a closer look, raffia worked into rounded and sculptural shapes, inspired, the brand explained, by the braiding techniques used in the creation of the hairstyles of southern Madagascar. According to the brand: ‘Braids speak without words. In Malagasy culture, braids are a silent language, a coded system read by an entire village. They tell of age, status, and life’s passages. Learned from childhood and passed from mother to daughter, braiding has always been a privileged time for intimacy and transmission.’
My visit to Madagascar in 2011 was fleeting. We were on a cruise and were given only a few hours to walk around the market, get some lunch and get back on board. Regrettably I was left with the impression of a country with nothing to spare and so when I saw this luxury brand I struggled to imagine how a premium label could come out of a country where children and adults were pummelling the windows of our taxi begging for coins or food.
The founders and cousins Andrianina Randria and Fitia Randriamifidimanana answered my question directly when we chatted last. Their market is mostly abroad and their goal was to add value to raffia and change what people picture when they picture Madagascar.
In Madagascar, raffia is not a material, it’s deeply connected to its people, the land and their stories. Raphia farinifera palm grows in the country’s tropical regions and has been used for centuries in baskets, mats and fishing nets. ‘Raffia is a living fibre. If we don’t harvest it, the tree actually dies. It’s a part of a virtuous cycle where we can use the material while protecting the environment,’ said Fitia when we spoke over a year and a half ago.
The story I wrote that was published in Business Day Wanted in March 2025 was about origins. Pok Pok is a reference to the physalis fruit, a small yellow berry that grows wild on the island. Fitia says they wanted a name that felt tied to their country and its sunshine; something exotic and unique.
And now the brand is called Aseho – Malagasy for ‘to reveal’, I think this new iteration is powered only by Andrianina though Fitia I can see is cheering her on in the comments. I also see that Aseho is positioning itself as a keeper of Malagasy memory. Short entries on the website under Culturebook gives a snapshot of the country’s cultural memory, a documentation of sorts of the objects or customs or rituals of Malagasy life. The tsihy for instance is a woven rug, handcrafted from natural fibres like penjy and raffia and used for prayers, rest, conversation; unrolled for guests or for family gathering. ‘On the tsihy, there is no hierarchy – everyone sits at the same level. It symbolises sharing, respect and togetherness,’ the website states.
‘Angano or fairy tales are stories that serve as bridges between the wisdom of the elders and the dreams of the young’, it continues. I love this. Oral tradition is part of our DNA as Abantu abamnyama. There’s a story my mother used to tell us ngesiXhosa about these baby mice who ate more mielies than their share and ended up with the worst kind of stomach ache imaginable.
‘Angano,’ Aseho writes, ‘is an act of transmission – a precious cultural legacy passed from one generation to the next.’
The first post on Instagram carries the same thread. The one announcing the new name, signed by the Aseho team opens with ‘From the very first page, we have been writing together …’ and promises to reveal a people’s beauty and the traditions carried in its hands. It ends on ‘a new name, yet the same voice’. Creative director Ando Ramanantsoa says the rice stitch on her Mahalia bag is ‘more than a technique: it is a writing’. Elsewhere it likens its craft of bag-making to writing, comparing it to sorabe – an ancient alphabet of Arabic influence, only few are able to read today – passed on in silence from one generation to the next. A brand that once talked to me about sunshine is now talking about script.
Stories are how a people keeps what it can’t afford to lose, whether they are told aloud, like my mother’s mice, or worked into a stitch. We like to say, ‘we’re losing all the recipes’ – like how we used to know the first and last names of all our classmates. Aseho seems to be asking a bag to do that work: to carry something from one pair of hands to whoever holds it next. It is a bag meant to be looked at slowly. Ando describes an object that doesn’t shout and reveals itself gradually to the person who picks it up.
And if a stitch is writing, then its maker is the writer. That’s the logic behind Andrianina’s letter, when the workshop names it Tanana Mahay, the ‘skilled hands’, for their growth and collaboration as well as their precision. The brand is trying to put its makers on the page.
For behind every bag lies a hand, a person, a talent, Andrianina writes.
A few hours from a taxi window gave me one picture of Madagascar. A mat, a bag and a stitch are giving me another, more textured, more resonant story.
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