Laura Schuerwegen

Many years ago, a Ghanaian friend once told me, “We women need to always be doing something with our hands.”

At the time, my younger feminist self bristled at the comment. It felt like a call back to domesticity, to the very limitations I wanted to escape. But twenty years later, I find myself thinking about her words often—and realizing how right she was.

There is a deep, almost ancient power in collective creation. Whether it’s a knitting circle, a quilting group, or, more recently, the beading workshop I joined at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg as part of their Activator on African Feminisms—something profound happens when we create together.

Something clicked for me that day. I sat quietly in a corner, focused on my beads, not saying much. I had set myself a small challenge and wasn’t in a particularly social mood. But as I listened to the murmurs around me—the laughter, the exchange of stories, the rhythm of hands at work—I felt it. The connection. The community. The collective heartbeat.

We often join these kinds of spaces without fully realizing their deeper purpose. Yet, beneath the surface, something healing is at work. Through shared stories, gentle advice, and the meditative repetition of our hands, we weave more than fabric or jewelry—we weave belonging.

It’s no wonder that in an age of disconnection and digital noise, many of us are returning to crafts like knitting, beading, crochet, and quilting. It’s not about fashion or nostalgia. It’s about touch. About tangible history. About remembering that our hands carry wisdom, that creation connects us to the earth, and that making together makes us whole.