Midway through “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Namor, the king of Talokan, strikes Lord M’Baku, sending him crashing into the center of an outdoor cafe. While most moviegoers focused on Lord M’Baku heaving for air after being launched feet away, Jomo Tariku, a furniture designer in Springfield, Va., homed in on another detail.
Tariku, who was watching the film in the theater with family, spotted something familiar in a corner of the frame: a cluster of seats he designed, inspired by furniture from Ghana, Ethiopia and Mali. He tapped his son, 17, and nephew, 14, to point out the Baltic birch stools, but they were unimpressed. “Okay, we saw it,” they said. “All right.”
“Since they were little, I’ve had the prototypes of these things all over the house, so they’re not extremely unique [to them],” Tariku says. But as a furniture designer, the opportunity to see his work in a feature film is anything but ordinary.
If asked, most longtime furniture makers would say their ultimate career goal would be to have their work displayed in a gallery or museum, says Tariku. “I really doubt any of us would say, ‘I want my stuff to be in a blockbuster.’ This was never on my radar.” But his work, including a chair selected for an exhibit curated by “Black Panther” production designer Hannah Beachler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was well-known enough that he caught the attention of Molly Ebner, an assistant set decorator and buyer for the film.
Part of the art department, the set decoration crew is one of the most important albeit sometimes overlooked teams on a movie production. “Our sets are typically 360 degrees every detail down to what’s written on a piece of paper, on a desk, to what’s in the trash can. Every single book that’s on a bookshelf is specifically thought out, even if you don’t see it,” Ebner says.
The art department is led by the production designer, who’s “kind of like the architect,” she says. They have a grand vision for the look of each scene, but they don’t source individual items such as furnishings and props. That’s where set decoration comes in.
“We’re kind of like the interior designers,” Ebner says. “Wakanda Forever” was a massive production; the team, which also includes leadmen, set dressers and fabricators, among others, accumulated 2,337 boxes of materials for set dressing.
“Where it’s fun to do something super crazy and out there if it’s really called for, some things you just want to be a beautiful backdrop to let the real art shine, which I think is usually the actors and the story and most of the time [the wardrobe],” says set decorator Lisa K. Sessions, who led the team of a few dozen people working on “Wakanda Forever.”
Sessions, who also was the set decorator for films such as “The Suicide Squad,” “Dolemite Is My Name” and “City of Lies,” begins each job by reading the script with an eye for what props each scene requires and comparing it to the production designer’s look book. From there, she creates a budget that she negotiates with the film’s producers.
Prep time could vary from a couple of weeks to several months. Typically, the bigger the budget, the more time the team has to plan, says Sessions, who worked on “Wakanda Forever” for 14 months with a $2.5 million budget. By comparison, she worked on “Dolemite Is My Name” for five months with $400,000 to spend.
Ebner was hired as one of two buyers about four months before shooting began. “The first thing I do is either go through my library or purchase more design books and research a ton,” she says.
No matter how specific a request, she tries to find just the right items. “It’s my job to scour the internet, call as many people as possible and try to figure out what is this thing, where does it come from and how can we get it as soon as possible,” she says. “I’m not always on set, but I’m out in the real world speaking with vendors, talking with people and creating these relationships.”
The number of independent furniture artists whose work makes it into a film also varies. About a quarter of the set pieces for “Wakanda Forever” were from small artisans like Tariku, while “Dolemite” featured none, says Sessions. Many small manufacturers can’t produce items quickly enough for a film’s timeline, so a lot of items for the “Black Panther” film were built on set, Ebner says.
Tariku, for instance, had just two weeks to build, pack and ship a dozen raw stools that the set decoration crew painted black on-site. At the time, he worked full-time as a data scientist and graphic designer at the World Bank. “It did not sound doable, but I wasn’t going to say no,” he says. He spent late nights and weekends cutting, gluing, sanding and assembling furniture. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked at that pace, but I got it to them on time it was pretty exciting.”
Sometimes, Ebner says, artisans miss the opportunity because they don’t think the request is real. “I didn’t think Jomo was going to respond because his furniture is in museums,” she says.
And he was, in fact, skeptical. “A pretty simple email showed up one day that said, ‘We want to use your work for a movie,’” he recalls. He showed the message to his family and his son picked up on an “MCU” reference. “‘That’s Marvel Cinematic Universe,’” he said. And that’s when it clicked for Tariku. “It’s got to be ‘Black Panther,’” he thought. “What else could it be?”
In addition to purchasing the stools, Ebner rented Tariku’s “Nyala chair,” inspired by antelope from the Bale Mountains of East Africa. It was featured in the character Aneka’s home toward the end of the movie.
To research Mayan culture for the Talokan people, Ebner visited a Mayan exhibit at the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta, where the film was shot. While it’s convenient to source materials from local vendors, Ebner favored authenticity. So when searching for a Mayan-inspired hammock for one of Namor’s sets, she called Angela Damman, a sustainable designer she knew from previous work.
Coincidentally, Damman’s husband recently discovered agave sisalana, a plant endemic to southern Mexico that was thought to be eradicated, in a junglelike area of their property in the Yucatán. “We started cultivating it, and at the time of Molly’s inquiry, we were ready to start harvesting it,” says Damman. She had three months and a team of 20 people to design and create the hammock using the fibers harvested from the rare plant.
“To our knowledge, no one has made anything with this fiber since the Mayans were around,” says Ebner.
For Tariku, answering Ebner’s email put him on a path he’d never dared to dream about. Ebner has already asked to use his Nyala chair in another blockbuster film, he says.
“I’ve stopped count of how many times I’ve been mentioned by name within the design world, being associated with Wakanda,” he says.
How a designer’s chairs made it onto the set of a Hollywood blockbuster
The Manager
A manager’s job can be classified into four basic aspects: planning, organizing, leading and controlling. Effective managers create opportunities for workers and teams to perform well and feel good about it at the same time. We also see that managers work long hours, are usually very busy, are often interrupted, attend to many tasks at the same time, mostly work with other people and get their work done through communication with others. Mintzberg identified three major categories of activities or roles that managers must be prepared to perform on a daily basis, which are:
Interpersonal roles – working directly with other people.
Informational roles – exchanging information with other people.
Decisional roles – making decisions that affect other people.
With the above in mind, we are now in a position to try and find the answer to an important question: What does it take to be a successful or effective manager? In other words: What skills are required to achieve management success in the particular environment we are in?
A skill is an ability to translate knowledge into action, which in its turn results in desired performance. It is a competency that allows a person to achieve superior performance in one or more aspects of his or her work. Robert Katz offers a useful way to view the skills development challenge. He divides the essential managerial skills into three categories:
Technical skill – the ability to perform specialized tasks.
Human skill – the ability to work well with other people.
Conceptual skill – the ability to analyze and solve complex problems.
Technical skill involves being highly proficient at using select methods, processes, and procedures to accomplish tasks. Take for instance an accountant, whose technical skills are required through formal education. Most jobs have some technical skill components. Some require preparatory education, where others allow skills to be learned through appropriate work training and on the job experience.
Human skill is the ability to work well in cooperation with others. It emerges as a spirit of trust, enthusiasm, and genuine involvement in interpersonal relationships. A person with good human skills will have a high degree of self awareness and a capacity of understanding or empathizing with the feelings of others. This skill is clearly essential to the managers networking responsibilities.
All good managers ultimately have the ability to view the organization or situation as a whole and to solve problems to the benefit of everyone concerned. This ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations is a conceptual skill. It draws heavily on one’s mental capacities to identify problems and opportunities, to gather and interpret relevant information, and to make good problem-solving decisions that serve the organization’s purpose.
The relative importance of these essential skills varies across levels of management. Technical skills are more important at lower management levels, where supervisors must deal with concrete problems. Broader, more ambiguous, and longer-term decisions dominate the manager’s concern at higher levels, where conceptual skills are more important. Human skills are consistently important across all managerial levels. And it is here, where in Ethiopia we face some of the most important challenges in my opinion. In a culture where interpersonal relationships are considered important or a precondition before entering into a business contract or getting down to the tasks at hand, I don’t often see this ability to work well in cooperation with others being practised by managers. Instead, I observe the practice of a more autocratic style of management, whereby the concerns or suggestions of workers are not very well listened to or heard. We allow ourselves to get caught in our “busyness” and practise crisis management. As a result, workers may feel neglected, not valued, discouraged, or frustrated, which will be reflected in their job performance. Somehow, we seem to take on a way of behaving, which doesn’t blend with the culture and ability to genuinely enter into interpersonal relationships. Yes, we attend the weddings and funerals of workers and their relatives, but how involved are we really? Or is this rather a more superficial level of relating, not really intended to relate but to appear and avoid speculations as to why we didn’t turn up? I would say that there really is room for us to learn and develop the human management skill more. Where this skill is developed and practiced, there is a bigger chance that workers will feel respected, involved, and encouraged. As a result, the workers will be motivated to perform better and the manager is applying skills that serve the company’s purpose, which is to produce results over a sustained period of time. Consistency is key here. Consistency in the effort of the manager to apply his or her skills, more especially the human skills, is essential as the technical and conceptual skills alone will not take the manager very far.
Ton Haverkort
Kalkidan Tademe
Name: Kalkidan Tademe
Education: BA Degree on Marketing Management
Company name: Befta Design
Title: C EO and Fashion Designer
Founded in: 2020
What it do: Fashion Designing
Hq: Gurdshola
Number of Employees: 5
Startup capital: 500,000 birr
Current Capital: Growing
Reason for starting the Business: To show women their creative potential
Biggest perk of ownership: Following my passion
Biggest strength: Creativity and Flexibility
Biggest challenge: Material shortage
Plan: To be one of the leading and innovative handmade crafts in Africa
First career: Marketing Manager
Most interested in meeting: Oprah Winfrey
Most admired person: My parents
Stress reducer: Prayer and worship
Favorite past time: Serving the Lord with all I have
Favorite book: Bible
Favorite destination: Paris
Favorite automobile: Mercedes-Benz
The evolution of social modernization
When the term “Atlantic civilization” was coined in the 18th century, the underlying idea was meant to combine the values of the French and the American Revolutions. They were seen as the two indispensable pillars of a single, yet divided approach to social modernization. The values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as well as those of liberty, equality and fraternity may sound hollow today, yet they have not lost any of their resounding power when looking at their impact.
The Atlantic civilization remains based on the primacy of individual dignity, property and rule of law, a strict separation between state and society the freedom of religion as well as the freedom to travel. People’s ability to engage in self-criticism remains the essential quality of the Atlantic civilization. While hoping for the universalization of people’s understanding of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness remains an inherent driving force of human culture, it is important to re-evaluate the world as it stands.
It is imperative for the future of the Atlantic civilization to realize the root causes of the conflicts which have taken us like a hurricane. The time has come to count the dead due to a series of acts of political violence committed over the past decade. We must take account of undeclared wars such as in the Ukraine, gruesome and barbarous acts of terrorism as in Iraq and Syria, incapable states which cannot really “fail” because they never worked in the first place such as Somalia, as well as states which can no longer prevent the outbreak of mass epidemics with global consequences such as Liberia or Guinea.
The West may be keen to promote the rule of law and democratic participation, but people are confronted with upheavals in their borderlands that follow a different, if not altogether confrontational logic. Russia is projecting its imperial glory, if only out of weakness. The Arab and Muslim world is undergoing a transformation with cultural, political and economic tensions of the highest order. While often clad in religious language, these tensions reflect age-old geopolitical controversies and rifts.
While Westerners are ambivalent about the use of military power, knowing too well its limits and the curse of Pandora’s Box that comes with the use of military power, they can no longer escape a global tide that changes their way of thinking. Aren’t they very scared of “foreign” fighters returning from Iraq or Syria, whether with a U.S. or EU passport? And what is their answer to self-declared “Sharia police” gangs patrolling the streets of London or Bonn, trying to prevent Muslim youth to enter “sinful” places such as discotheques and casinos?
The Atlantic civilization is united these days, or so it seems. In reality, Western nations are divided in their perception of, and proximity to, current hotspots. Whether they are engaged in sanctions against Russia or in organizing a military coalition against the barbaric terror of the self-declared “Islamic State caliphate,” the truth of the matter is this: Nobody has a good answer, and no strategy seems to work the way we thought these things happen.
What’s happening in Russia is about re-establishing spheres of influence, territorial and ethnic. The shift from Arab spring to a Caliphate winter represents almost the opposite: the individualized, decentralized and excessively violent, cruel and unpredictable use of force.
According to political analysts, understood properly, Eurasian imperialism and Arab radicalism are two sides of the same coin. They both reek of obvious helplessness and long-term self-defeat. They represent deep inferiority complexes to which the West has not developed any serious response beyond the usual policies of carrots and sticks.
The Atlantic civilization has to learn that political ideologies and violent conflicts which are no longer relevant in the West have found willing repetition outside their sphere. The Arab world may well have entered its genuine Thirty-Year War, while nobody knows how long Russian imperialism may last.
But as Russia’s and the Arab world’s inner tribulations have begun to penetrate the cohesion and stability of the West, they pose a threat to the Atlantic civilization that goes beyond the reaction of concerned neighbors. That is why, according to political analysts, it is time to reinforce the foundation of this unique experiment in the history of man’s search for freedom without coercion.
The Atlantic civilization needs to redefine its foundation: the search for truth cannot justify the destruction of freedom, one’s own and that of others; the rule of law and democratic participation include the protection of minorities; the outbreak of violence is the end of politics and not its continuation.
In the end, this is what liberal democracy is all about. It is against this backdrop that the success or failure of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) takes on a new dimension. These negotiations are about far more than a trans-Atlantic trade and investment partnership.
Political analysts noted that it is an investment into a common future of liberal democracy and it is about a partnership that cannot be traded on the altar of petty populism and myopic trends on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.
