"'Rorke’s Drift was no ordinary school,' Peder Gowenius writes in the introduction to Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints. When he and Ulla Gowenius landed in South Africa from Sweden, they knew very little about the country. Naive to apartheid, the couple arrived at the mission station in (what is now) Kwa-Zulu Natal with relatively modest aims: to explore traditional craftmaking and whether these crafts could assist women in rural areas to make a living. 'The whole idea was absurd and politically unclear,' he writes.

The students became the project’s key collaborators, the teachers’ teachers. Azaria Mbatha and Allina Ndebele-Khumalo were vital contributors who, together with their colleagues, guided the founders to the three cornerstones upon which the Rorke’s Drift Evangelical Lutheran Art Centre would be built:

1 – That the art made there could, through metaphorical pictures and stories, convey messages that were forbidden or banned in South Africa under apartheid.
2 – That ‘ordinary’, or western school systems might be inhibitory to creative expression.
3 – That Rorke’s Drift be self-sufficient, where sanctions on SA made it difficult to access foreign aid, and reliance on foreign donors would be irresponsible.

Ulla Gowenius and her team of weavers accomplished the third cornerstone within the first four years of the art centre’s establishment, through demand for their storied tapestries."

– Sightlines wayfinder