Once upon a time, a man came from the cold…

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and a young engineer from England was walking down the streets of Douala in Cameroon. He noticed in a shop the most gorgeous sandals he had ever seen. Surprised to see such beauty, the young man asked the seller : “who makes them?”

…In a land far away where there was a maître-bottier.

He found the maker, Mr Nyam [ni-yam]. A shoemaker for over 25 years, he had invented a shoe model in raffia in the 1990s so successful that copycats appeared all around Central Africa. Then in the 2000s the rise of cheap shoes from abroad and free shoes distributed by charities bankrupted him.

A friendship grew between the two men.