I’m Fariji Cannon, and I was born in Iringa, in the southern highlands of Tanzania. Today I live in Denver, Colorado, but Iringa is still home.
How it started
Every time I went home to Tanzania, I brought back a basket bag for myself. People here kept stopping me to ask where they could get one. Then a lady at church told me I should start selling them. That is how Fortress of Blessing began.
The women who weave
Our bags are woven by the women of Vikapu Bomba, a weaving enterprise in Iringa founded by my friend Catherine Shembilu. Vikapu Bomba means “fantastic baskets” in Swahili. Catherine started in 2011 with six weavers. Today more than 300 women across the Iringa and Njombe regions weave with her, and their baskets are sold in 21 countries.
Weaving baskets is a long tradition for women in our region, but for many families it had stopped paying. Catherine brought the women together, taught them new designs, and found them markets, so the work could support them again. Many of the women are widows, and this work helps feed and care for their families. That is why every bag we sell matters so much to me.
Catherine’s label goes on every bag alongside ours, because we do this together.
From grass to bag
In Iringa, baskets are everyday things. We use them for market days, for carrying food, and for taking grain to the mill. Each bag begins as milulu grass, a reed-like grass the women gather by hand along the rivers of the southern highlands and dry in the sun. Then it is woven, strand by strand, into a basket, and finished with leather straps and handles. A single bag takes days of careful work, and no two are ever the same.
Why we do this
This shop is about more than bags. It is about sharing our culture: the warmth, the food, the market days, and the way we don’t know a stranger. When you carry one of these bags, you carry a little of Tanzania with you, and you help a woman in Iringa earn a living with her own hands.
Why “Fortress of Blessing”
In Iringa, the small houses sit beneath the mountains. Each one is a fortress, the place you always run home to. For me, our culture and our heritage are that fortress, wherever in the world we live. And we are so blessed to have them. That is the name, and it is the heart of everything we make.
Thank you for being part of it.
With gratitude,
Fariji