The Simpsons Get Stoned

The Simpsons get stoned, carved up, crated and shipped around the world and everybody's happy. A remote village of stone carvers in Kenya get to ride on the Simpsons gravy train.

According to BBC, most residents of the remote village of Tabaka in Kisii have never watched the The Simpsons but are deeply aware Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie are changing their lives. When Twentieth Century Fox designated the Tabaka soapstone carvings as official Simpsons merchandise in July 2006, life ramped up overnight. With the movie just out, the cavers are bracing for an explosion of demand for their work, surely the most exotic of all the Simpsons merch.. Soapstone carving is a traditional craft passed down from generation to generation, and the Abagusii tribe is renowned for their carving prowess. The Tabaka Classic Carvers are licensed to produce 12 models of the show's characters, and they are keen to expand their portfolio. Pauline Kemunto and and her husband work with the Simpsons team in Tabaka; he carves the figures and she smoothes the soapstone afterwards "I don't know who they are," she says about the dysfunctional cartoon family. "But I like them because I earn from them." Monty Burns would surely approve. The team carve replicas of the characters that sell for $6, a huge improvement on the $1 per piece they earned before The Simpsons came to Tabaka. The business employs around 80 people - the carvers, the miners who provide the soapstone and the women who wash and polish the finished statues. The head of the team, Daniel Oigo Mogendi, said he won the tender by accident when he had gone to the capital, Nairobi, to collect payment for a soapstone chessboard. His client asked him to carve a prototype of Homer, the big-bellied family man who is fond of a beer. "I'd seen The Simpsons once on television, but I didn't care, I still carved it," he explains. It took more than a year for the Tabaka carvers to come up with a sculpture that would work logistically, as shipping the weighty sculptures was a major problem. "At first we tried full figures. But the hands would snap off during shipping so we'd try them with Homer's hands in his pockets, but then there was the weight issue," he says. A bust was felt to be the best solution and the carvers now reproduce the famous features without looking at the stone. "We know the physical characteristics of The Simpsons so well that we don't have to copy from anywhere," says one of the carvers. "The measurements are engraved in our memories." You need considerable skill to replicate the characters exactly each time and only the toppest of the village's top guns get to work on the Simpsons project. Packing boxes stacked against the walls of the grass thatched hut that serves as their studio reveals the far-flung destinations of the Tabaka soapstone carvings - the US, the United Kingdom and Italy. "My favourite carving is of Sideshow Bob," says Mogendi. "He's not my favourite character, but it shows how gifted the carvers are as it's replicated exactly with such skill each time."