About us

 9-foto_-rand_-dhows_-coming-back_-home_-nungwi-zanzibar-david_-germain-2008-with-credits

Dhows returning home, Zanzibar, Tanzania, 2008 © David Germain

Indigenous Sails is registered as an association with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce under reg. nr. 24456608. This non profit project is initiated by Teije Brandsma, a Dutchman who lived and worked for more than ten years in Asia and Africa.

During his years in the Far East and Africa, Brandsma came across the last remaining sailing ships in the Indian Ocean, specifically near Zanzibar, the Gulf of Aden and Indonesia. The time Brandsma, an avid sailor, spent in those parts of the world made him realise there is still a considerably number of exotic sailing ships in use, although their numbers are inevitably declining.

Indigenous Sails is convinced that although most of these ships will disappear in the next decades, they do not have to vanish altogether. The survival of a small and commercially healthy core group of ´working sails´ is, according to Indigenous Sails, a real possibility. Indigenous Sails brought in Eelco Kraefft, managing director of Ehio Media in Amsterdam, for concept development and website design.

As Teije Brandsma travels a lot and stays abroad regularly, the office of Ehio Media in Amsterdam serves as the contact address and meeting place for those involved in the Indigenous Sails project. Ehio Media has its office in a renovated storage building in the harbor area in Amsterdam, not far from the Amsterdam Central Station. The address is Van Diemenstraat 88, 1011 CN, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.