Clothing
in Africa as elsewhere, has long served more
than one purpose. In addition to satisfying
human needs for covering and adornment, textiles
and clothing provide media for artistic
expression for weavers, dyers, tailors, and
clothing designers.
For centuries, textiles and garments have been
produced both domestically — for household and
village community members — and commercially,
for bartering or sale. Although the earliest
cloth was made primarily of local natural
fibers, today's African textiles and clothing
incorporate a wide variety of materials and
styles.
The precise origins of cloth production in
Africa is lost in time, but archaeological
findings indicate some of the earliest sites.
Drawings of looms can be seen in the tombs of
ancient Egypt, dating back to at least 2000
B.C.E.
Archaeologists have found linen remnants in
ancient Egypt, as well as fifth-century cotton
cloth remnants in Meroe, in northern Sudan. In
West Africa, woven fiber pieces dating back to
the ninth century C.E. have been found in
Nigeria, and woven cotton cloth dating to the
eleventh century has been recovered in Mali.
Evidence of loom use in Mauritania dates back to
the eleventh century.
Traditions of Cloth Production and Design Bark
cloth, or cloth made from tree bark, predates
the development of woven textiles in most parts
of Africa. Today it is rarely used for
day-to-day clothing, but some societies use it
for ceremonial costumes. The Ganda of Uganda,
for example, make fabric from the inner bark of
fig trees, which is worn during ceremonial
dances and other occasions when ancestors are
being honored.
Early clothing in Africa was also made from
treated animal hides, furs, and feathers.
Many
African societies weave cloth from locally grown
cotton. In North Africa and the Sahel, women
also spin and weave camel and sheep wool. Other
sources of fiber include the raffia palm in
Central and West Africa, jute and flax in West
Africa and Madagascar, and silk in Nigeria,
Madagascar, and East Africa. All these fibers
can be dyed using vegetable and mineral dyes.
The two main kind of textile looms in Africa are
the double-heddle loom, used for narrow strips
of cloth, and the single-heddle loom, used for
wider pieces. The narrow strips are typically
sewn together, then cut into patterns for
clothing. The double-heddle loom is generally
used only by male weavers, who use it to weave
in colored threads and create richly textured
fabrics.
In addition, weavers in North Africa and in
Ethiopia also use ground looms, while looms
similar to those used in Southeast Asia are
found in Madagascar. Although Africa's weavers
produce a wide variety of patterned, colored
fabric, they also weave plain cloth. This cloth
can either be used "as is" for daily wear around
the home, or it can be decorated. Common
fabric-decorating techniques include appliqué
designs, sewn on in contrasting fabrics;
embroidery with brightly colored threads; and
dyeing.
Two
of the most popular dyeing techniques in Africa
are tie and dye, and resist dye. In tie and dye,
designs are first tied or stitched into the
cloth, using cotton or raffia threads. In resist
dye, dyers draw on the cloth using an
impermeable substance, such as candle wax or
paste made from cassava, a tuber. They then dip
the fabrics into solutions typically made from
vegetable dyes, which color all but the covered
areas. Indigo plants are used for deep blue
dyes, while reddish brown dyes are extracted
from cola nuts, the camwood tree, and the
redwood tree. Greens, yellows, and blacks are
prepared from other sources.
Most designs and motifs used to decorate fabric
have names. Many designs are associated with
particular plants, animals, events, or proverbs,
and are often used in other crafts, such as
house painting, carving, and pottery. Others
incorporate Arabic script, Roman letters and
numerals, or line drawings of contemporary
objects, such as bicycles and cars.
"Traditional" cloth production, in other words,
is not only highly varied from place to place
but is also influenced by societal and
technological change.
In many African societies, men and women are
responsible for different stages of cloth
production. The gender division of labor,
however, varies widely by region, and in many
places has changed over time. For example, in
Mali, women used to dye bogolanfini mud-cloth,
but today young unemployed men in urban areas
have taken up this craft. They typically produce
lower-quality
cloth, which is sold to tourists or exported.
Indigo dyeing is women's work among the Yoruba
and the Soninke of West Africa, but among the
Hausa,
fabric dying is traditionally a men's craft.
Commercial textile and clothing production has a
long history in some parts of Africa. In
Tunisia, weavers and dyers as early as the tenth
century C.E. organized guilds in order to
protect their business. By the fifteenth
century, the dyeing pits of Kano in northern
Nigeria were renowned as far north as the
Mediterranean coast. They are still in operation
today. In Kano as in many other precolonial
centers of commercial textile production, the
city's political elite were among the weavers'
and dyers' most important clientele. Royal
patronage fostered the development of special
luxury cloths. The court of King Njoya of Baumun
in present-day Cameroon, for example, produced
especially fine examples of raffia-stitched tie
and dye. The Asante court in Kumasi (in
present-day) Ghana) supervised the production of
silk kente cloth (described below).
Clothing Traditions Across the Continent In
North Africa, nomadic pastoralists in
mountainous regions weave animal wool into thick
cloth for tents, blankets, rugs, and cushions.
The mouchtiya is a capelike shawl worn by
married women, and like other clothing materials
is woven on vertical looms. Across North Africa,
both Arab and Berber influences are apparent in
textile designs and clothing styles.
In the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea,
Amharic and Tigrean women wear kemis, cotton
dresses with fitted bodices, long sleeves, and
full skirts. The shamma, a light shawl, is
thrown over the head and shoulders. A border of
woven or embroidered geometric designs
highlights the otherwise white cloth. The
designs include variations of the cross motif,
which is central to the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Men also wear the
shamma, as well as shirts and baggy knee-length
pants made of the same white cloth. In colder
weather, people of this region have
traditionally wrapped themselves in a heavy
woven blanket (kutta) or cape (bornos). When it
rains they don a wollo, a cape made from finely
woven grass. Farther east in the Horn of Africa,
the pleated skirts and tight embroidered
trousers and veils worn by Islamic Somali,
Harari Oromo, and Argobba women reflect
influences from the Indian subcontinent,
cultivated over centuries of trade across the
Indian Ocean.
Pastoral societies in the lowlands of the Horn
of Africa, such as the Boran, make some of their
own clothing out of goatskin. The women wear
leather or cotton skirts trimmed with beads,
metal rings, cowrie shells, and ostrich eggshell
beads, and sometimes painted with cow blood. The
cotton woven here is multicolored and striped,
not unlike the kikoi cloth found along the
Swahili coast of East Africa.
In the Sahara and Sahelian regions of West
Africa, Tuareg men wrap their heads in a
distinctive blue veil. The indigo-dyed wrap is
put on during the
initiation ceremonies marking the end of
boyhood, and thereafter is rarely removed. The
indigo from the veil and accompanying robes rubs
off onto the
skin, hence the Tuareg's nickname, the "blue
men." The Tuareg have traditionally purchased
their indigo cloth from Hausa traders in markets
along the Sahara's southern edge.
Elsewhere
in West Africa, men in many societies weave
cotton cloth in long narrow strips, which are
then stitched into large pieces. Among the
Asante, the men wrap the long piece of cloth
around the waist and then loop it over the
shoulder, toga-style. Baggy pants that are tight
around the lower leg are
popular, as are elaborately embroidered,
full-length robes. Women across West Africa
commonly tie a long wrap around the waist,
accompanied by a wide sash, a matching blouse,
and a head wrap.
The Yoruba of Nigeria prepare an indigo-dyed
cotton called adire eleso. The artists sew
finely detailed patterns onto the cloth using
raffia or cotton thread, then take the cloth to
a dyer, known as an aloro, who, it is said,
works under the protection of the Yoruba spirit
Iya Mapo. Similar techniques are also used
farther west, among the Wolof, the Soninke, and
the Mandinka, and as far
south as the Kasai region in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
Yoruba women cloth makers, known as aladire, use
resist dye methods to make adire eleso. They use
cassava paste to paint or stencil repeated
abstractions of animals and plants onto the
cloth. After dyeing the cloth indigo blue, they
beat it with a wooden stick until it attains a
bright glossy sheen. Bambara women in Mali also
use the resist technique to produce a speckled
blue fabric, while Soninke women coat cloth in
paste and then run a comb through it, to create
a wavelike design after dyeing.
The colors and designs of the adobe architecture
found in Tombouctou and other older cities in
Mali are reflected in the Bambara's famous
ochre-colored bokolanfini, or mud-cloth fabrics.
Women first dye the cloth yellow with a
vegetable extract, then carefully paint the
cloth with specially prepared mud. After the mud
is washed off, the designs appear in yellow
against a dark brown
background. In the final step, dyers apply
bleach to the yellow parts to change them back
to the original color. In Ghana, cloths sewn
from narrow cotton strips are either kept white
or dyed reddish brown with a dye obtained from
the bark of the kuntunkuni tree. The artist then
divides the cloth into blocks, and uses stamps
made out of calabash shells to decorate the
fabric with designs, many of which are
associated with proverbs. The finished cloth is
worn toga-style by Akan and Ewe men.
Perhaps
the most famous fabric produced in Ghana is
kente, which was traditionally made by tailors
of the Asante court, using European silk
acquired first through trans-Saharan trade and
later coastal trade. Richly colored and textured
fabric, kente was once worn only by Asante
royalty, but it has now become an international
symbol for Africa. It is worn throughout the
African diaspora as an acknowledgment of one's
roots on the continent. Outside of Ghana, it is
still difficult to find large pieces of
high-quality hand-woven kente. But cheap,
mass-produced copies of kente designs — often
printed rather than woven — are now sold
worldwide.
One of the most distinctive textiles produced in
Central Africa is raffia cloth. Men weave fibers
from the leaves of raffia palm trees into
squares that vary in size according to length of
the fibers. Tie and dyeing, weaving, cut-pile
embroidery, and appliqué are all used to
decorate the fabric with geometric designs. The
squares are sewn edge to edge into larger
pieces, which can be used for dance skirts and
for burial cloths. Raffia cloth production has
largely died out in more heavily populated areas
along the coast, but today the Kuba of the Kasai
region continue to weave and decorate raffia
cloth for use during funerals.
Foreign Influences
African societies have long incorporated
imported materials, textiles, and styles into
their own clothing traditions. For centuries,
trans-Saharan trade caravans carried cloth back
and forth between the city-states of the West
African
savanna and North Africa. After Europeans began
plying Atlantic trade routes around the
continent, they too participated in the textile
trade. Certain kinds of cloth, in fact, served
as currency in West Africa, to be exchanged for
slaves or gold. In East Africa, foreign textiles
arrived on ships that worked the monsoon trade
routes between the Gulf of Arabia, India, and
East Asia.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, Portuguese
traders frequented the southern African port of
Lourenço Marque (now Maputo, the capital of
Mozambique), bringing glass beads to exchange
for ivory and gold. The Ndebele people used
the beads to decorate leather skirts and cloaks,
as well as to make thick hoop necklaces,
bracelets, and anklets.
In the late nineteenth century, a new cloth
became popular on Zanzibar, an island city-state
with a long history of transoceanic trade.
During the 1870s, enterprising Swahili women
began to sew brightly colored imported
handkerchiefs known as lesos into larger pieces
of fabric, which were called kangas. Six lesos
were cheaper than one piece of imported fabric
of the same size. The textile industries in
Manchester and Holland soon caught on to this
new market and began manufacturing similarly
sized single cotton pieces that were intended to
be sold in pairs. The kangas were worn mainly by
women eager to establish their emancipated
identity after the abolition of slavery on
Zanzibar. They wrapped one kanga around the
waist, another around the upper body, and a
third around the head and thrown over the
shoulder, covering the body in the Muslim
fashion. The most popular kangas had proverbs
and other
sayings printed at the bottom. Kangas are now
widely worn in East Africa; most are either
produced by domestic industries in Kenya or
Tanzania, or imported directly from South or
East Asia. Just as at the turn of the century,
customers are always in search of new designs
and new printed proverbs.
In
West Africa, nineteenth-century European traders
found large markets for factory-produced
wax-printed cloth. The designs of this cloth
imitated hand-dyed batik textiles, which the
Dutch East India Company began importing from
Java in the seventeenth century. West African
women wore "dutch wax" wraps (or pagnes, in
Francophone countries) much like women in East
Africa wore kangas.
Today, most independent West African countries'
domestic textile industries manufacture cloth
decorated with "dutch wax" prints as well as
other designs. These factories commonly produce
special runs on request, to commemorate
holidays or events. Genuine dutch wax cloths are
still imported from Europe and are both
prestigious and costly. Despite their foreign
origin they are widely recognized as "African"
fabrics. A large proportion of both the urban
and international trades in dutch wax cloths is
controlled by women traders based in West
African cities such as Lomé, Lagos, and Abidjan.
The most successful
of these traders are known as "Mama Benzis," a
reference to their Mercedes Benz cars and other
symbols of wealth.
British and Dutch merchants were not the only
Europeans who encouraged Africans to adopt new
clothing styles during the colonial era.
Christian missionaries expected converts to wear
modest European-style clothing. During World War
I and World War II, pamphlets used during
recruitment campaigns in the colonies featured
pictures of soldiers smartly dressed in khaki
shorts and shirts. Most colonial-era schools
(like many today) required students to wear
uniforms, similar to the blouse and skirt (for
girls) or shorts (for boys) ensembles worn by
European schoolchildren.
Contemporary Trends
Given the association of Western-style dress
with the colonial powers, it is hardly
surprising that many African anticolonial
movements of the 1940s and 1950s made elements
of traditional clothing symbolic of their
campaign toward independence. Kenya's Jomo
Kenyatta wore a beaded ogut tigo hat and a
beaded leather belt, while Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah
encouraged educated
nationalists to wear the fugu, a waist-length
tunic worn by the common man. At independence,
many new republics designed a national dress,
intended to unite the diverse peoples within
their borders. In the former Democratic Republic
of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko's authenticité
campaign urged
Zairieans to return to "authentic" African
clothing styles.
Contemporary African governments and political
leaders still exercise important influences over
popular clothing styles. Kangas and kitenges
have become wearable billboards, with
special-edition designs promoting national
health campaigns such as family planning, or
celebrating presidential birthdays and national
holidays. After Thomas Sankara came to power in
Burkina Faso in 1983, he declared locally woven
cotton the national fabric and required civil
servants to wear it. In southern Africa, men's
"Kaunda suits" are named after
Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia.
In South Africa, Gatsha Buthelezi, head of the
Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party, encourages
supporters to wear the skins and headdresses of
Zulu warriors at public events.
South African President Nelson Mandela's taste
in brightly-colored shirts has made them newly
fashionable.
Economic conditions and changing technologies
are also influencing African clothing styles.
Currency devaluations carried out under
structural adjustment economic reform programs
have made imported materials and clothing more
expensive, but markets for used clothing
("fripperie" in Francophone countries) remain
consistently strong. A significant proportion of
the used Western clothing sold in Africa was
originally donated to charities in the United
States
and Europe.
Whether new or secondhand, Western clothing is
considered fashionable in contemporary Africa.
So too are "new traditional" clothes, which mix
traditional fabrics and styles with synthetic
materials and Western designs. For example,
Yoruba weavers of the traditional aso oke fabric
now incorporate lurex and rayon threads into
their fabric. In Mali, tailors use bogolanfini
mud-cloth to
make European-cut blazers, vests, and caps.
Often tailors' customers, especially women,
commission outfits using locally bought cloth,
but based on imported patterns or designs copied
from fashion magazines.
Growing appreciation for handmade African
fabrics, both as pieces of art and as materials
appropriate for "high-fashion" clothing, bodes
well for the survival of traditional skills.
Contemporary artists such as Nike Davis, Senabu
Oloyede,
and Kekekomo Oladepo of Nigeria use indigo-dyed
adire cloth in tapestries that
explore modern themes. In Mali, Pama Sinatoa in
Djenné and Ismael Diabaté, and the Groupe
Bogolan Kasobane and the Atelier Jamana in
Bamako have won renown for their bogolanfini
clothes, while Chris Seydou used
bogolanfini-inspired textiles in his
contemporary clothing styles. In Nairobi, Kenya,
the African Heritage Gallery commissions
clothing and jewelry that draws on traditional
styles from all over the continent.
Contributed By: Muhonjia Khaminwa
http://www.africana.com/
