Part III

Indigenous subsaharan textiles

Subsaharan Africa's earliest textile was nonwoven barkcloth, which oxidized naturally to various shades of brown or was painted with overall designs in black.  During the slave trade era, the woven cloth most women in West Africa and Congo/Angola made and wore was, like European linen of the period, either solid, checked or striped in white, indigo blue and brown, and averaged 24" wide; some of it was very fine and delicate.  The narrow strip loom was not found in Congo/Angola, the source of many of the Deep South's slaves.  It was limited to West Africa, and was used exclusively by men, who also wore most of its cloth.  This loom's narrow strips, either solid or striped white, blue and brown, averaged 4-6" wide, and were made into larger panels by joining them along their long edges, carefully matching the patterns to produce an even checkered effect or to mimic the horizontal stripes of North African blankets.  

Our earliest knowledge of West African textiles comes from the records of Arab Moslem traders and invaders.  In the 12th and 13th centuries, they noted that while rulers and some elite wore wool and cotton clothing, most people they saw wore barkcloth or skins.  Barkcloth is probably what Ghana's Asante and Ewe wore before they started weaving what we know as kente on narrow horizontal looms in the 16th century, and it remains the required dress for the Asante king during some ceremonies. The Brong people just to their north were making barkcloth as late as the 1920s. 

Evidence suggests that fabrics woven on vertical looms were probably first used in subsaharan Africa in the early Middle Ages, and that the horizontal strip loom was introduced somewhat later. Giovanni Ramusio noted in 1550 that a hundred years earlier, cotton thread and cloth were being sold in what is now Nigeria.  Giovanni Leo Africanus, who traveled throughout West Africa from 1492-1526, said the finest cottons came to the coast from the interior.  By the late 1600s, visiting Europeans described most people they saw as wearing woven textiles.  The earliest known examples are from the 11th-15th centuries, and were found in cave dwellings in Tellem, Mali, just north of the part of Africa affected by the Atlantic slave trade, on the border of the region with the longest contact with Arabs.  Some are tunics and hats, made of the sort of blue and white checks and stripes that would not be out of place in 18th century Europe or America. Others are blankets made from narrow fabric strips joined along their selvages, but carefully assembled to imitate the horizontal striping found in textiles North Africans wove on wider looms (compare the Tellem fabrics to Malian blankets and Berber shawls).  Some historians think the North African motifs were derived from Moslem amulets, and in turn inspired the designs found in Asante and Ewe cloth. But as the distance from Moslem- dominated areas increases, African textiles show fewer similarities with Arab aesthetics and techniques.  West Central Africans, for example, do not use the narrow strip loom.

During the Diaspora, from Senegal to Angola the most common form of clothing for both sexes was a sarong-like body wrap about 4x8 feet, worn at the waist or above the bust, in some regions called a kijipa.  (Women sometimes wore an additional panel as a shawl; in later years, more prosperous men and eventually women wore larger pieces like a Roman toga.)   In woven fabric, these panels were made by joining the selvage (lengthwise) edges of narrower strips to form a piece of appropriate dimensions. The width of the strips depended on the loom on which they were woven and, to a degree, the sex of the wearer.  As Islam gradually spread southward during the 17th and 18th centuries, some men began adopting Arab-style tunics, pants and turbans made from these fabrics, but such garments would not become the norm until after jihad in the early 1800s ensured Moslem dominance.

As in the Americas and Asia, in West Africa cotton grew naturally in three basic shades: inland, a snowy white with long fibers, preferred for indigo dyeing; in Dahomey, a deep beige similar to the Chinese cotton referred to by Europeans as "yellow" or "Nankeen"; and in Senegambia, around Oyo and along the Nigerian coast, a light reddish-brown, short-staple perennial cotton, considered the least desirable.  (Thomas Clarkson's 1788 reference to it as "crimson in the pod" probably results from an erroneous reading of the botanical term "rufous"; had true red cotton actually been available, Europe would have fallen all over itself to get it, and there would have been no market in West Africa for red English wool).

Barkcloth 

Both oral and material history and early European and Arab visitors' notes indicate that throughout the forested regions along the coast of West Africa, the earliest textile used was barkcloth.  It continued to be popular during and long after Diaspora period, and was observed being worn by coastal Ewe in 1717 and by the Kongo in 1910. Even among people who later switched to woven textiles, barkcloth often remained the required fabric for ritual garments.

Barkcloth beater from the Baule people, Ivory Coast.  Click thumbnail for details.

C.1900 painted and and brown barkcloth made by the Ebo? (left) and Bene (right) people of Cameroon. Click thumbnails for details.	Barkcloth is made by removing large pieces of bark from fig trees, softening the bark with water, laying the sheets across a log, and pounding them with a ridged club to soften the fibers and join the pieces into a larger sheet to form a kind of felt. It looks a little like handmade paper, and like paper it can be thick and stiff or thin and flexible, and it readily receives color.  Certain types were said to be waterproof.   The final color of barkcloth varied from region to region. In most places it was naturally oxidized to shades of tan to reddish-brown but, for example, the tree used by the Ewe resulted in a beige or off-white cloth.
Samuel Baker observed during the 1870s that in western Uganda, the finest barkcloth was painted with or dipped in iron-rich water which reacted with the tannin to turn it black. Early 20th century examples exist of cloth (mostly for men) that has been painted, tie-dyed or stitch-dyed in combinations of brownish-red and brown, but I have not been able to confirm that these techniques were used along the west coast during the Diaspora or that the dyes are indigenous.   Like most textiles, barkcloth was generally used as a wrapping cloth, but some ritual costumes  (tunics and pants) have been made of painted barkcloth.  I have not ascertained whether they were used during the Diaspora, or if they are the predecessors of modern costumes which are either embroidered with imported yarn or made of patchwork from imported fabrics.

Fabrics that would have been most familiar to West Africans brought to the Americas as slaves in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Left, Bobo women from Upper Volta wearing kijipa "women's cloth" with woven-in horizontal stripes, circa 1940.  Right, a closeup of a kijipa made of handwoven strips about 5" wide, sewn together and then dyed indigo, circa 1950.

"Women's Cloth" - the wide vertical loom

As its name suggests, "women's cloth" - striped, checked, or solid-colored - was woven by women, mostly for their own use, on a vertical loom in two panels 18-30" wide, averaging 24".  The panels would be sewn together lengthwise to make a larger piece. 

In most communities today this fabric has been almost completely replaced by brightly multicolored, mass-produced "Dutch wax" prints, first manufactured in mid-19th century Holland in a failed attempt to imitate Javanese batik for resale in Indonesia.  The fabric found a successful market on Africa's Gold Coast, where Indonesian batik in traditional blue and brown had been a luxury item since the 17th century.  Only since the 1960s have "Dutch wax" prints been manufactured in Africa; Chinese imports now dominate the market.

Men's Cloth - the narrow horizontal strip loom

This fragment of early stripwoven men's cloth shows careful pattern matching

Men's cloth and some forms of women's cloth was woven almost exclusively by men on a double-heddle horizontal strip loom, whose sitting position was regarded by many as immodest for women.  This loom produces narrow fabric strips averaging 4-6" wide (although they can be as wide as 15" or as narrow as 1"), which were then assembled along their selvages into wider panels about 4x8' for women, worn like a sarong; or 8x10' for the toga-like wrap worn by men, draped over the left shoulder.  In Moslem-dominated areas, the completed fabric could also be made into men's tunics and pants.   Although the design of the West African strip loom is similar to wider looms used in the Arab-dominated, Moslem north, and non-African cultures also make strip-pieced fabric, in Africa the strips produced are much narrower.  The simplest and probably the earliest of these fabrics had lengthwise stripes; checks and complex weft patterns could also be woven.   Why the narrow strip-loom caught on and was retained in West Africa remains a mystery.  Historians point to its portability; it may have been introduced by itinerant North African weavers.  They note it requires less initial investment in yarn, which took longer to produce on the drop spindle used in the region (it took several spinners to keep one weaver supplied). They speculate it may have persisted because of the essentially conservative, traditional nature of West African society, which more readily adopted political or military introductions than technological ones; a habit born of earlier use of strips of cloth as currency (which would demand  standardization) or it may relate to the way work was divided by gender.

Appearance cannot be the only reason, since from earliest times, many strip-woven fabrics have been finished in ways that ignore,  de-emphasize, or even hide the way the cloth is assembled, and examples of "strip-piecing" imported textiles are extremely rare. 

Raffia Cloth

With few exceptions, data on textiles from any period in most of West Central Africa (generally speaking, today's Congo and Angola) is scanty.  The area closest to the Atlantic was dominated by the Kongo (a/k/a Bakongo) kingdom, whose trade with Europe began in the 15th century and intensified as the Kongo developed a lucrative industry capturing and selling their neighbors to European slave traders waiting on the coast.  As both contact and wealth expanded in the 18th century, they abandoned their own prestige fabrics in favor of imported velvets and brocades.  

Most textile research has therefore focused on the Bakuba people, who live hundreds of miles to the east in central Zaire and retained many locally-made fabric types in some form into the 20th century. It is believed that the Bakuba acquired their textile methods from the Kongo via trade intermediaries.   But the Bakuba were not taken as slaves to North America; they did not even have contact with Europeans until almost 1890.  So although the Bakuba culture was preserved by this limited, late contact and by Bakuba conservatism (particularly among the ruling Bushoong), their textiles are second- or third-hand adaptations Kongo designs and methods, not direct imitations.  

However, we do know from oral history and European travelers' notes that, as in most forested areas of West Africa, the earliest textile used in the region was barkcloth, which typically was dyed a solid reddish-brown using camwood. Early 20th century examples exist of men's cloth that has been tie-dyed and stitch-dyed in combinations of red and brown, but I have not been able to confirm that these techniques were used during the Diaspora.   Certainly by the time the Portuguese arrived in the late 15th century, plain raffia cloth was being produced; it  looks and feels like linen and is woven by men on a 45-degree vertical loom. Some communities twisted the fibers into long threads and used it like cotton, while others used the fibers individually, making rectangular or square panels about 12"x18" or two feet square, a size determined by the raffia palm leaves from which the cloth's fiber is obtained.

A Bakongo man (Congo) weaving raffia cloth in the 1930s.

A Babunda (Congo) pattern-woven raffia cloth collected in 1910.

The squares were then joined to make a single cloth which in Central Africa was several yards long. This was worn by both men and women wrapped around the waist and secured with a decorative belt. An important man might wear a larger piece like a toga.  Raffia cloth was also found in some parts of West Africa, such as Ivory Coast, where it appears to have been worn unadorned and undyed. The fabric's weave was usually plain, but sometimes consisted of regular geometric designs; occasionally some of the fibers were bleached by the sun before weaving, producing a delicate tone-on-tone effect.   In 1914 John Weeks noted that a full-sized men's cloth - probably the equivalent of 5 yards of modern cotton - was so soft and fine it could fit into a pint jar (which suggests it was comparable to handkerchief linen).  In Central Africa, before wearing the fabric was softened by wrapping it in damp rags, placing it in a trough and beating it with wooden pestles.  Because the fibers are delicate, this can result in damage to the cloth which had to be repaired by patching.