Applique and patchwork on raffia - Kongo vs. Bakuba

Until the 20th century, the role of applique on raffia cloth was was primarily functional, not decorative. 

Modern Bakuba raffia cloth is often seen heavily embellished with hundreds of appliques in contrasting fabric. However, appliques on cloth made before WWI are the same color as the base fabric, are sparsely and randomly distributed, and unlike the interlaced designs typical of Bakuba art, these appliques are disparate L, J, or dot shapes.  Examination revealed that unlike the appliques that completely cover more recently made cloths, those scattered over early examples covered small tears or holes in the that resulted from the softening process previously mentioned. 

From Picton and Mack's "West African Textiles", p.176.

Compare the Bakuba applique cloth at top, made not long after European contact in 1890, with the one below it, made in the mid-20th century.   Click images for details.

Decorative patchwork also appears to be a post-Diaspora Bakuba innovation which like applique may have originated as a means of repair, as sashiko embroidery did in Japan. The earliest examples limit it to borders; typically the patchwork consists of regularly alternating squares of dark and light fabric, possibly an adaptation of the checkerboard embroidery along the edges of cloth (typically worn by men) that were trimmed with ball fringe. The most common modern method is reverse applique (the foreground is cut away to reveal a contrasting fabric placed behind it).

Comparing early and later examples, we can reasonably conclude that while applique may have been used in the Congo/Angola region during the 18th and early 19th centuries its primary role was functional, and that it and patchwork did not appear as significant decorative elements until after the end of the US slave trade.  

 

"muraqqa'a" and "Jibbeh" - Sudanese Arab appliqued tunics 

Sudanese jibbeh, c.1909.  Click for details.

 Since these garments originated in the Sudan (northeast Africa) in the late 19th century, they would not have been familiar to the Africans who were brought to the US as slaves.

The appliqued tunics worn by the Sudanese jihadis known as Mahdists have a relatively short history.  Mahdists were followers of Mohammad Ahmad, a Sudanese Arab born in 1844 who in 1881 declared himself al-Mahdi al-Muntazar ("Expected Savior"), the 10th century "Missing Imam" whose return would bring worldwide jihad and eventual Moslem domination.  (This is the same Imam for whose return Iran's Ahmadinejad has prayed at the UN.)  

Ahmad declared jihad against the ruling Ottoman-Egyptians and the British, who were unpopular for having hurt the economy by disrupting Arab enslavement of the region's minority black population in Darfur.   By the time Ahmad died of typhus in 1885 the Mahdists controlled the entire region and instituted strict sharia law.  Mahdist rule continued for the next four years, during which the economy collapsed and half the population died.   Their army was destroyed by the British in 1898, and their influence never extended beyond Sudan.

As evidence of their asceticism and devotion to Allah, Ahmad's followers, known as ansar, wore a ragged, torn tunic called a muraqqa'a, derived from a similar wool garment worn by the early Moslem ascetics called Sufis.  The muraqqa'a (which in the Arab world refers to a scrapbook) were patched, apparently intentionally, with colored rectangles, resulting in what Venice Lamb describes as "a dilapidated form of attire which translated the life of poverty and austerity at the heart of the Mahdist ideology into a striking visual image."   A muraqqa'a in the British Museum is thought to be the only one to have survived. 

Over a period of about 15 years this evolved into the Mahdist leaders' jibbeh, a carefully-crafted, stylized and quite standardized cotton version of their subordinates' tunic which imitated the patching but not the raggedness, reflecting in Christopher Spring's words the "evolution of the Mahdist state from a movement of religious zeal under the Mahdi to an increasingly militaristic autocracy under his successor, the Khalifa."

Muraqqa'a c.1886

Since they originated in the 1880s and were worn only by Sudanese jihadis, the Africans brought to the US as slaves would have no recollection of these tunics.

 

"Lifida" - Patchwork armor - Sudanese Arabs /Cameroon Fulani

Sudanese horse armor c.1899. Click to enlarge.

If these quilted patchwork garments were used during the Diaspora, the rarity of horses in subsaharan Africa would have limited their familiarity among the slaves brought to the US.  They show none of the "improvisation" and "spontaneity" of modern African-American quilts. 

The patchwork-covered, quilted armor worn by horses in Sudan and by the Hausa, Bornu and Fulani in northern Cameroon is often claimed as an origin for African-American patchwork style.  The Chronicle of Kano, written in 1890, says Kanajeji introduced quilted armor to the Hausa in the 15th century, but I could not determine whether it had spread elsewhere before reports of the Cameroon Fulani using it in their 1804 jihad against the Hausa, or whether it was used by Fulani in Senegambia.  

Among the Cameroon Fulani it was made by organized craftsmen groups under palace supervision.  The earliest examples I have located were made in the 1890s of colorful imported cloth. Conversely, the quilted armor worn by the Fulani themselves was made of plain white stripwoven cloth, quilted in parallel diagonal rows of concentric squares. 

The lethal presence of the tsetse fly in subsaharan Africa's savannahs and forests makes it unlikely either horses or their quilted armor were familiar much beyond these ethincities' home regions.  (The tsetse fly is also the reason that Arab traders headed for West Africa transferred their merchandise from horses and camels onto human porters as they reached the southern edge of the Sahara). The Fulani and Hausa also appear to have been in the minority of Africans taken as slaves from their respective regions.  

Worth noting is that early examples' careful piecing and regular quilting lack the "improvisation" and "spotaniety" of modern African-American quilts.