African Textiles

One of the most obvious features of the material culture of Africa is cloth. Woven textiles, and other fabrics, are available in almost every part of the continent, and more often than not in substantial quantity. This is, of course, particularly apparent in any market in West or North Africa; but it is surely hardly less true of other regions. As far as the textiles are concerned, some of these fabrics will be imported from Europe and India, though by the present time the greater part is likely to be locally manufactured. Of this, much will be the product of industrial equipment and processes in the factories of post-colonial Africa; and yet much will have come from the hands of spinners, weavers and dyers still working, and very often flourishing, within the traditions of pre-colonial origin that continue to be of cultural and social relevance, with a secure indigenous patronage. These provide the subject matter of this book.

Textiles as a context of culture

The most obvious use of textiles is as articles of clothing. One or more lengths of cloth may be draped around the body, or tailored to make gowns, tunics, trousers and so on. Modesty, whatever that may mean to a particular people, and protection against the elements are, however, not the only purposes of clothing. Particular colours or decorative embellishments or shapes of garment may have cultural value such that the wearer is immediately associated with the possession of great wealth or status. Alternatively, an otherwise relatively poor man may possess one costly gown which he will wear only at important occasions.

Particular colours, kinds of decoration or shapes of garment may also have political or ritual significances. The tribal affiliation of a Moroccan Berber woman, for example, can be seen (coincidentally) in the pattern of stripes of her cloak. In Benin, Nigeria, chiefs wear red cloth as part of their ceremonial court dress; and red by its association with anger, blood, war and fire is regarded as threatening. By the wearing of such cloth a chief protects himself, and his king, from evil, that is to say from witchcraft and from the magical forces employed by their enemies (Paula Ben-Amos, 1977). In addition, however, some chiefs wear red cloth which is scalloped to produce a type of skirt known as 'pangolin skin'. The scales of the pangolin are widely used also as a protective charm against evil and the pangolin is regarded as the one animal the leopard (a metaphor of kingship) cannot kill. Wearing this costume can, in addition to giving protection from evil, be interpreted as referring to the potential opposition between the king and the Town Chiefs, the resolution of which is so important a part of the political tradition in Benin. In this particular case the red cloth used is of European manufacture although it has been imported into Benin since the late fifteenth century. (As we shall see, we cannot ignore the use of European products in textile design and manufacture in Africa.)

The basic colour spectrum of Africa, red, black and white, is, of course, rarely without some level of significance although the precise nature of this significance will vary from one people to another. Elsewhere in Nigeria, as among the Ebira for example, red is a colour associated not with danger and war but with success and achievement with which they overlap but do not coincide; and in Madagascar the term 'red', mena, is applied to burial cloths though with the sense of 'colourful' rather than because they are dominantly red in colour. The contrast is at least in part between the colourful shrouds of the dead and the white cloth worn by mourners.

Textiles are not only used to clothe the living, obviously, but also the dead (as in the above Malagasy example), as well as providing clothing for the manifestations of the world of the dead, or of some other mode of existence, in masquerade form. Here too colour is likely to be of significance and certain kinds of textile may be produced specifically for such purposes. Textiles may be used to dress neither person, corpse nor spirit, but a house, to mark an event of some significance, or, similarly, a shrine. Finally, gifts of textiles are a means by which social relationships are created and maintained.

In the absence of woven cloth people may use barkcloth or skins, and in a few places almost the only form of bodily attire is paint. Frequently textiles are worn in combination with non-textile fabrics, skins or paint. The simplest form of West African man's dress, for example, is a triangular leather apron, worn around the waist and sometimes tucked between the legs, together with a length of cloth thrown over one shoulder. Although this book is about textiles rather than about costume, since barkcloth, skins and body decoration are analogous to textiles in some areas and combined with them in others, they cannot be left altogether out of any consideration of the subject.

Cloth is also a marketable commodity and has been the subject of extensive trade within and beyond the continent of Africa. In some places one range of cloths is knotting, netting, braiding, plaiting, etc.; and secondly, the interworking of one set of parallel elements by another set crossing them more or less at right angles. These two sets are essential to the structure of a woven fabric, or textile; and it is, of course, with the woven fabrics of Africa that we are here concerned.

Cloth, a term which is in everyday use, is rather more difficult to define. All textiles are cloths, but not all cloths are textiles, for they need not be woven; and all cloths are fabrics, but, again, not all fabrics are cloths. Thus, to give the obvious example, basketry depends on the ordered interworking of previously prepared elements and it is usual to assume a distinction between cloth and basketry. But, as Emery shows in a lengthy discussion, although both words are widely used as generic terms for large groups of fabrics, they are 'variable composites'. The most that can be said is that basketry generally comprises fabrics which, due to the inherent inflexibility of some or all of their components, have little or no pliability; whereas cloth is composed of no inherently inflexible or rigid elements. In other words there is no hard and fast distinction between cloth and basketry (or, for that matter, between either of them and 'matting', a term which has only aggravated the confusion: some of the looms described here, for example, have been described as mat looms despite the fact that their products are worn around the body rather than trodden under foot).

Textile design

Textile design depends upon three variable factors: the nature and colour of the fibres employed, the kinds of relationship between warp and weft which may be effected on a loom, and the possible methods of embellishment of a fabric after manufacture. The weaving of any textile presupposes the existence of previously prepared elements. Loose fibres, or fibrous materials, must be transformed into these elements, which are in turn interworked to form the fabric. Therefore the preparation of the raw materials used in textile manufacture is discussed first, followed by an account of the kinds of loom found in Africa and the different ways of giving tension to the warp and of effecting the shed and countershed. This leads to the kind of design which can be achieved by means of relatively simple variations in the basic relationship of warp and weft, made possible by different kinds of shedding device. Finally, the decorative techniques sometimes applied to cloth subsequent to its weaving - dyeing, applique, embroidery, quilting, patchwork, drawing, stencilling and printing - are considered.

Male and female weavers

In some areas, for example, most of West Africa, Ethiopia, East Africa and Zaire, all weaving is done by men. Elsewhere, for example Berber North Africa and Madagascar, all the weaving is done by women. In other areas, such as Nigeria, Arab North Africa and the Sudan, both men and women weave. If a man weaves he may or may not be a full-time specialist; if a woman weaves it is because for that culture weaving is among the various skills expected of her. However, a type of loom used by women in one part of the continent will be used by men in another. The most that can be said is: first, that in those few cultures where both men and women weave they each use a different kind of loom; and secondly, that looms with a double-heddle shedding device (p. 46, below) are never used by women in Africa except on parts of the island of Madagascar and in very recent years in Nigeria.

Among the Yoruba peoples of Nigeria women work on an upright rectangular frame loom with the shed stick and single-heddle shedding device. The cloths manufactured on it are for immediate local consumption, by both men and women, and generally have little or no prestige value. Weaving is not the fulltime speciality of any woman but is numbered among the range of domestic skills proper to women. Some men also weave but in their case they use the doubleheddle and dragstone loom. Moreover, men's weaving is concentrated in a few centres and the weavers are, in principle, full-time specialists. The precolonial economic structure of Yorubaland was sufficiently complex and diverse to permit a wide range of specialities. The cloth woven by Yoruba men now has high prestige value, as it presumably also had in the past, and is worn as such by both men and women. Yoruba men's weaving thus thrives, but in many parts of Yorubaland women's weaving has gradually, and now almost completely, disappeared with the advent of factory-produced cloth.

Finally, for those who may care to speculate on the origins and development of weaving in Africa it will be of interest to note that almost all the different kinds of loom discussed have their parallels elsewhere, as with the different kinds of Middle Eastern loom illustrated by Shelagh Weir (1970 and 1976). However, the mere comparison of technicalities is relatively fruitless, as cultural traits tend to move as part of a package rather than in isolation. Careful comparative studies of the terminology employed by different peoples within the broader context of textile production is the only reliable method of investigation.