African Textiles in Close Up #2: a Sierra Leone robe.

In my last post I looked at two rare embroidered robes from Liberia or Sierra Leone in the British Museum collection. Today I turn to a third robe, also from Sierra Leone, that is in an even more unusual style. The vast majority of robes from the region were tailored from either plain or simple warp stripe patterned cotton cloths in shades of white, brown and indigo. They can be distinguished from other West African robes by their distinctive front pockets and their overall design – according to Venice Lamb there were two styles: a simple sleeveless tunic called in Sierra Leone  kusaibi, and a more complex sleeved robe called a duriki ba. A very few  surviving examples (two of which we looked at) were embroidered and fall into a group that Bernhard Gardi in his important book Le Boubou – c’est chic calls Manding robes.

However there remains an even smaller number of robes from the same region tailored from the elaborately patterned kpoikpoi cloths for which Sierra Leone weavers were so notable. This robe, part of the British Museum’s Beving collection, was collected at least by 1913 and most probably dates from the second half of the nineteenth century. It was apparently (Lamb 1984:136) collected in Bonthe region, Sierra Leone. It is among less than ten robes I am aware of that have been made from kpoikpoi cloths.

The structure is simple – an existing small cloth is simply folded in half width ways, a neck hole made, and a patch pocket added at the front. This results in a robe made up of seven strips of cloth, each around 18cm in width, and a total size of  124 cm width by 96cm length. The pocket is made from a square piece of cloth, one and a half strip widths in size, with the small corner fold typical of robes from the region. The lower half of each side is sewn up with the rest left open to create armholes. However in marked contrast to this simple tailoring the cloth used to create this robe is exceptionally elaborate. On the pocket detail above we can see blocks of thicker indigo dyed thread inserted as supplementary weft floats half way across the strip in sufficient quantities to distort the flow of the ground weft into a curved pattern. This is just one of the many variations used in a way that seems to me to suggest a deliberate echo of the embroidery patterns normally found on the pocket and chest areas of prestige robes. In particular when we look at the back of the robe we see that the small block of checkerboard pattern largely concealed by the pocket is repeated.

Elsewhere we see the use of tapestry weave techniques to create distinctive triangular patterns that are a feature of the more complex styles of Sierra Leone weaving.

The detail above from the lower left of the back also shows some of the remarkable variation in weft stripe placement and simple variants of the weft float patterning the weaver has utilised. To me though the most interesting feature, and the strongest evidence that this cloth was woven to order with its use as a robe planned is the contrast in colour between the front and the back. On the front of the robe white is the dominant colour, but on the back there is a preponderance of light blue indigo dyed thread. The pattern diverges at the fold in the centre of the cloth, yet the strips used are continuous, strongly suggesting that it was woven with this use in mind. We can see this in the photograph below where the two sides are shown together (please excuse the inept photoshop.)

Can anything useful be said about the ethnic origin of this robe ? Venice Lamb published it (1984:137) with a caption ascribing it to the Vai ethnic group, but in the text is much less certain noting only “It is possible that this garment is an example of Vai inventiveness in weaving.”  However I am not convinced that there is sufficient evidence to distinguish Vai weaving from that of the larger group of Mende weavers.  Easmon (1924:22) noted that kpoikpoi cloths were “essentially a Mende cloth, and is also made by the Gallinas [Vai]”. Very few of the small number of early Sierra Leone cloths in museum collections have any detailed collection data and where they do it is not generally sufficient to confirm that the piece was woven in the same place as it was collected. Prestige cloths and prestige robes were important trade goods and may well have been traded a considerable distance from their place of origin. Bonthe, where this cloth was collected, was mainly inhabited by Sherbro people . We might also note that the whole process of assigning a particular cloth style to a particular ethnic group is extremely problematic.

All photographs above by Duncan Clarke. Click on the photos to enlarge.

Akwete Cloths in the British Museum

The Beving Collection in the British Museum is without doubt the most important collection of nineteenth century and early C20th African textiles. Among its highlights is a remarkable group of cloths from the town of Akwete in south eastern Nigeria. Akwete is on the southern fringes of the Igbo speaking area of Nigeria and its women wove cloths that were traded throughout the Niger delta, both as formal dress and for use on various ceremonial occasions. The Akwete loom is the widest variant of the upright single heddle loom with a continuous circular warp that was used in many parts of Nigeria. The cloths woven were up to 120 cm in width allowing them to be worn as a single panel rather than the two joined panels that were more typical of Nigerian women’s weaving.

Postcard, CMS Bookshop, Lagos, 1960s. Author’s collection.

Photo source: Vintage Nigeria. The loom has been moved outside to be photographed.

Photo source: Vintage Nigeria.  Circa 1960s.  Two cloths were worn overlapping each other.

The Beving Collection

“There were two generations of Charles Beving.
Charles Beving senior was a West Africa trader born in Baden (he was Christened Karl), born in 1858. He worked from Manchester in the cotton business, first as a trader, trading in Africa for all but a few months every two years. He became partner in a cotton printing company Blakeley & Beving, and later owned his own company Beving & Co, apparently at a late stage in his career. He is listed in the 1891 Manchester census as 'Africa Merchant' and in 1901 as 'merchant and calico printer'. He died in 1913. He formed for his company a large collection of items, largely textiles, from West Africa and Indonesia, as specimens on which his firm might model its productions for the African market.
This collection was donated to the Museum in 1934 by his eldest son, Charles Adolphus Beving, on behalf of Messrs Beving & Co of Manchester, with the request that it be known as the 'Charles Beving collection' in his father's memory (see letter on file). Braunholtz states that the collection was formed by Beving senior, and there is no reason to think that the son ever made additions to the collection. All items in it therefore have a secure dating before 1913, which makes this one of the earliest documented collections of African textiles.”

From the British Museum site.  All cloths below are part of the Beving Collection and can be assumed to date from before 1913. All are woven from imported cotton thread.  Images © Trustees of the British Museum. For further information on any cloth the file name gives the museum reference number and may be looked up in the “Research the Collections” section of the museum site.

 

For more information on Akwete weaving see:

Lisa Aronson -  "Akwete Weaving: Tradition and Change" in Engelbrecht, B. & Gardi, B. eds. Man Does Not Go Naked (Basel, 1989)

Lisa Aronson - "We weave it:" Akwete Weavers, their patrons, and Innovation in a Global Economy. in Tornatore, S. ed. Cloth is the Center of the World: Nigerian Textiles, Global Perspectives. (2001)

Venice Lamb & Judy Holmes – Nigerian Weaving (Shell, 1980)

A postscript to my Sierra Leone trip

The National Museum in Freetown is, as might be anticipated in the aftermath of the recent war, in a somewhat forlorn and neglected condition.It does however have a young and enthusiastic guide and is still worth a visit. Among the more interesting of the few older artefacts on display I was surprised to see two men's caps of a rare type I had previously only seen in the on-line collections database of the British Museum. One of the things I want to do with this blog is to highlight the many treasures of African textile design that the opening up of museum stores through on-line access is making available. I will be doing a post soon on accessing the British Museum textiles as their search database is far from intuitive. In the meantime this seems an appropriate pretext to show four of these obscure hats from the British Museum collection.

All of these pieces are part of the Charles Beving collection that was assembled by the Manchester cotton merchant in the late C19th and can be dated at the latest to before his death in 1913. Unfortunately there is no specific information on the origins of the hats. I has assumed them to be from Senegal or Gambia but the presence of others ( also apparently without documentation) in Freetown does suggest perhaps a wider distribution along what used to be known as the Guinea Coast.

The description that accompanies the hats on the British Museum site refers to supplementary weft float decoration, which is the predominant decorative technique used in West African weaving. However I suspect that at least some, if not all, the decorative patterns are embroidered rather than woven. This type of patterning recalls Hispano-Moorish designs that were woven for centuries by enslaved Africans on the Portuguese-ruled islands of Cape Verde for trade on the Guinea Coast, from where they were introduced also to Mandjak weavers in Guinea Bissau. In turn these highly prized cloths seem to have played a role in inspiring a tradition of resist dyed indigo cloths, found in St. Louis in Senegal in particular, in which an imported damask was embroidered with a complex design, the cloth was dyed with indigo, then the embroidery was painstakingly removed to leave a white undyed pattern. I will discuss these resist dyed cloths in a future post. Here I show a detail from an extremely rare cloth, also from the Beving collection and therefore contemporary with the hats, on which a strip woven cloth is decorated with embroidery in the same style of "woven" patterns.

According to the collector's notes this cloth is a Maninka piece from Gambia, called a "baybayo" that was worn as a breast cover cloth by unmarried women. "Baybayo" is translated as "whose mother lives."

Sierra Leone textiles - the search begins

I made a brief first visit last week to Freetown, Sierra Leone. I didn't really expect to find any old cloths straight away so was not too disappointed when all that was to be seen at the market was rather badly woven and unappealing new blankets. Freetown itself was peaceful and interesting, with a spectacular setting and a great beach. These images are the first of a couple of posts this week to mark the trip, reminding myself at least of the great textile traditions of the past....


This card, postmarked 1902, shows the distinctive tripod mounted loom unique to Sierra Leone and neighboring areas of Guinea and Liberia. The sender of the card writes " I saw one of these weavers at work and bought his whole outfit. I have it here at College with about 60 yards of cloth woven."


Another early C20th card, by the noted Creole photographer W.S. Johnson, shows the full length of warp which the weaver moves along with his tripod mounted apparatus as weaving proceeds. Note the second, partially completed, warp, behind the hammock.

The finished cloth, from the Beving Collection at the British Museum, a thick handspun cotton "country cloth" called kpoikpoi. This famous cloth, which was featured in the last years Metropolitan Museum textile exhibit can be found on-line in the "Search the Collections" section of the British Museum site here by entering the reference number Af1934,0307.179