Cloth of the month: A rare variant form of Asante adinkra.

ADK071 -   This is the best example I have seen of a very rare variant of woven ground adinkra cloth, as distinct from typical adinkra that is hand stamped  onto machine woven imported fabric.  This type of cloth usually only has two stamped motifs in alternation, and is usually on an orange and red ground, so a white and black ground example such as this with four different motifs is exceptional. The background cloth is composed of an alternation of two different woven strips - the first is plain black and only 5 cm in width, while the second is much wider at 16cm and white with black weft stripes at regular intervals.

Combining the two creates the grid of black squares that frame the stamped motifs. See my recent book: African Textiles: The Karun Thakar Collection (Prestel 2015) for a similar ground cloth with only two motifs.           
In excellent condition. Dates from early to mid C20th. Measurement: 135 ins x 94, 344 cm x 239.  PRICE: Email for price

For more recent acquisitions visit our gallery here.

Asante Silk Kente Cloths

While run of the mill Asante kente cloths woven from rayon thread and mostly dating from the 1970s and after are easy to find, top quality silk cloths woven in the early part of the twentieth century are extremely rare and becoming increasingly difficult to source. The images below show a glimpse of some or our current inventory. Full views and more details on our site at adireafricantextiles.com

Cloth of the month: A fine blue and white Asante kente.

K260 - Exceptional Asante mixed strip blue and white cotton kente cloth. Composed of four repeats of six different strip patterns, this cloth is notable both for the fine quality of the weaving and for the addition of borders (a feature not usually found on Asante blue and white cloths of this type.) The interaction between the blue extra weft float motifs that make up the border and the different blue and white patterns beneath makes a subtle and interesting visual impact. In excellent complete condition. Dates from early to mid C20th. Measurement: 127 ins x 75, 323 cm x 190.

Click on the photos to enlarge. See this cloth on our New Acquisitions Gallery or visit our Asante Kente Gallery. 

Kente Cloth Sale

We are having a summer sale of kente cloths from a British private collection assembled in the early 1990s. Click here to see the sale.

Nkontompo Ntama–The Liar’s Cloth

I first met Claude Delmas a couple of years ago when I gave a talk on African textiles at the Oriental Rug Society here in London and she had brought along several of the cloths she had woven. These turned out to be remarkable reproductions of some of the more unusual West African textile designs, including the intriguing Asante kente pattern known as “liar’s cloth.”  The article we reproduce here with Claude’s kind permission was first published in 2008 in the Journal for Weavers Spinners and Dyers #227 . Having seen a loom set to weave “liar’s cloth” in the collection of the Deutsche Textilmuseum, Krefeld, I can confirm that Claude’s solution to the mystery of this design is the correct one.

“Nkontompo ntama – The Liar’s Cloth

Claude Delmas, London Guild

Looking at John Gillow’s book African Textiles my eye fell on the image of a lovely blue and white strip woven cloth from Ghana decorated with very precise inlay motifs. The caption read: ‘Liar’s Cloth in which blue warp threads are taken down the length of the cloth in stepped fashion’. The picture was so small that I needed a magnifying glass to see the blue stripes at all. There were three of them on one side of the strip which seemed to turn at right angles into the weft at regular intervals to continue on the opposite side. How could that be done?

The Research

Picton and Mack in African Textiles refer and defer to Venice Lamb’s exceptional field work in West African Weaving, and show in black and white a Liar’s Cloth from her collection – frustratingly indistinct for the non-expert. In her own book Lamb illustrates ‘an old Asante cloth with an inverted “liar” pattern. The liar pattern is fascinating: the warp thread is carried from side to side.’ In the small catalogue of the exhibition at the Halifax Museum of The Lamb Collection of West African Narrow Strip Weaving in 1973, there is yet another Liar’s in black and white. Hardly enough visual information to attempt such a feat on the loom! Nor were descriptions precise enough to help: Venice Lamb writes: ‘…there are a few devices which are rather harder to classify, such as the ‘floating warp’ technique used by Ashanti weavers to produce what they know as ‘liar’s cloth’, a kind of Greek fret pattern executed by shifting a warp stripe from one edge of the web to the other at regular intervals.’ And Kate Kent: ‘Ashanti weavers formerly produced…a handsome fabric called “liar's cloth” (Nkontompo ntoma), in which narrow lines meandered the length of a plain weave strip – either white lines on an indigo blue ground, or blue on a white ground. Blocks of weft-patterned design were woven over this warp pattern at regular intervals.’

It was the ethnographer R.S.Rattray in 1927 who established the name of the cloth as Liar’s. He made an extensive study of West African strip weaves, and put together a large collection of swatches, now in the British Museum, of both silk and cotton fabrics. Rattray’s swatch number 95 is a blue silk with two yellow and 2 red warp stripes and swatch 106 shows their meander into the weft and back on the opposite side. He elucidated the names given to the cloths according to the order and colour of warp stripes and attempting a description of the symbolism behind those names. His entry reads, ‘Nkontompo ntama’ (the liar’s cloth). The King of Ashanti is said to have worn this pattern when holding court, to confute persons of doubtful veracity who came before him.’ In 1969, another researcher Kate P. Kent was told that the shifting blue lines represented the liar’s speech.

Intriguing as it is, the name ‘liar’s’ and its meaning has survived, and it was interesting to find on the internet a mention of a Yale University thesis quite unrelated to textiles entitled ‘The Liar’s Cloth: Producing Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom’. Ethnographers seem to have been more exercised by the symbolism of the names than by the technique, and by their historical relation to status in the rigid hierarchy of the old Ashanti empire, where some combinations of stripes and patterns were reserved for royalty and nobility, the main sponsors of the weavers.

Traditional Kente cloth

Nowadays, after an eclipse lamented by writers of the 70s and 80s, it seems that narrow strip weaving is alive and well, whether worn as a mark of African identity or purchased by tourists, and the professional weavers formally trained by ‘masters’ in their workshops now even include women – witness a video recording produced in 1998 by the Open University as material for its Art and its

Histories course. The narrow strip loom of Ghana is well documented. The bundle of its 25 metres long warp is tensioned on a drag weight, its double heddle and reed, suspended from a frame, both pairs of heddles worked by the weaver’s feet. One heddle, the asatia, is threaded for the warp-faced tabby weave, the other, the asanan, threaded six by six ends, making itpossible to weave a weft-faced fabric at will and partially or completely cover the strip with decorative inlay left to the creativity of the weaver. Although some liar’s lines are worked along strips completely clear of inlay, the cloth that intrigued me had many indigo motifs and presented me with a double learning challenge. In The Art of the Loom Ann Hecht has a diagram showing the way to thread a modern four shaft loom to work like the double heddle loom – ground weave on shafts one and two, and weft-face on three and four, giving the same flexibility.

It seemed to me that in order to meander from side to side, the blue warps needed to be weighted independently at the back of the warp beam. To interlace with the weft, they had to be caught in heddles and go through the reed. My Texsolv heddle’s eye was large enough to take a small flat stick (a drinks stirrer) with the warp end wrapped on it, which I could manipulate in and out, use as a shuttle to weave in as weft, and return as warp, through empty heddles reserved on the opposite side, then back to their weight at the back of the loom. Not easy, but possible. Yet decidedly not the Ashanti way! More research was needed.

Floating warps?

Venice Lamb mentions a ‘floating warp’ technique in connection with the liar’s cloth. A few pairs of supplementary warps anchored independently on the cloth beam and weighted at the back would lie idle in the shed, neither held in the heddles or the reed, until lifted by the shuttle to appear as intermittent decoration on the cloth. As the liar’s lines weave continuously, it seemed to me that heddles were indispensable and floating warp not the solution. Another description suggested that ‘To make the meander pattern supplementary warps of liar's cloth served at times as weft. These were probably passed between the dents of the beater and through the eyes of the plain weave heddles when the loom was strung. They were thus part of regular plain weave when in the position of warps. When a warp pair was to be turned and used as a weft, it was cut to the appropriate length and woven in. The cut end would then fall free of the beater, but remain in the heddle eye. When it was to be re-utilized as warp again, it was pinned to the surface of the cloth – then woven in. (Ashanti weavers are accustomed to pinning any broken warp back into position in this fashion. The process outlined above was suggested by a young Ashanti weaver)’.

Convincing as this was, it failed to work for me, because I still had to move the blue warps from one side to the other, and I was left at each turn with four cut ends to darn back into the cloth in the usual way.

A theoretical solution

Not until I discovered the extraordinary survey and descriptive catalogue by Brigitte Menzel, mentioned in other works but never actually quoted or translated, Textilien Aus Westafrika, did I begin to see the light. Her swatches, like Rattray’s, relate mainly to the arrangement of warp stripes, but unlike him she concentrates, instead of the naming of cloths, on the exact thread count for each colour stripe. The swatch for ncontompo ntama shows 3 pairs of warps on the left, and the description says they are turned into the weft at 20cm intervals then vertically back into the warp. But it was the drawing that explained all. The warps are weighted, but at the front of the heddles! The blue threads are therefore wound on to the warp beam with the rest. And it dawned on me that there has to be two sets, one at each side of the strip. One set only weaves at a time, while the other rests attached to the weight, threaded in the heddles, but free of the reed. After 20cm of plain weave, one pair after another is cut off, freed of the reed and woven as weft to the appropriate point on the web to meet its opposite partner, which is detached from the weight, pinned on the cloth to be woven in on that side for the next 20 cm.

Looking at the real textile

I was fortunate enough to be able to test this theory on a genuine liar’s cloth thanks to John Gillow and the generosity of his friend Molly Hogg, who owns an old and damaged but very beautiful one. Like all Ashanti cloths, its web is very dense warp faced, about 80 epi (a lot more than I had guessed) of fine machine spun cotton. The blue pairs are equally fine, and only show faintly on the cloth. The strips have been sewn together with exquisitely small stitches and the arrangement of the strips aligning the liar’s lines back to back – so to speak – create a fretwork into which the indigo motifs are slotted. It is impossible to know whether it ever had a traditional heading of densely brocaded designs at each end as it is coarsely hemmed instead. Nor can one tell if it ever had more than the present 21 strips. Very few of the inlay motifs repeat many times, some only occur once, and this somehow reveals the skill of its imaginative weaver.

With a magnifying glass, it is possible to ascertain that the threads are cut at the turn from weft to warp. Sometimes there is a small but discernible gap, and one can detect the closely cut thread ends. They are held by the density of the web, in the same way as the brocading wefts, without knots or darning in. Perhaps these cuts are the lie, the deception; The line doesn’t ‘turn back into the warp’, it is not continuous. Instead it is replaced by a partner.

Detail of Claude’s completed liar’s cloth.

The practical solution

To put this new understanding into practice, I warped up a long 4 inches wide strip with very fine white silk at 72 epi and dyed some silk in indigo for the supplementary weft. I included three pairs of indigo warp stripes on each side of the strip, entering them all in the heddles normally. However only one set of blue stripes went through the reed, while the other was weighted down in front of the heddles. After 20cm I needed to go through the following steps to turn the liar’s lines:

1. wind on the weaving so there will be enough space in front of the heddles to manipulate the blue threads.

2. disengage the first blue pair from the weight, bring it up through the reed at the appropriate place and pin it on the woven cloth.

3. cut the opposite blue pair long enough to become weft . Disengage the cut end from the reed and weight it in front of the heddles with a second weight.

4. weave the two cut warps into the weft one after the other to meet the pinned threads Then weave with the ground weft until the next blue pair needs turning into weft and repeat steps 2 – 4.

Two weights are needed until all three pairs have changed sides. After weaving half an inch or an inch, remove all three pins and cut all loose threads lying on the surface of the weaving closely. Because the sett of the cloth is very high, the cut ends stay caught in the web. For the next 20cm one can concentrate on working the inlays patterns, before returning the liar’s lines to the opposite side once again.

It seems easy, so it is likely to be right. Another interpretation of the name Liar’s cloth is that anyone who says they can weave it is a liar: I am hoping I have disproved that saying.

“Arkilla kunta / arkilla kerka: patterns” by Bernhard Gardi

“Written descriptions of looms, weaving technologies, and their histories often prove difficult for both author and reader.” Doran Ross. 1998. Wrapped in Pride: Ghanian Kente and African American Identity. UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. p.75

These three motifs (figs.1-3) from an arkilla kunta-blanket are of outstanding finesse, quality and of a certain age. The vegetable colours have not faded and match very well, the yarn had been finely spun with great regularity. As arkilla kunta-blankets are very rare, their ethno-historical background is of interest.

The arkilla kunta is the old form of the better known arkilla kerka woven by the maabuube, the weavers of the Peul in Mali. Something like 200 years ago two groups of people left the Upper Delta of the river Niger in c0entral Mali and eventually settled down south of Gao in today’s Republic of Niger. These two small groups are known as Kurtey and Wogo. Their language is Songhay. The Kurtey claim their descent from the Peul, the Wogo see their mythical origin in a small place called Tindirma south west of Tombouctou.

Among other Malian traditions, the Wogo kept a specific symbol for their marriages until the early 1960s, namely this huge tent-like blanket kunta being completely woven with sheep wool. Not so the Kurtey; they had no such arkilla-blankets.

Literally, arkilla has an Arabic root meaning ‘mosquito net’.

There are significant differences between an arkilla kunta and an arkilla kerka. A complete kunta should have five rather wide strips (32 cm), the fifth or lowest one being simpler woven than the other four. [Fig.4] A kunta is tent-shaped. Hung over the bed it gave warmth and shelter during the cold season. Made of 95-100% wool the whole blanket is brittle and much rougher to touch than a kerka. A complete kerka should have six strips (22 cm wide), the sixth or lowest one being simpler woven than the other five. [Fig.5] In some areas there is a seventh strip in black and white called sigaretti to hang the kerka as a curtain in front of the bed. Well over 50% of a kerka (including the warp) is made with cotton yarn.

However, their ‘look’ has striking similarities. For instance, all the motifs and weaving techniques are the same, and on both types of arkilla we have a comparable rhythm of successive plain weave (cannyudi), weft float patterns (cubbe) and patterns in tapestry weave (tunne). While a kerka has just three dominant weft patterns with white tapestry on red grounds – the largest one being in the centre of the blanket - a kunta has four of them. And as a kerka of the first quality has twice six rather narrow weft float patterns, a kunta has five of them, the largest one being in the centre of the blanket.

On both, kunta and kerka, there are two major motifs as eye catchers in tapestry weave: the lewruwal (moon) and the gite ngaari (eyes of the bull), as the Peul say.

And for those readers who have followed us so far: a kerka has the lewruwal motif (moon) in the geometric centre - whereas a kunta has its lewruwal to the left and right of the centre – the centre itself being decorated by a huge diamond shaped pattern in weft float.

The moon motif lewruwal may be called differently in some regions – namely tiide eda: the forehead of the wild buffalo.

When we were in Wogo country in 1974 (Renée Boser-Sarivaxévanis and myself), we acquired three kunta for the Museum der Kulturen Basel. At that time the owners of the blankets or the villagers around there did not know the names of the patterns anymore. Names given to us were untranslatable for the linguists that we consulted in Niamey. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, the only anthropologist who describes an arkilla kunta, states that most names of the patterns are unknown to the weavers and to the old people in general or of unknown origin altogether (1969:108-109). As we did not stay long, our field data are poor.

When in Mali later, between 1978 and 1982, I put together some important documentation on the arkilla kerka - blankets that were still in use then. So all the terminology given here is in Fulfulde (the language of the Peul).

It is one thing to know the names of the patterns and it is another one to know how they are made. It is easier to understand these huge marriage blankets arkilla when looking at them through the eyes of a weaver – technically.

Looking back again at the first three photos above, Fig.1 shows the motif lewruwal (moon) with two stars kode to the left and right. Usually, there are four, six or eight stars. ‘Moon’ and ‘star’ are tunne, woven in the technique of tapestry. The two diamond shaped motifs above and below the lewruwal are called jowal meaning ‘rhomb’. As the two jowal are woven in a special kind of a weft float (in French “broché”) and not in tapestry they have another technical name, namely cukke. So, besides plain weave (cannyudi) we have three tunne (1 moon and 2 stars in tapestry) and two cukke. That is how the weaver thinks. After all, for him the weaving of an arkilla is a mnemotechnical challenge. “What I weave”, a weaver would say, “I have found with my fathers.”

That means, he repeats what he has learned. He doesn’t care whether a pattern is called ‘ears of the second wife’, ‘teeth of an old woman’ (black-white-black in reference to gaps between the teeth), ‘hoofs of a gazelle’, ‘upturned calabash’ or ‘tracks of a rabbit in the sand’. He is the artisan who masters the techniques and he rather thinks in terms of quality of the yarn, the colours, or his deal with the bride’s father and the bride’s mother who cooks his meals.

He will equally think about his salary: the more tunne he weaves and the finer and more eye catching they are the more additional income (cattle, millet, cash, kola nuts – a mix of all of them) he generates.

Arkilla kunta weavers were real master weavers. It would be wrong to think that their weaving was just repetitive. Now, in writing this contribution, I went through all the data I have on kunta blankets – 16 altogether – discovering, that no two kunta are exactly alike. There is a great range in designing the over all aspect of the blanket just in varying distances between patterns, the size of motifs and the combination of cukke, cubbe and tunne.

Fig.2 in fact is another jowal (rhomb), however of another kind than the two small jowal on fig.1. The weaver will call it cubbe, as the pattern is woven in weft float (in French “lancé”). This very cubbe here was probably in the middle of a kunta although, as it is rather small I am not quite sure.

The twisted fringes in yellow and red are a decoration. However, they serve as an important help to knot the newly woven strips together so that at last – after four or more weeks of weaving – the whole surface or the kunta can be admired before the sewing together of the strips starts. The very same fringes are on the kerka-blankets, too.

Fig.3 is another tunne extremely finely woven. It is called fedde (fed = finger), as all the weft threads forming the tapestry pattern have to be pushed through the warp threads with the fingers during the weaving process. On most kunta-blankets there are four weft stripes with the fedde-motif embracing several kode (stars) and a cubbe (woven in weft float pattern).

Throughout the old world – Middle East, North Africa, Europe – tapestry weaving was done by women on an upright loom. Not so in Mali: the Fulani of the Upper Delta of the Niger are an exception to the rule. Tapestry weaving is done on their horizontal treadle loom with one pair of heddles, and the weavers are men. That makes tapestry weaving interesting. It even seems that tapestry is a cultural marker, that wherever we find tapestry on West African textiles, there are Peul/Fulani around or the weaver has learned his profession with a maabo-weaver (singular of maabuube).

So, let us have a second look at that lewrual-moon-fig.1: it is a rather rectangular moon. In this case, all together, there are seven concentric layers or colours: light indigo blue, white, red, yellow, light indigo blue again, red, and white/blue. We can compare this kunta lewruwal with a kerka lewruwal (fig.6) having equally seven layers. This is just one way of talking about quality. The more layers, the more work involved, the better quality it is.

The striking difference, however, are the ‘antennas’ sticking out at the kunta lewruwal-fig.1. repeated below On kerka-blankets there are never such antennas. On arkilla kunta sometimes … or even often - but it depends where. These ‘antennas’ might exactly be one of these details a master weaver plays with and which might be in relation with the arranged ‘salary’.

On fig.1 we have 11 ‘antennas’ – quite a lot. Of the three kunta in Basel only one has such antennas, namely 10, on red ground. The other two have such ‘antennas’ on the smaller lewruwal which are towards both ends of the blanket on yellow ground, having 5 or 7 ‘antennas’ only.

That logic seems to be systematic: Either a kunta has its ‘antennas’ on red ground or they are on yellow ground. Not both together. Or there are no ‘antennas’ at all. And as the lewruwal on red ground is more to the centre of the blanket it is bigger and more important. Of the 14 kunta in my file where such details are visible only 3 have ‘antennas’ on red ground.

Maybe this is just a European approach: counting and quantifying for lack of other data. However, including other factors I have the feeling that the lewruwal motif on red ground with ‘antennas’ means ‘old’ … whatever that means. I know photos taken in Ghana in 2013 showing kaasa-blankets (the ordinary 6 striped woollen blankets of the Peul in Mali) in a ritual. As the patterns of the kaasa-blankets have changed considerably during the 20^th century, it can be said that this very kaasa was woven well before 1930. That means the woollen blanket was kept in the tropics safely for over 80 years. The same is very possible for this piece of arkilla kunta-weaving.

Only one arkilla kunta-blanket is dated and has full information: the one at the National Museum of Mali, Bamako (inv.no. 2002.13.1) woven 1968. It is maybe the last one ever made.

So far, I have found no arkilla blanket in a museum collection dated before 1900. We have, however, one archaeological cotton cloth from the Dogon, dated to the 17th/18th century containing over 20 patterns strangely resembling the lewruwal motif of an arkilla kunta (fig.8 above - National Museum of Mali, Bamako 92-05-390 = H 71-2). Isn’t this an amazing cloth! It was found in a cave where all the human remains were female. So this is a female cotton shawl or wrapper. Originally, it had at least five strips.

Among the important corpus of published Tellem textiles (500 pieces, see Rita Bolland 1991) dating from the 11^th to the 15^th century, patterns with supplementary weft threads (“lancé” in French, cubbe in Fulfulde) go back to the 11^th century. In rare cases there are even tapestry patterns in wool. Are all of them imported textiles from North Africa? Probably yes – although there might be just one exception (C 19-1, see Bolland 1993: 174, fig.32). In any case, fig.8 is the oldest tapestry pattern known for sure and woven on a West African treadle loom with one pair of heddles.

We have come a long way from arkilla kunta and Wogo to arkilla kerka and Peul to tapestry weaving in cotton found in a cave in Dogon country and going back 200 to 300 years. In order to end this story, I would like to invite the reader to come with me to Ghana. There, the most sacred and the most venerated cloths are called nsaa. Sacred drums or horns with human jaws sewn on them may be wrapped in nsaa. Dead people before burying are put on their bed, the room being decorated with nsaa. The first textile layer in a palanquin in which Akan chiefs are carried around is often nsaa. Although several authors had mentioned the importance of these nsaa- (or nsa-) blankets (Rattray, Ross, others) no researcher really followed up that topic. Except, maybe textile researcher Brigitte Menzel. “They are not only attributed protective but also healing properties”, she writes, and she carries on, “my aged Asante informants were unanimous of the opinion that this woollen textile, which they all called nsaa, is the highest ranking of all traditional textiles…“ And “in the olden days“ – 40 head loads each containing 2000 cola nuts or five healthy male slaves were paid up north in Salaga or Dagomba for such a nsaa. Although the word nsaa embraces all kind of woollen blankets from Mali Menzel stresses that nsaa means mainly: arkilla kunta … made 1000 km to the north, south of Gao (Menzel 1990:83).

We all know that the Golden Stool is the symbol and “national soul” of the Asante, as Rattray puts it. When the Golden Stool “was borne”, he tells us, it was “sheltered from the sun by the great umbrella, made of material called in Ashanti nsa (camel’s hair and wool). This umbrella was known throughout Ashanti as Katamanso (the covering of the nation).” (Rattray 1927:130) [Please note: “camel’s hair” is wrong. It is always sheep wool however of mediocre quality. But sheep it is.]

Click on the photos to enlarge.

Captions

Fig.1 see text

Fig.2 see text

Fig.3 see text

Fig.4 Arkilla kunta-blankets in the exhibition of the National Museum of Niger, Niamey in the late 1960s. One kunta is hanging over the bed, two others are spread on the bed and on the floor (Photo by Pablo Toucet, Photocard, coll. B.G.)

Fig.5 Arkilla kerka hanging in front of the bed. The centre of the blanket with the lewruwal motif is to the right. The white tapestry patterns on red ground to the left are called gite ngaari: ‘eyes of the bull’ (N’Gouma 1982, photo B.G.).

Fig.6 Central motif lewruwal (moon) of an arkilla kerka, Mali (1980, photo B.G.)

Fig.7 A = fig.1 Duncan Clarke’s lewruwal on red ground

Fig.7 B Lewruwal on red ground with 10 ‘antennas’, 4 stars. Museum der Kulturen Basel: III 20456

Fig.7 C Lewruwal on red ground with 11 ‘antennas’, 4 stars. National Museum of Niger, Niamey.

Fig.7 D Museum der Kulturen Basel: III 20462 – lewruwal on red ground without ‘antennas’. Eight stars. Below: lewruwal on yellow ground with 6 ‘antennas’.

Fig.7 E Museum der Kulturen Basel: III 20455 – lewruwal with 7 ‘antennas’ on yellow ground.

Fig.8 Single motif in tapestry on an archaeological cloth, Dogon 17./18.Jh. (National Museum of Mali, Bamako : MNM 92-05-390=H 71-2-II)

Fig.9 kunta in Ghana: nsaa (Photo: Werner Forman 1964, published by Duncan Clarke. 1997: The Art of African Textiles, p. 68, 69)

Fig.10 A maabo weaver at work. To weave a weft pattern with supplementary weft (cubbe) he uses a wooden board to count the warp threads. Below to the right we see two stars tunne on white ground (N’Gouma, 1982, photo B.G.).

Quoted literature

Bolland, Rita. 1991. Tellem Textiles. Archaeological Finds from Burial Caves in Mali’s Bandiagara Cliff. Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam; Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde; Leiden; Institut des Sciences Humaines, Bamako; Musée National du Mali, Bamako. With contributions by Rogier M.A. Bedaux and Renée Boser-Sarivaxévanis

Menzel, Brigitte. 1990. Textiles in Trade in West Africa. Presented at the Textile Society of America, Biennial Symposium. September 14-16, 1990. Washington, D.C. Proceedings of the Textile Society of America, pp. 83-93

Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. 1969. Système des relations économiques et sociales chez les Wogo (Niger).Université de Paris. Mémoires de l’Institut d’Ethnologie III. Institut d’Ethnologie Musée de l’Homme.

Rattray, Capt. R. S. 1927: Religion and Art in Ashanti. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Ross, Doran H. 1998. Wrapped in Pride. Ghanian Kente and African American Identity. UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Click on the photos to enlarge.

Two Asante Silk Kente Explored

In today’s post I will be taking a look at two extraordinary Asante silk kente men’s cloths and airing some preliminary thoughts and queries that they suggest in relation to creativity and innovation. The first, above, a predominantly green version of the classic “a thousand shields” design, is from the William Itter Collection in the USA . The second, below, that we found recently and is now in a UK private collection, is a warp stripe patterned cloth called “Ammere Oyokoman”  in the familiar red green and gold colours so favoured by Asante weavers. Both cloths are woven from silk and both can be assumed to date to the first third of the C20th.

Looking first at the green cloth, on first glance it appears to be a standard version of a familiar design, such as the cloth, also from the William Itter Collection, below.

The diagonal grid pattern in the main field of the cloth is made up of small rectangles, recalling the rectangular shape of the wood and leather shield once used by Asante warriors and giving the cloth its name Akyempem, or “a thousand shields.” Incidentally the vast majority of Asante kente cloths were named after the warp stripe pattern, this is an exception. However the technique used is quite different as detail photos show:

Compare the usual version, above, where a supplementary weft float in red and yellow on a blue and white warp striped, warp faced background, is used to create each rectangle in the grid of “shields”, with the one below:

 

Here the entire cloth is weft faced and the grid of red and yellow shields is created as weft faced rectangles using a tapestry weave  technique. I can’t recall another example of a fully weft faced Asante kente and I have certainly never seen tapestry weave used in this way. Also very unusual is the background colour that alternates picks of  yellow green and blue that blend to a muted green overall effect. These threads are not plied together to create a “tweed” in the way that Ewe  weavers sometimes do. We should also note that using this technique to reproduce the design would have been both significantly slower (as more weft threads and hence more weft picks are required) and, because it needed far more thread, considerably more expensive that the standard method.

Turning to the red Oyokoman cloth, here the notable feature is a large array of unique weft float patterns.

The grid framework imposed by the interaction of warp and weft threads naturally leads itself to the creation of diamonds, triangles, and regular stepped patterns and Asante kente weaving exploits these shapes to the full. Here though the master weaver has transcended the limitations of the form by weaving ellipses and even circles, as well as fragmenting the standard diamond shapes to create more complex composite motifs.

While my primary purpose here is simply to register, share, and admire these two wonderful cloths, to me they also raise a number of interesting questions about innovation and creativity in kente weaving and perhaps pose a challenge to any over simplistic contrast between creative expectations expressed in Asante as opposed to  Ewe textiles. Anyone familiar with the two genres is aware that there is a greater variety of styles and techniques apparent in “Ewe kente” than in Asante. As William  Itter noted in our discussion of these two cloths “regarding the controlled or restrained composure of construction and design found in Asante cloth from the more expected/unexpected variety of design in Ewe wraps.”

Here we have seen two superb examples of novel and innovative extension of established techniques that nevertheless remain within  the expected parameters of Asante kente design in terms of cloth layout, overall patterning etcetera.   Such cloths, I would suggest, arise out of a sustained interaction between an experienced master weaver and a exceptionally well informed and perceptive patron, in this context we might suppose an Asante king or senior chief with a deep knowledge and understanding of the existing pattern repertoire who is able to finance and encourage such sophisticated results over a considerable period. This hypothesis would fit with what little we know from the unfortunately rather inadequate ethnographic documentation of Asante kente production for royal patronage in weaving villages such as Bonwire. It would however, in my view, be over simplistic to contrast this with a more open pattern of patronage for Ewe cloths as alone explaining their greater variety. I will return to this complex topic in future posts.

I am very grateful to William Itter for generously sharing his photographs. My thanks also to the owner of the Oyokoman cloth.  Click on the images to enlarge.

“African Rulers Here”

Press photo titled “African Rulers Here” 27.9. 1948

Caption: “A party of African rulers, here for the African Conference opening on Wednesday at Lancaster house, arrived at Euston this evening. (L- R) Essuma Jahene and Sir Tsibu Daku.”

Asante Kente Cloths in the Ethnological Museum, Berlin

A small selection from the large number of Asante kente cloths collected by the late Dr Brigitte Menzel are now online on the website of the Ethnological Museum, Berlin. Menzel’s field research on Asante weaving in the 1960s, sadly largely unpublished, remains the only in depth investigation of the tradition, and she was able to collect a group of cloths of unrivalled quality. Most of these are in the Berlin Museum where she worked for many years (others are in the Textilmuseum, Krefeld, and the Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Leiden.) Small black and white images of these cloths and many others are published in Menzel’s three volume catalogue Textilien aus WestAfrika (Berlin 1972).

Click on the images to enlarge. You can see these together with other early and important Asante kente on our Pinterest page here, and view the Asante kente we have for sale here.