Ivory Coast Chiefs: some images from the Smithsonian Elisofon Archives

Baule dignitary N'Goran Koffi with his linguist and elders, Kouassiblekro, Ivory Coast, Baule dignitary N'Goran Koffi with his linguist and elders, Kouassiblekro, Ivory Coast, Eliot Elisofon Field photographs, 1942-1972 [slide].eepa_01519.jpg (1230×840)

Kyaman chiefs and notables, Anna village, Ivory Coast, [slide]. Contained in: Eliot Elisofon Field photographs, 1942-1972 The photograph depicts Ebrie (now Kyaman) dignitaries wearing prestige clothes and regalias. .eepa_01546.jpg (1230×840)

 

Dan men wearing hat called tarboosh, Man region, Ivory Coast.The photograph depicts three men wearing black and white robes of locally woven cloth. Their red hats, Tarboosh, are similar to those worn by other Moslems further north. This photograph was taken when Eliot Elisofon was on assignment for Westinghouse Film and traveled to Africa from October 26, 1970 to end of March 1971. eepa_02708.jpg (840×1230)

Click on the photos to enlarge. For many more please explore at the Smithsonian Eliot Elisofon Archives here.

A Liberian Rice Bag–weaving without a loom..

Drifts of slowly decaying black plastic bags are an all too frequent site in even the remotest villages in West Africa in recent years. Today’s post looks back to an earlier time when in at least one region of Africa simple and beautiful bags were made locally using dried fibres from the raffia palm. In Liberia rice was the staple crop and women carried it home from the market in small (less than 30 cm length plus fringe) finely woven bags decorated with check patterns.

Although represented in the “material culture” collections of a number of museums, these bags would have been used and discarded many decades ago and are probably impossible to collect today. I was very happy to find this example recently among a group of artefacts collected over the years by an American missionary family. They are created without a loom, using bundles of warp fibres tied at one end to a post and divided into three groups, with a simple string heddle in each group used to create the shed allowing weft threads to be inserted by hand. A seamless tube is created which is sealed with a knot at the bottom and left open with a long fringe at the top. The same technique is used by the Dida people of Ivory Coast to weave plain raffia tubes that are later tie dyed to create their now well-known fabrics.

The photo below shows a Loma woman making a raffia bag in Guinea close to the Liberia border. (H. Labouret, before 1933. reproduced from Karl-Ferdinand Schaedler Weaving in Africa (Pantterra Verlag, Munich, 1987.)

For more information, images of several bags in a museum collection, an early photo of a Dan man making a bag, and a fuller description of the technique see Monni Adams and T. Rose Holdcraft Dida Woven Raffia Cloth from Cote D’Ivoire in African Arts magazine XXV (3) 1992.

Click on the images to enlarge.

A Dan Chief’s Robe at Sotheby’s 13 May 2011

Lot 283A at Sotheby’s upcoming auction of African, Oceanic and pre-Columbian Art in New York on 13 May is this interesting robe, collected in Liberia between 1926 and 1930. The simple tailoring of the robe with the cut and folded pocket below the neck and the absence of distinct sleeves is characteristic of the area from Cote D’Ivoire through Liberia into Sierra Leone while the weaving is typical of Mande/Dioula cloth in some northern areas of these countries. Although there is some description of Dan weaving there is very little documentation of the patterns and styles they produced, so I am not clear whether the cloth used for this robe is the work of a Dan weaver or imported by a Dioula trader.

The estimate of USD 6000-9000 seems rather high for a robe that, however unusual in collections, is neither particularly early, nor in my view, of outstanding visual appeal.