Mossi strip weave, Burkina Faso.
Yoruba stitch-resist adire, Nigeria, 1960s.
Strip weave, Niger, mid C20th.
Hausa strip weaves, Nigeria, circa 1970.
Yoruba strip weave aso oke, Nigeria, early C20th.
Yoruba strip weave aso oke, Nigeria, early C20th.
Yoruba starch resist adire eleko, Nigeria, circa 1960s.
Hausa stitch resist, Nigeria, circa 1970.
Efik stitch resist, Nigeria, mid C20th.
Please visit our website to view our selection of indigo cloths.
AS523 - Fine Hausa blanket collected before World War II. Although cloths such as this were doubtless once widely available in the north of Nigeria few examples from this period have survived and they are not well represented in museum collections. Unlike more common examples from the 1960s it is woven from hand spun cotton throughout (by the 1960s weavers were using machine spun cotton for the warp) and the tapestry weave inserts are dyed with natural dyes. This cloth was unused when collected and is in very good condition, dates from the 1930s. Measurement: 97 inches x 57 ins, 246cm x 146cm
Click on the photos to enlarge. To see this cloth on our galley click here.
We have just acquired a group of more recent Hausa blankets from the 1960s that will be posted on the gallery in the coming weeks.
The famous indigo dye pits at the Kofar Mata gate in Kano may be the last few survivors in the city of what was once a massive local industry supplying highly prized burnished indigo turbans and robes to wealthy patrons throughout the Sahara and Sahel but today they are a rather sad sight, with only a few remaining dyers who largely make tie dye patterned cloths for the extremely desultory tourist trade. However a short drive outside Kano the village of Kura still retains its ancient specialisation supplying merchants from Niger and Mali. For the most expensive cloths cloth is woven from very fine spun cotton into strips only around 1 cm in width – these are the narrowest strips produced anywhere in West Africa.
Between sixty and one hundred and twenty strips are then sewn together edge to edge to make a turban before being dyed in indigo. In order to obtain the darkest possible colour the cloth is immersed and then drawn out to oxidise the dye repeatedly.
The dyed cloth is then dried in the sun.
It is then ready for the cloth beaters, another specialised craft requiring great skill.
Water is sprayed onto a cloth dusted with powdered indigo and animal fat.
Two workers use heavy wooden mallets to beat the cloth, giving it a metallic sheen and folding it repeatedly until a long narrow bar of cloth is ready to be wrapped in paper for sale.
Two completed bars of cloth can be seen behind the seated man below.
Click on the photos to enlarge. All photos above © Duncan Clarke.
The Hausa/Fulani chief Sarkin Zamfara Ahmadu Barmo, Anka, north Nigeria 1961/62, photographer Brigitte Menzel. Indigo dyed and glazed turban.
To mark the recent update of the robe section of our gallery, today I am posting a selection of early images of this style of robe in use. Although this style of robe was made in and closely associated with the nineteenth century Sokoto Caliphate in north Nigeria, taking in Hausa, Nupe and northern Yoruba peoples, such was it’s prestige that it was traded and worn across a much wider expanse of West Africa.
Photographer unknown. Lagos, Nigeria, Circa 1890.
Photographer N. Walwin Holm or J.A. C. Holm, circa 1900-10. The Alake of Abeokuta.
Photographer unknown, Cameroun, early C20th.
Photographer unknown, Burkina Faso, early C20th. the Moro Naba, king of the Mossi, Ouagadougou.
Photographer unknown, early C20th, Tuareg Chief, Zinder, Niger.
Photographer unknown, early C20th. Hausa dance troupe, northern Nigeria.
Photographer unknown, early C2oth, Shendam, east central Nigeria.
Click on the photos to enlarge. Please visit our robe gallery to see our current stock and for more information.
Flowing wide sleeved robes, usually decorated with embroidery, became one of the predominant forms of male prestige dress worn by chiefs and other wealthy men across a large part of West Africa from at least the Sixteenth Century. Their distribution owes much to the diffusion of Islam along key trade routes, although not everyone who wore them was a Muslim. There were a number of mainly quite rare local variants but the predominant type was associated particularly with the C19th Sokoto Caliphate centred on northern Nigeria and primarily the product of Hausa, Nupe and Oyo Yoruba textile workers (cotton spinners, dyers, weavers, tailors, embroiderers, beaters.) The Hausa name for these robes is riga, while among the Yoruba they were called agbada. It is usually not possible to attribute a specific ethnic origin to this type of robe on stylistic grounds alone. Although today they are often still made from hand-woven cloth, the painstaking and beautiful hand embroidery that was used in the past is very rarely seen. Fine old robes have become family heirlooms passed on from father to son and worn with pride at major celebrations.
For descriptions, details etcetera of all these robes please visit our updated gallery here.
Published in Nigeria in 2011 but new to me this is a substantial (600 + pages) volume that explores dress traditions across numerous ethnic groups in Nigeria in considerable detail. The author Dani Lyndersay, a theatre studies expert, lived in Nigeria for many years and has a Phd from the University of Ibadan. She draws on both her own field and archive research and a pretty thorough overview of the literature illustrated by numerous line drawings. These drawings are in may cases quite detailed and make up for the limited and rather poorly reproduced photographs (often a problem with books published in Nigeria.) There is much new and interesting information here – 28 pages on the dress of the Kanuri, for example.
The book is not listed on Amazon but I did find it at an online seller here. I bought my copy at SOAS bookshop in London, who no doubt could obtain more.
Superb ceremonial tunic from the Wodaabe people of Niger. The Wodaabe are a nomadic cattle herding branch of the Fulani (or in French, Peul) people who are widely distributed across the Sahel of West Africa. The Wodaabe are well known for their spectacular annual ceremonies in which young men wearing thick face makeup dance in a row displaying their beauty to admiring women from the rival clan. These tunics are open-sided and worn over a plain leather wrapped skirt. More recent examples are usually made from cheaper imported cloth and embroidered in harsher colours, but this piece, dating from around 1960-70 is a great exemplar of a style that is now becoming very hard to collect. The designs, which include motifs alluding to aspects of nomadic life such as the layout of camps, are hand embroidered on a strip woven cloth ground. On this piece it is made up of the most expensive and most prestigious strip cloth - very narrow width strips woven by Hausa weavers in the vicinity of Kano in Nigeria specifically for sale to the desert peoples to their north such as the Tuareg and Wodaabe. A distinctive feature of this tunic is the central red stripe embroidered with a different design. Condition excellent. Measurement: 17 inches (plus 18 "sleeves") x 52 inches, 44 cm (plus 46 "sleeves")x 133 cm.
Click photos to enlarge. More information on our gallery here.
AS435 - Unique women's wrapper skirt cloth hand sewn from early C20th aso oke woven with local hand spun indigo dyed cotton with weft stripes of magenta silk “alaari” imported via the trans-Saharan caravan trade. Exceptionally the cloth is decorated with endless knot motifs and lines hand embroidered in colourful imported thread. Embroidery on wrappers is not usual among the Yoruba (although there was a brief vogue for machine embroidered wrappers in the 1970s) but was a custom among the Hausa, so it is possible that the embroidery on this piece is by a for a Hausa woman patron, or was influenced by knowledge of Hausa examples. Excellent condition. Dates from circa 1920s - 30s. Measurements: 77 ins x 55ins, 197 cm x 140.
Click on the photos to enlarge. More information on our website here.
