Three Early Textiles from Côte D’Ivoire in Newark Museum.

Although there are currently large quantities of  fairly recently woven cloths from the Baule peoples of Côte D’Ivoire in the international market, the earlier textile traditions of that country remain obscure and little researched. Much of the detail of the historical relationship between Ivoirian textiles and those of neighbouring countries such as Mali and Ghana is still to be understood. How do earlier cloths relate to the ethnic groups such as Senufo, Guro, and Baule that are so well known to collectors of African sculpture ? Looking carefully at textiles with early acquisition dates in museum collections is one way in which scholars can begin to address some of these issues.  The three cloths shown below were accessioned by Newark Museum in 1928 and according to records generously shared by Newark Museum Research Associate Roger D. Arnold were purchased that year from a gallery in Paris. The first and to me most interesting (Newark Museum #28.835) is to my knowledge the earliest recorded example of this very elaborate and odd type of cloth that a couple of later sources have attributed to the Guro.

 

As Roger suggested to me there are intriguing visual similarities between this cloth and some from Senegal, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde.

The other two (Newark Museum#28.836 & 28.862) are fine examples of a slightly better known type of cloth with blocks of extra weft float patterning in a style that is primarily associated with the Dioula (Jula) people of northern Côte D’Ivoire. However the use of red and yellow for the patterning in these two examples rather than the more typical white is exceptional.

Thanks are due to Roger Arnold for the images.

A Baule Weaver, Ivory Coast, 1960s.

Vintage postcard, postmarked 1969, showing a  Baule or Dioula weaver in Côte D’Ivoire, wearing an indigo overdyed robe cloth and weaving an ikat pattern. Note the indigo on the loom’s heddles. This is not normal weaving attire so we can assume he put on a finished cloth or his best outfit for the photographer.

Revisiting some exceptional Bondoukou textiles from Ivory Coast.

Agnibilécro - Kangah, Chef Agnis. Postcard photographed by G. Kante, circa 1920. The seated ruler wears a Bondoukou style cloth. Author's collection.

This post features an important and very rare group of cloths from the north eastern part of Cote D'Ivoire, around the town of Bondoukou. Stylistically and historically related to the well known Ewe and Asante cloths of Ghana these distinctive early C20th cloths are previously undocumented and not represented in museum collections (except a few we have sourced in recent years.) They represented an important stylistic and historical link between the textiles of Mali and Ivory Coast and those of Ghana. The area we found these cloths is sparsely populated and it would appear that most existing examples have now been collected. For more information please see my article on Bondoukou cloths from Hali magazine, 2008, now online here.

fr473 - One of a very small number of museum quality Bondoukou men's cloths that we have collected over recent years, this subtle and beautiful piece uses complex blocks of coloured weft threads muted by the predominant indigo warp as the sole decorative effect. Although this is a very old decorative technique found in some of the earliest Ghanaian textiles the sophisticated effect achieved here by varying the colours and the placement of blocks is to my knowledge unique. More details here.

fr479 - This rare men's hand spun cotton wrapper cloth illustrates a style of weaving in the Bondoukou area with simple, almost rustic, geometric weft float motifs bordered by weft faced blocks in bold simple colours. Very few complete man's cloths with this degree of pattern have been collected and this example is in great condition, with a single small patch on a worn edge. Dates from about 1950. More details here.

fr474 - Superb men's hand spun indigo-dyed cotton ground wrapper cloth collected in a village in the vicinity of Bondoukou in northeast Côte D'Ivoire. One of the finest of the small number of top cloths from this area we collected in 2006 and 2007 when these textiles first began to become available. This exceptional piece was published full page in Hali #157, Autumn 2008. Regular lines of colour across the cloth are created by weft faced bands on alternate strips that are joined by narrower pairs of weft stripes on the other strips. At the centre the design is expanded into a row of complete pattern blocks in which weft faced bands frame supplementary weft float motifs. These motifs, which differ in form from Ghanaian styles, include two animals. The layout of pattern in bands across the field of the cloth separated by undecorated areas is a design that would not occur on Ewe or Asante weaving. More details here.

fr502 - Superb early example of man's wrapper cloth from the Bondoukou region. Illustrates two of the distinctive aspects of pattern layout within this tradition that differ from those of the Asante and Ewe in Ghana, namely a focus on the centre of the fabric and an alignment of patterns in rows down the cloth (rather than the chequerboard type layout typical in Ghana.) This exceptionally fine piece appears to be among the earliest we have seen from the Bondoukou area. Woven with a hand spun indigo dyed cotton background with very subtle balance of warp and weft stripes. More details here.

Click on the photos to enlarge. For more of our collection please visit our gallery online here.

African Textiles–details from the shop

Weft-faced Ewe cloths, Ghana/Togo

Yoruba adire cloths, Nigeria

Indigo striped strip weaves, Ivory Coast.

Mostly blankets from Mali.

Mossi indigo cloths, Burkina Faso.

Yoruba indigo cloths, Nigeria.

Ewe men’s cloths, Ghana/Togo.

Dioula and Bondoukou men’s cloths, Ivory Coast.

For other views of these cloths please visit our website.

Cloth of the month–an exceptional Bondoukou man’s cloth.

fr473 - One of a very small number of museum quality Bondoukou men's cloths, this subtle and beautiful piece uses complex blocks of coloured weft threads muted by the predominant indigo warp as the sole decorative effect. Although this is a very old decorative technique found in some of the earliest Ghanaian textiles the sophisticated effect achieved here by varying the colours and the placement of blocks is to my knowledge unique. One strip is missing from each edge (they were likely removed because they were excessively frayed) but the cloth is otherwise in very good condition with no patches, holes, or stains. Dates from C19th or early C20th. Measurements: 118ins x 71ins, 300cm x 180cm. PRICE: Email for price.

Bondoukou is in the north east of Ivory Coast, not far from the border with Ghana. Culturally and historically  it shares many features with the nearby Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana, such as small Akan kingdoms and chieftaincies ruling primarily farming peoples and significant communities of Muslim traders of Malian ancestry. The textiles of this region, as I discussed in my article in Hali magazine a few years ago, now on my website here, share features with both Asante and Ewe cloths from Ghana and with Ivoirian cloths of the Guro and Baule.

Two cloths from the collection of the Museum de Kulturen, Basel, published in the important exhibition catalogue Woven Beauty: The Art of West African Textiles edited by Berhard Gardi (Basel, 2009) illustrate the early use of the same technique.

This cloth, collected in 1840, is the oldest documented kente in the world. Here red, yellow, and blue weft stripes are muted by the white warp. The author notes that it may be attributed to either an Asante or an Ewe weaver – although I would suggest the red edge strip is strongly indicative of an Ewe origin.

This second piece, collected in 1886, is attributed by the author to the Asante on the rather weak grounds that the collection location is nearer Asante than it is to the Ewe. It is closer to our cloth in that indigo and white stripes are used in the warp although the variety of weft colours is still much less, and the pattern layout much less sophisticated. Click on the photos to enlarge. More Bondoukou cloths on our website here.

Minimal Four–another Bondoukou men’s cloth

In this series of posts I will highlight some rare West African textiles where the elaboration and complexity of design that usually typifies high status textiles is replaced by a more minimal aesthetic….

fr505 - Superb man's cloth from the Bondoukou region with very unusual and subtle minimal design. On a neat hand spun indigo dyed cotton ground the weaver has carefully aligned rows of narrow diamond shaped supplementary weft float patterns. On the second to last row from the bottom of the cloth the colours are reversed. In excellent condition. Dates from early C20th. Measurements: 110ins x 76ins, 280cm x 193cm.

Click on the images to enlarge.

For more information please visit our gallery of Ivory Coast textiles here

Minimal Three – Bondoukou man’s cloth

In this series of posts I will highlight some rare West African textiles where the elaboration and complexity of design that usually typifies high status textiles is replaced by a more minimal aesthetic….

FR527 - Unusual man's cloth from the Bondoukou region of northern Ivory Coast with a simple but graphically strong design of blocks of blue and yellow wefts on a background of white and blue hand spun cotton. This is the only white ground men's cloth I have seen, although we have collected several smaller white women's cloths. In excellent complete condition, dates from circa 1930-50. Measurements: 100ins x 66ins, 255cm x 169cm.

Click on the images to enlarge.

For more information please visit our gallery of Ivory Coast textiles 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.

African Textiles in Hali magazine Spring 2012

The latest issue of Hali magazine (#171, Spring 2012 – available from www.hali.com ) has two worthwhile articles on aspects of African textiles.

This beautiful and rare cloth, formerly owned by the celebrated Parisian couturier Paul Poiret and recently acquired by the MFA Boston, is the subject of an interesting and thought provoking “Masterpiece” appraisal by dealer Andres Moraga.  As he points out there is still considerable uncertainty in the identification of some of these more obscure styles of blue and white cloth, woven with often quite subtle variations over a wide area under the influence of the dispersal of Mande weavers of Malian origin over many centuries. This piece is tentatively attributed to Sierra Leone on the basis of comparison with two published cloths in the Lamb collection (Gilfoy 1987 numbers 8 & 12), but to my mind is far more likely to be from northwestern Ivory Coast along with the two related cloths in the Quai Branly. In fact I would suggest that the two cloths Gilfoy published are likely not to have been woven in Sierra Leone either (for what its worth my guess would be  Mali and northwestern Ivory Coast respectively.) In any event two things are clear. Firstly this is a fine and rare cloth with an exceptional provenance that deserves the consideration it is given in the article. Secondly we can note  how little is known about the cloths of this whole sub-region and how much further research is urgently required.

Ros Weaver’s article Saharan Chic is a well researched introduction to the plant fibre and leather mats of the Tuareg and Maures of the Sahara, illustrated with some superb examples in the collection of Rafaelle Carrieri of the Altai Gallery, Milan.

“The Fashionable Hair”– Africa’s coastal style in the 1900s

These images are from two series of postcards produced between 1900 and 1910 by the photographer F.W.H Arkhurst in Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast. Arkhurst, a member of the Nzima ethnic group born in the Gold Coast , was a timber exporter who lived in Assinie and later in Grand Bassam. His studio photographs capture perfectly the then fashionable style of  women’s dress along the African coast from the Niger Delta to the Ivory Coast as families grew prosperous from trading opportunities in the expanding colonial economies. Hair was swept high and adorned with gold jewellery or wrapped in cloth, tailored dress was of imported cotton prints, often with a shawl or wrap of locally woven fabrics.

African Textiles in Africaniste Art–an unusual case.

Marché en A.O.F. signed J.B. Vettiner, 1931. [click all images to enlarge]. From Christie’s sale The Africanists, Amsterdam 1 July 1998. Oil on canvas, preparatory work for a mural painted in the pavilion of the city of Bordeaux at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris.

Although this is in most respects a typical colonial genre scene of no outstanding merit, it is unusual because of the detail and accuracy with which the artist has depicted the textiles worn by the participants. Moreover the textiles shown are in several instances extremely rare styles not well represented even in French museum collections. I am intrigued to find these cloths shown in this context and can’t help wondering if they have survived in an obscure French collection, perhaps in Bordeaux, to this day. The scene was clearly not drawn from life – there is no suggestion in the limited biographical information available on the artist, Jean-Baptiste Vettiner (1871-1935), that he travelled in West Africa, and the cloths shown are far too elaborate and expensive to have been worn by porters in the market. Gathering cotton was a frequent theme of colonial imagery as the postcards dating to circa 1910-20 below show.

So what can be said about these cloths ? The image below numbers the main pieces.

1. Wool kaasa blanket from Mali, of the lanndaaka type, with the central motif of the mosque, lanndal, woven by a maabo weaver. Shown  wrongly worn vertically as a kind of hooded burnous rather wrapped horizontally. The kaasa lanndaaka below is in the National Museum of Mali, Bamako – see Textiles du Mali, Bernhard Gardi, 2003.

2 and 4. Indigo dyed cotton cloths with white warp stripes at the selvedge of each strip and coloured supplementary weft float motifs are typical of the Bondoukou region on the northern part of the Ghana/ Côte D'Ivoire border, where they were woven by Dioula, and perhaps Abron or Koulango weavers. The cloth below is on our gallery.

3 and 6. These are really obscure types, related to weft faced cloths woven in West and north west parts of Côte D'Ivoire by weavers who may be Guro, Mande or Dioula, working in a number of as yet undocumented local traditions. The Musee Quai Branly in Paris has a superb collection of related pieces, although unfortunately largely without much useful collection data. Search for Côte D'Ivoire  in their textiles collection database to see more. They have the piece below as Senufo but that is unlikely as the Senufo learned weaving from the Dioula in the early decades of the C20th.

5. Also from Côte D'Ivoire this cloth is an example of a slightly better known but still rare style that we believe to be the work of Guro or Mande weavers. The example below is on our gallery now.

7. One of the more unusual types of Malian blanket, the arkilla bammbu would have been used as a prestige display hanging for a Fulani wedding and is most unlikely to have been worn at all. The detail below is from a cloth in the National Museum of Mali, Bamako – see Textiles du Mali, Bernhard Gardi, 2003.

8. This cloth has embroidered rather than woven decoration, probably the work of a Hausa embroiderer in the north of Côte D'Ivoire. I know of only one related example of this style on a man’s wrap cloth (rather than robes and trousers). Now in the Karun Thakar collection (www.karuncollection.com) it was acquired in Accra and probably collected in northern Ghana.