African Textiles in Close-up: two robes in the British Museum

At the end of last month I had the opportunity to spend a morning at the new textile store for the British Museum in Blyth House, West London. With the patient assistance of curator Julie Hudson and Textile Centre manager Helen Wolfe I was able to look closely at a number of robes and cloths from the British Museum’s vast collection that had attracted my attention either in publications or via their online database. (The entire collection is now online here and provides a hugely important resource for those interested in studying African textiles.)

Although I am lucky enough to spend most of my days surrounded by stacks of old African cloths there is in my view always more to be learned and more details to be grasped by paying close attention to threads, weaves, patterns, constructions, layouts, textures, etcetera. Some of these can be learned from photographs but actually seeing and handling cloths reveals more again. [Any of the cloths, or indeed other items, in the collection of the British Museum can be viewed by appointment and curators are generally happy to help.]

Over the next few weeks I will be writing a short series of posts based on this visit, beginning today with a look at two  robes from Sierra Leone or, more probably, Liberia. One of these has been frequently published and the other is very obscure.

My attention was drawn to this simple and rather stained looking robe (British Museum number AF,WA.10) by the early accession number and the brief description on the image page “Embroidered garment made of cloth (grass).” In old descriptions and travellers accounts of West African textiles cloths described as woven of “grass” are generally actually woven from raffia (the dried inner leaves of a type of palm tree. While cloths woven from raffia on the upright single heddle loom in West Africa are reasonably widespread, strip woven raffia cloths are extremely rare (primarily, I think, because raffia thread could only provide short lengths that had to be tied together.)

There is no detailed record surviving of the origin or accession date of the robe but it appears to be part of the collection left to the museum by Henry Christy (1810-1865.) Disappointingly the first thing that became apparent when we handled and examined this robe was that despite the rather harsh scratchy texture, it was in fact woven from hand spun cotton not raffia. Raffia is not spun so on close examination the fibres are flat rather than round as here. [The main description on the BM page has now been corrected following our examination.]

So what accounts for the pale beige colour and harsh texture ? The robe appears to have been soaked in some kind of plant based dye (most probably after robe was tailored but before it was embroidered.)  Although I am not aware of any documentation of this practice in the southern part of Sierra Leone or Liberia, it is still in use in the making of “war shirts” called hu ronko among the Limba people in the north of the country and in neighbouring Guinea. In their book Blues et ocres de Guinée Anne-Chantal Gravellini and Annie Ringuedé describe the use of the bark of the tree terminalia ivorensis along with the kola nut Cola nitida to dye cloths and tunics a variety of ochre shades.

Also notable was the regular placement of thicker wefts at intervals along each strip of cloth. The embroidery, although limited in area and elaboration, is quite complex in design. Below is a detail from the back. Imported wool, cotton and silk is used.

The pocket has the folded over corner and oblique placing that were found on many robes from the Guinea Coast region and help to distinguish them from the better known robes of Mali and Nigeria.

The sides of the robe are completely open but it can be seen that they were once sewn up at the lower part. This sleeveless structure would put this robe within the group that the Lambs (Sierra Leone Weaving by Venice and Alastair Lamb)  report are called kusaibi, while the second robe that we looked at, with a more complex tailored design is called in Manding duriki ba.

Below we show front and back views from the BM site (BM accession number Af1934,0307.218). This robe was part of the Beving collection accessioned in 1934 but can be assumed to be from the nineteenth century.

Published by the Lambs with photographs that make it look very yellow this remarkable robe is in fact a very similar pale ochre colour to the first one we looked at, although it is softer to handle.

In this robe also there is a decorative effect in the cloth used achieved by adding thicker threads in the weft, albeit here in blocks rather than the single threads used in Af.WA.10. This is a quite unusual technique in West African strip weaving and may in itself point towards an origin in the same region. In his book Le Boubou –c’est chic (Basel, 2000), Bernhard Gardi attributes the very small number of robes of this type to Liberia. A blue ground robe with rather similar embroidery to this was collected in 1932 from a Mano chief in a village called Blaui in northern Liberia.

Click on the photos to enlarge. In the post above all detail photos are by Duncan Clarke and the full views are from the linked pages on the British Museum site.

“Costume for a King”–An important Sierra Leone or Liberian robe at the Pitt-Rivers Museum.

A couple of years back a research project at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford, revealed that a previously undocumented West African robe in their collection was in fact among the founding objects assembled by General Pitt-Rivers in the 1870s, and more remarkably, that the same robe appeared in an article in the Illustrated London News on 28 November 1846.

The robe was among a group of objects collected by a Captain Henry Denham during a naval survey of the West African coast in 1845-6. It belongs among the extremely small number of chiefs’ robes of the type that Bernhard Gardi in his book Le Boubou – C’est Chic (Basel, 2000) ‘boubou Manding’ from Sierra Leone and Liberia.

For full details of this robe in the Pitt-Rivers collection click here and for a notice about the research here.

Sierra Leone Textiles–a selection on Pinterest.

Over the past week I have been adding photographs to a new section on my Pinterest page featuring a curated selection of cloths and robes from Sierra Leone and Liberia.   Early textiles from this region of West Africa are extremely scarce and the images I have been able to locate probably represent around 50% or more of all surviving examples of the more elaborate and distinctive types.

 

Most, but not all, of the cloths shown will have been woven on variants of the distinctive tripod loom shown above (in a postcard from circa 1900-1910 by the photographer W.S. Johnson).  Rather than being worn as wrappers like the more simple blue, white and brown warp striped cloths also woven, most of these large cloths would have been prestige possessions of chiefs and important families and used as hangings and backdrops for events such as chieftaincy ceremonies, young women’s ‘coming of age’ events etcetera.

Above is a rare image from neighbouring Guinea circa 1900-1910 showing the use of a prestige cloth as the backdrop to a chief’s portrait photograph.

For more images of Sierra Leone weavers see my earlier post here and more recent photographs that I took of a tripod loom weaver near Freetown may be seen here. For more about Sierra Leone culture more generally please visit the website of the excellent Sierra Leone Heritage project.

See the full selection of cloths here.

A Rare Chief’s Robe at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

For serious lovers of African textiles the most exciting exhibit of the current show Majestic African Textiles at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (see earlier post here for details)  will be the chance to view this extremely rare robe. At the time of his important survey catalogue Le Boubou C’est Chic (Editions Christoph Merian/Museum der Kulturen, Basel 2000) Bernhard Gardi noted that only 23 robes in this style were known in collections worldwide. Gardi observes that very little is known about the production and use of this style of robe, which he calls “boubous Manding.” He suggests they were made somewhere in the interior of Liberia and/or Sierra Leone where people of Mande origin descended from migrants from Mali were in the majority.

This superb example in Indianapolis can now be added to the small corpus. It’s accession details are:  “Mende people; Sierra Leone, Liberia. royal robe, early 1900s, cotton, wool. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Eiteljorg. 1989.808”  I would suggest it is in fact more likely to be made in the nineteenth century.

All photos are copyright Indianapolis Museum of Art, with thanks to Niloo Paydar. Click on the photos to enlarge.

Chief Kai Lunda of Luawa Country, Upper Mendi, circa 1893. He was chief of an area on the border between Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. Vintage postcard, authors collection.

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.