An exceptional silk and cotton Yoruba wrapper.

NW513 -Fine and rare Yoruba women's wrapper cloth dating from late C19th or early C20th with an exceptionally complex and subtle array of warp stripes incorporating magenta trans-Saharan silk "alaari" in an indigo dyed hand spun cotton ground. Unlike strip woven aso oke produced by male weavers, these cloths were woven in two wide panels on an upright single heddle loom by a woman weaver. The use of silk in these women's weave wrappers was an established tradition in the C19th and at the start of the C20th, allowing wealthy women to outshine the plainer blue and white style.

However today it is extremely hard to find surviving examples and almost all those we do see have been patched or repaired. These cloths are not well represented in museum collections and published sources, reflecting their rarity but one piece collected before 1890 and now in the American Museum of Natural History, New York may be seen here. This is a particularly fine completely intact example in excellent condition and with an unusually elaborate configuration of stripes. It would have been an heirloom cloth passed down from mother to daughter over several generations. It retains it's very neat hand stitched seams throughout. Measurements: 78ins x 66ins, 200cm x 168cm

Click on the photos to enlarge.‘ To see this cloth and others in our online gallery of Nigerian women’s weaving click here.

Cloth of the month: A fine natural dyed Hausa blanket.

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.

A Koma Weaver, 1911

From the image archive of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, three views of a Koma weaver in the Atlantika mountains (then part of the German colony of Kamerun, now in Adamawa State in Nigeria, near the Cameroon border.) the watercolour above, dating from 1911,  is by Carl Arriens, while the photo and sketch below are by the great German ethnographer Leo Frobenius.

“A Yoruba bride and bridegroom”- vintage postcard circa 1910.

Cloth of the month–a lower Niger prestige sash.

Man's prestige sash, worn over the shoulder, with the warp woven from luxury magenta silk imported to Nigeria by the Saharan caravan trade. Woven by a woman on an upright single heddle loom, the precise origin of this unusual cloth is hard to pinpoint but we can narrow it down to the lower reaches of the Niger and suggest the weaver was most likely Igbo. The neatly woven decoration is in blue, cream, green, and orange, with the same order of colours maintained across the three pattern sections. This is a very rare piece, with only one fairly similar example known (in the British Museum, # Af1956,07.35, collected by Charles Partridge before 1915.) Condition: Excellent. Measurements: 53 inches x 15, 135 cm x 38cm

The image below shows how the cloth would have been worn over the shoulder.

Below is the similar cloth collected by Charles Partridge before 1915 and now in the British Museum.

Click on the photos to enlarge. Click here to view this piece and other rare Nigerian textiles in our gallery.

Cloth of the month: an early indigo dyed aso oke wrapper.

“AS492 - Exceptional and early indigo strip weave aso oke from the Yoruba region of Nigeria, with a beautiful and subtle effect achieved by pale indigo warp stripes against a dark indigo check background, with fine hand spun cotton used throughout. The slight sheen apparent in the photo is an effect of a recent washing and starching to prepare it for resale in Nigeria, an old tradition that is still maintained in some districts - it is less visible in reality than under the photo lighting. Retains its original hand stitched seams throughout and is in excellent condition. Age circa 1900. Measurements: 80 ins x 56, 203cm x 142cm.” – on our gallery here.

This cloth is called an iro, and would have been worn as a wrap around skirt by a wealthy Yoruba lady on an important occasion such as a wedding or a chieftaincy ceremony. It would have formed part of a set of cloths woven in the same pattern, along with two or three smaller pieces worn as shawl, headtie, and  sometimes a hip cloth.  What makes this an exceptional piece ? To my eye what singles out this cloth is the quality of the indigo dyeing. Very dark, almost black, indigo dyed strip weave cloth was prestigious and expensive because of the high number of immersions in the dye required to achieve that colour. When patterned as a fine check or plaid of lighter blue or white threads, it was known as etu, or guinea fowl, after the speckled plumage of the bird. In the Yoruba aso oke tradition etu formed part of a threefold classification of high status cloths along with magenta silk alaari obtained from the trans-Sahana caravan trade network, and local beige wild silk called sanyan.

On this cloth the small scale check of etu is replaced by a larger check design that was called petuje, that literally translates as “kill and eat guineafowl” but meant “surpasses etu”. Here though it is combined with warp stripes in a beautifully dyed mid-blue. One stripe runs along the selvedge of each strip while a second is set slightly off centre to create the regular layout.

Click on the photos to enlarge. Our galleries of indigo cloths are here and here.

Yoruba asooke in the Gold Coast, circa 1900

This photograph from the Basel Mission archive shows a wife of the King of Accra. She is dressed in the fashionable style of the day, with a typical high swept hairstyle, and most likely would have been of Ga ethnicity.   Although the description only notes that it dates to “before 1917” it appears earlier and more likely around 1900.  Aside from being a fine image it interests me because it provides a rare early glimpse of Yoruba asooke cloth in use in the Gold Coast. Folded across her lap is a shawl in a classic Yoruba strip weave design of the late C19th, similar to the example from our gallery shown below.

From the later decades of the C19th until the 1960s Ghana provided a large and important market for Yoruba weavers. Growing numbers of Yoruba people settled in the Gold Coast (most were expelled from the then independent Ghana in 1969) and traders from the Oyo Yoruba town of Ogbomoso dominated the export trade in asooke. Much of the cloth was woven to order, with traders gathering sufficient orders then walking back to their home region to organise the weaving of  the cloth, either in Ogbomoso or in the larger weaving towns nearby such as Iseyin,  Ilorin and Oyo. In the early decades of the twentieth century many of these traders used bicycles, packing a large bundle of cloth on the saddle then pushing it several hundred miles back to the north of Ghana.

Although locally woven cloth and cloth traded from elsewhere in the country was of course available throughout Ghana from Asante, Ewe, and other weavers, the imported varieties from Nigeria offered an alternative that at least in the case of more expensive examples using silk from the trans-Saharan trade, was highly valued. Our photograph provides a rare visual proof of this high status. Posing for a portrait photograph was a rare and important event at that period, and every detail of the sitter’s appearance and outfit would have been carefully selected. For a high status woman such as the wife of a king to display an asooke shawl so prominently in the photograph clearly indicates that it was a prized and prestigious possession. 

Cloth of the month: An Ebira men’s cloth–probably…

As I noted in my description on our gallery site here this cloth is something of a mystery piece. It was bought from an Ebira cloth vendor who gave it an Ebira name itogede that indicates the use of bast fibre along with cotton but on closer examination is woven entirely from cotton. The Ebira (previously written Igbirra) live in several locations near the confluence of the rivers Niger and Benue, with the largest group in and around the large town of Okene in Kogi state. Ebira women are known for their weaving and at least until 5 or so years ago it was very common to see women in Okene weaving brightly coloured rayon cloths on the front veranda of their houses throughout Okene. These cloths were sold in the main Okene market every four days and traded widely across Nigeria and beyond.

This tradition of rayon and earlier silk weaving was quite recent, dating back to around the 1930s, according to John Picton (in his article in Textile History: Textiles of Africa, Pasold Foundation, 1980.)  Until perhaps the 1970s this rayon style flourished alongside an older tradition of weaving in local hand spun cotton and bast fibres producing a variety of blue and white warp striped cloths for a number of local uses. Picton observed in Okene town at the end of the 1960s  that these hand spun cotton blue and white cloths fell into three categories, called ikitipa, itokueta, and itogede. The first two of these consisted of three panels of cloth sewn together, the third made up of four panels. The primary use of both itokueta and the four panel itogede (literally “banana cloth” although in fact the bast fibres came from other plants) was as funerary cloths. They would be hung on the front of the deceased’s house, with the pattern of stripes indicating a male or female burial, and later used as a shroud. In keeping with this use the panels were usually only loosely tacked together rather than fully stitched.

Our cloth is three panels, cotton only not bast fibre, and fully stitched, so it cannot be said to fall within the itogede group. However Picton does discuss cloths in the first group, ikitipa, that were intended for wearing, either by women or by men. Unlike women’s cloths that were hemmed, cloths to be worn by men had a fringe and what Picton called a row of decorative stitching to prevent the cloth unravelling, both features we find here.

In this form, he noted, in is “the antique mode of dress for men in this area” and by the 1960s distinctly outmoded. Nevertheless there are significant differences between our cloth and the examples described by Picton, and those that he collected for the British Museum. The first of these is that ikitipa seems to have been predominantly white, with only limited warp striping in indigo or local brown cotton, whereas our cloth is mainly indigo dyed. More significant and much more unusual though is the grid like pattern of supplementary weft float patterning in pale brown machine spun cotton on this cloth. Although as we have noted Ebira women working in the rayon style cloths used a lot of extra weft float patterning this was much more elaborate than the minimal effect achieved here.

Moreover when we look carefully at these floats we note that rather than a regular over ten under one arrangement that we might expect the anchor threads are quite irregular – over ten under one, over 8 under one etcetera. Together with the asymmetric layout of the warp stripes this imparts a quite complex and dynamic effect to the design that I find very pleasing. As to its origins,  the most likely explanation is that its source is not within Okene town but elsewhere in what is a very culturally diverse area. The cloth is in excellent condition and dates to circa 1920s-1950. There are no examples of this style in museum collections or published literature as far as I know. Hand spun indigo and white cotton. Measurements: 91ins x 66 ins, 232cm x 168cm. At present it is still available on our gallery here.

Cloth of the month: A unique Wodaabe women’s wrapper cloth.

FR556 - Wodaabe women's ceremonial wrapper cloths were usually embroidered on narrow strip woven dark indigo dyed cloth from Hausa weavers in northern Nigeria, and more recently on imported black fabric. However this example, which to my knowledge is unique, is based on a Soninke strip weave stitch resist patterned cloth from Senegal. Collected recently in Mali it dates from circa 1960. In excellent condition. Measurement: 55 inches x 37 ins, 140cm x 94 cm. PRICE: US$475

More details here.

Cloth of the month: Two Kanuri women’s robes.

The far north eastern corner of Nigeria and adjacent areas of Cameroun and Chad are today best known for Islamist insurgency but were once the centre of a powerful kingdom known to historians as Kanem-Bornu that grew rich through controlling the southern end of one of the most important trans-Saharan trade routes.  The Kanuri rulers maintained close links with both other trade centres in the Sahel such as Kano and Timbuktu and with north African trading centres and as a result developed a distinctive material culture  that today is little known. Among the most spectacular features were these embroidered tunic that formed a key part of ceremonial attire for high status Kanuri women. 

Made from imported trade cloth hand embroidered with brightly coloured silks these duriya tunics seem to have been quite varied in style during the nineteenth century, as indicated by examples in museum collections in Berlin and Paris, but to have become more standardised during the first half of the C20th. Our example, shown above, which was collected during the 1950s, is very similar to the single tunic in the British Museum that David Heathcote obtained in the early 1970s (British Museum #Af2008,2025.22) Tunics with embroidered decoration all over were known as sharwan kura (Lyndersay, Nigerian Dress, 2011), while those with more restricted decoration as below were   called kura.

As the sketch below indicates in use they formed part of an elaborate outfit combined with a headcloth, waist wrapper and a large wrapper called a leppaye that could be either locally woven or imported cloth.

From: Dani Lydersay, Nigerian Dress, the Body Honoured (2011, CBAAC, Lagos.)

This photo from the Bella Naija website shows a modern version at an elite Kanuri wedding.

To visit our gallery of West African robes clock here.

“Dyeing cotton in indigo, 1946. Igbomina Yoruba, Nigeria.”

The British Museum’s online catalogue has recently been revamped with a much more intuitive and user friendly search procedure that allows rapid access to much of their vast collections, including their photography holdings. A recent browse turned up this fine image of a Yoruba woman indigo dyer at work in the small town of Omu Aran east of Ilorin. This was once a major centre of Igbomina Yoruba women’s weaving and the photograph shows skeins of dyed thread hanging up to dry in the background. It was taken in 1946. Museum reference number is Af,B61.8. The photographer is not listed. Image copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.

Click on the image to enlarge. Visit the British Museum collections database here.

West African Robes: some early photos of Nigerian robes

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.

West African Robes–an updated selection of fine early examples

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.