A Sierra Leone Display Cloth.

Display textile used as a backdrop for chieftaincy ceremonies and other important events, kpokpo, early to mid C20th, Mende or Vai peoples, Sierra Leone. Hand spun white and indigo dyed cotton, red machine spun cotton. 61 x 140 inches (155 x 356 cm). Private Collection.

Detail of central portion. Note the thicker warp thread running down the centre of each 10 inch width strip that serves to guide and anchor the tapestry weave squares in the centre of the cloth.

Detail of border section. Two shades of indigo, narrow red stripes framing the extra weft float patterning.

Click on the photos to enlarge.

Sierra Leone Textiles–the Alldridge Collection in Brighton Museum–part two

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery houses more than 100 objects from Sierra Leone purchased in 1899 from Thomas Joshua Alldridge (1947-1916). Alldridge was in Sierra Leone for extended periods between 1871 and 1905,  served as District Commissioner for Sherbro district between 1894 and 1905, travelled extensively throughout much of the country. Among the collection at Brighton are a small but important group of textiles. Sierra Leone textiles are extremely rare and the early dating and provenance makes this perhaps the second ranking group worldwide after those at the British Museum. The accession notes attribute all of them to “Mendiland”, indicating that the weavers were Mende, but given that Alldridge did travel widely in the area over a number of years the possibility that some came from other ethnic groups can not be rules out.

None of the cloths are currently on display but last month I was able to view them with the kind assistance of curators Helen Mears and Martin Pel. Due to the size of the cloths it was not possible to take full view photographs but I was able to get detail pictures that are worth sharing. The three textiles shown here are all display hangings, long and elaborate cloths that would have served as a backdrop for important village events and enhanced the status of the family and chieftaincy that owned them. All three owe a debt to historical links between Mali and Sierra Leone, both in the underlying structure of a blue and white checkerboard layout and in the use of tapestry weave patterning. All are woven from hand spun cotton.

Reference #BMAG.R3483.110a

Reference # BMAG.R3483.110c

Reference # BMAG.R3483.110f

Click on the photos to enlarge.

Sierra Leone Textiles–the Alldridge Collection in Brighton Museum–part one.

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery houses more than 100 objects from Sierra Leone purchased in 1899 from Thomas Joshua Alldridge (1947-1916). Alldridge was in Sierra Leone for extended periods between 1871 and 1905,  served as District Commissioner for Sherbro district between 1894 and 1905, travelled extensively throughout much of the country. Among the collection at Brighton are a small but important group of textiles. Sierra Leone textiles are extremely rare and the early dating and provenance makes this perhaps the second ranking group worldwide after those at the British Museum. The accession notes attribute all of them to “Mendiland”, indicating that the weavers were Mende, but given that Alldridge did travel widely in the area over a number of years the possibility that some came from other ethnic groups can not be rules out.

None of the cloths are currently on display but last Monday I was able to view them with the kind assistance of curators Helen Mears and Martin Pel. Due to the size of the cloths it was not possible to take full view photographs but I was able to get detail pictures that are worth sharing. In todays post I will focus on the most spectacular of the group, a cloth that Venice Lamb in her book Sierra Leone Weaving calls “one of the greatest of all West African cloths.” She publishes a full view in black and white, shown below, and for reasons that are not clear to me from the text, attributes it to a weaver of the Vai ethnic group. Its accession number is R3483.110h.

Click on the photos to enlarge. The cloth measures 12 foot x 4 foot 7inches (365cm x 104  ) and is woven entirely from hand spun cotton in white, indigo and brown (kola nut dye ?). It is notably for the densely worked and incredibly varied blocks of weft float patterning. It falls into the largest and most complex group of Sierra Leone cloths of a type called kpoikpoi (or kpokpo) and would have been displayed at important events rather than worn.

“a native Christmas tree”

Since at least the end of the nineteenth century the Christmas and New Year holidays in Conakry, St Louis and other cities of Francophone West Africa have been marked by a festival and parade during which families and “quarters” would vie with each other to display the most elaborate and innovative “fanal.” A fanal was a wooden frame covered with paper, often in the shape of a boat, or, as in the image above, a fantasy building.  It is this fanal that the caption of the card identifies as “a native Christmas tree.” Candles or other lights were placed within the fanal for night time parades, giving them the name “lanterns” when the custom spread to English speaking Freetown by the 1930s.

Vintage postcards, circa 1900-20, author’s collection. Photographers unknown. Click on the photos to enlarge.

Sierra Leone Cloths at Wembley, 1924–another view.

Some months ago I posted a note on the display of Sierra Leone textiles at the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley in 1924. I have since found this card which gives a better view of the “country cloths” on show. I wonder where they are today.

Madam Yoko, a Mende Chief, Sierra Leone

“Madam Yoko or Mammy Yoko (ca. 1849–1906) was a leader of the Mende people in Sierra Leone. Combining advantageous lineage, shrewd marriage choices and the power afforded her from the secret Sande society, Yoko became a leader of considerable influence. She expanded the Mende Kingdom and at the time of her death, she was the ruler of the vast Kpa Mende Confederacy.” Source: Wikipedia

Vintage postcards, circa 1900, author’s collection.

African Textiles in Close Up #2: a Sierra Leone robe.

In my last post I looked at two rare embroidered robes from Liberia or Sierra Leone in the British Museum collection. Today I turn to a third robe, also from Sierra Leone, that is in an even more unusual style. The vast majority of robes from the region were tailored from either plain or simple warp stripe patterned cotton cloths in shades of white, brown and indigo. They can be distinguished from other West African robes by their distinctive front pockets and their overall design – according to Venice Lamb there were two styles: a simple sleeveless tunic called in Sierra Leone  kusaibi, and a more complex sleeved robe called a duriki ba. A very few  surviving examples (two of which we looked at) were embroidered and fall into a group that Bernhard Gardi in his important book Le Boubou – c’est chic calls Manding robes.

However there remains an even smaller number of robes from the same region tailored from the elaborately patterned kpoikpoi cloths for which Sierra Leone weavers were so notable. This robe, part of the British Museum’s Beving collection, was collected at least by 1913 and most probably dates from the second half of the nineteenth century. It was apparently (Lamb 1984:136) collected in Bonthe region, Sierra Leone. It is among less than ten robes I am aware of that have been made from kpoikpoi cloths.

The structure is simple – an existing small cloth is simply folded in half width ways, a neck hole made, and a patch pocket added at the front. This results in a robe made up of seven strips of cloth, each around 18cm in width, and a total size of  124 cm width by 96cm length. The pocket is made from a square piece of cloth, one and a half strip widths in size, with the small corner fold typical of robes from the region. The lower half of each side is sewn up with the rest left open to create armholes. However in marked contrast to this simple tailoring the cloth used to create this robe is exceptionally elaborate. On the pocket detail above we can see blocks of thicker indigo dyed thread inserted as supplementary weft floats half way across the strip in sufficient quantities to distort the flow of the ground weft into a curved pattern. This is just one of the many variations used in a way that seems to me to suggest a deliberate echo of the embroidery patterns normally found on the pocket and chest areas of prestige robes. In particular when we look at the back of the robe we see that the small block of checkerboard pattern largely concealed by the pocket is repeated.

Elsewhere we see the use of tapestry weave techniques to create distinctive triangular patterns that are a feature of the more complex styles of Sierra Leone weaving.

The detail above from the lower left of the back also shows some of the remarkable variation in weft stripe placement and simple variants of the weft float patterning the weaver has utilised. To me though the most interesting feature, and the strongest evidence that this cloth was woven to order with its use as a robe planned is the contrast in colour between the front and the back. On the front of the robe white is the dominant colour, but on the back there is a preponderance of light blue indigo dyed thread. The pattern diverges at the fold in the centre of the cloth, yet the strips used are continuous, strongly suggesting that it was woven with this use in mind. We can see this in the photograph below where the two sides are shown together (please excuse the inept photoshop.)

Can anything useful be said about the ethnic origin of this robe ? Venice Lamb published it (1984:137) with a caption ascribing it to the Vai ethnic group, but in the text is much less certain noting only “It is possible that this garment is an example of Vai inventiveness in weaving.”  However I am not convinced that there is sufficient evidence to distinguish Vai weaving from that of the larger group of Mende weavers.  Easmon (1924:22) noted that kpoikpoi cloths were “essentially a Mende cloth, and is also made by the Gallinas [Vai]”. Very few of the small number of early Sierra Leone cloths in museum collections have any detailed collection data and where they do it is not generally sufficient to confirm that the piece was woven in the same place as it was collected. Prestige cloths and prestige robes were important trade goods and may well have been traded a considerable distance from their place of origin. Bonthe, where this cloth was collected, was mainly inhabited by Sherbro people . We might also note that the whole process of assigning a particular cloth style to a particular ethnic group is extremely problematic.

All photographs above by Duncan Clarke. Click on the photos to enlarge.

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.