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.

New light on an Ewe chief

In her pioneering book West African Weaving (Duckworth Press, 1975) Venice Lamb published the photograph above (source: Wilmarth family private collection) depicting an Ewe chief with  his court retainers.  She suggested that it showed an Adangbe chief and goes on to describe the features of the cloth that he is wearing as distinctive of what she calls “an earlier type of Adangbe design” , although it is unclear if she has any source for the geographic identification or is basing it only on what she perceived to be the origin of the cloth. She also regarded the picture as dating from the nineteenth century.  This photograph is interesting as there are relatively few early photographs of Ewe chiefs, perhaps because they lacked the elaborate large scale ceremonials and court paraphernalia of the Asante as well as being of lesser political significance in the Gold Coast colony.

For some years I have had a postcard that clearly shows the same man, wearing the same cloth (and the same rather odd crown.) With the photographer identified as “Cliché G.O.” the card is captioned “Palimé (Togo) – Le Chef du village de Kpandu”.  Palimé (Kpalimé) is a town in Togo quite close to the Ghana border, while Kpandu is on the Ghana side on, now on the shore of Lake Volta. Both fall within the more northern cluster of Ewe weaving groups near the town of Hohoe  (that Lamb rather confusingly identifies as the Central Ewe) rather than the more southerly Adangbe or the coastal Anlo.  Whilst there is no guarantee that the caption information is correct (misleading captions on postcards from this period are quite widespread) we can at least note that before the 1914-18 war Togo was a German colony and postcards before that date are captioned in German rather than French.

Malika Kraamer, in her unpublished Phd thesis on Ewe weaving (Colourful changes: two hundred years of design and social history in the hand-woven textiles of the Ewe speaking regions of Ghana and Togo (1800-2000), SOAS, 2005 –now online here) discusses the corpus of early photographs showing Ewe textiles (most drawn from the archives of the Basel and Bremen missions and mainly online here). Among the images that she found with the Bremen Mission is a third photograph of the same chief, again in the same attire. She notes that the same unidentified chief was shown by Lamb and perhaps influenced by her suggests it is a late C19th or early C20th image (at that point it seems she did not have access to the postcard view.)

A couple of weeks ago I was able to buy a group of three photographs from a French source whose grandfather was a trader in Togo in the early part of the twentieth century. One of these photographs, shown below, is a print of the same image as that in the Bremen archive.

Our chief wears his now familiar cloth and crown, but unlike the Bremen copy this print has two captions and, on the reverse, the photographer’s stamp. The first caption, apparently contemporaneous with the print, reads “Fia Dagadu III, Kpandu”, while the second, written in ink, reads “le seigneur de Kpandou, 1929.” On the reverse is the photographer’s stamp “Louis A. Mensah, Photographer.”

In addition to finally identifying this distinguished looking chief, for me these images raise a number of interesting questions about Ewe textile production and use. Why is the same cloth worn in all three photographs ? Is it the only one that he had or his favourite among several ? Might there be other, earlier or later, photographs of him wearing a different cloth ?

What can we say about the cloth itself ? Malika Kraamer identifies the style as atisue based on the short weft faced block structure. As she discussed, both the naming and the design evolution of Ewe textiles were extremely fluid and complex. This type of cloth, in which almost square weft-faced blocks alternate with similarly sized warp-faced sections decorated with supplementary weft float motifs, was certainly among the more elaborate and highly prized types woven in the first half of the twentieth century. A fine example that is on our gallery at the moment is shown below.

Is Venice Lamb correct in attributing this style of cloth primarily to the Adangbe weavers (Kraamer calls the same group Agotime after the main weaving village in the area) ? I would suggest that at present the necessary field research that might perhaps allow us to clearly attribute many of the huge variety of Ewe cloths to specific locales has yet to be carried out, although based on Kraamer’s work some preliminary suggestions for some styles might be possible How did geographical variation interact with individual innovation, workshop styles etcetera ? We simply don’t know.  We do know however that cloths are highly mobile artefacts, with prized pieces being traded over a wide area. Did master weavers whose work was in demand also move to supply wealthy patrons ?

And what about the odd crown ? Both colonial authorities and European traders imported items of royal regalia and prestige goods that they gave or sold to local rulers they wished to influence. The tiger patterned rug in the third photograph clearly falls into this group and I would suggest the crown does also.

Click on the photos to enlarge. Click here to view our current selection of Ewe textiles.

The Lamb Collection of African Textiles on-line

Venice Lamb is a pioneering figure in the study and documentation of West African textiles. The series of books she published together her husband Alastair in the 1970s and 80s are still the only monographs devoted to most of these areas, and remain essential both for the wide variety of photographs and their recording of many traditions that have since evolved markedly or in some cases disappeared altogether: Venice Lamb, West African Weaving (Duckworth, 1975) – mainly covering Ghana; Venice Lamb & Judy Holmes, Nigerian Weaving (Roxford, 1980); Venice & Alastair Lamb, Au Cameroun Weaving – Tissage (Roxford, 1981); Venice & Alastair Lamb, Sierra Leone Weaving (Roxford, 1984).

The collection of textiles assembled by the Lambs is owned jointly by the National Museum of African Art and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Part of the collection was exhibited soon after the purchase and highlights of this may be seen in the small but important book by Peggy Stoltz Gilfoy, Patterns of Life: West African Strip Weaving Traditions (Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 1987.) A small number of the Lamb cloths are also online as collection highlights at the National Museum of African Art website – search for “Costume and textiles” on the Advanced Search page here.

More importantly for scholars of African textiles, it is now possible to access a large part of the Lamb collection through the main Smithsonian database here. Entering “Venice Lamb” as the search term pulls up 1563 records, of which 988 include photos online. The strength of the Lamb’s collection of Asante kente cloths is well known and most of the major pieces have been published, but I was interested to see a number of very fine small cloths, described as shawls or headtie’s. Brigitte Menzel also collected a number of these miniature kente in the 1970s but I have seen only one in all my years of collecting in Ghana.

Click on photos for larger views…..

	USNM#: EJ10570, LAMB: "POSSIBLE A SHAWL OR SMALL WOMAN'S PIECE...ASASIA PATTERN...OLD...OYOKOMAN SAMPLE. BELONGED TO NAN OKAI ABABIO'S MOTHER." 112cm x 59.3cm
	USNM#:EJ10594. ”liar’s cloth” pattern. 81cm x 37cm

Also of interest is a group of Manjak and Papel cloths from Guinea Bissau.

USNM#:EJ10109. Wrapper, 185cm x 114cm.

For me though the most exciting pieces are three cloths unlike any I have seen before…..

	USNM#:EJ10227. Shroud. 219cm x 168c. Collected in Ferkessedougou, Cote D’Ivoire. RENE BOSER NOTES: "BAULE OR...DYULA MANUFACTURE. USED EVENTUALLY BY THE SENUFO."
	USNM#:EJ10375. Woman’s wrapper. 159cm x 104cm. Collected 1980 in Bafodia, Sierra Leone.
	USMN#:EJ11423. 233cm x 56cm. Collected in 1975 in D.R. Congo. Donor’s comment – “string net cloth, the function of this unusual cloth is not clear.” My own comment would be that surely this strip woven cloth must have been traded to Congo from West Africa.

Asante kente “adwinasa” and some thoughts on our kente archive

I have now posted online our archive of photographs of Asante kente cloths we have sold over the past ten years or so. Comprising 175 images it can be viewed here. To mark this event here is a brief article written by me about one of the finest of these pieces, the Asante silk “adwinasa” man’s cloth shown here, that was published as a “Benchmark” in Hali #160 Summer 2009. Hali is now devoting an increasing amount of space to African and Indonesian textiles – issue #160 also includes a “market report” on African textiles – subscription and single copies available here.

“Asante silk man’s wrapper cloth, Ghana, late C19th - early C20th.

Silk and gold were the attributes of power in the Asante kingdom, an expansionary state that dominated present day Ghana from around 1700 until its defeat in a series of wars with the British in the late nineteenth century. When the British envoy Thomas Bowdich visited the capital at Kumase in 1817 he marvelled at the splendour and wealth displayed by the Asante court. In his account Mission from Cape Coast to Ashantee he noted “The caboceers, as did their superior captains and attendants, wore Ashantee cloths of extravagant price….They were of incredible size and weight, and thrown over the shoulder exactly like a Roman toga; a small silk fillet generally encircled their temples, and massive gold necklaces, intricately wrought, suspended Moorish charms.”

The Asantehene, the king of the Asante at Kumase, is at the head of a complex hierarchy made up of lesser kings, chiefs, and rulers of formerly subject peoples, each of which replicates aspects of the Asante court ritual and regalia, on a lesser scale. Although anyone who can afford it can wear a kente cloth the very finest examples were woven at the order of great kings and wealthy chiefs. For a man of lower rank to wear a cloth that outshone in novelty or complexity that of his superiors was, and still is, an act of lèse majesté that could have serious consequences.

As part of the regalia of office, the property of the “stool” in local terms, the presumption was that these great cloths were to be passed on to successors rather than sold. Enhancing, rather than reducing, the wealth and splendour of the stool was among the major responsibilities of any officeholder and as a consequence it is particularly hard to collect top quality Asante textiles. The cloth we are considering here was one of a small group assembled in the 1970s by a Ghanaian dealer who discovered that the key to securing access to these courts and their treasures was a ready supply of old brass bedsteads he shipped over from England. It remained in a London private collection until a few years ago when it was purchased and donated to the British Museum, which perhaps surprisingly given the long history of British contacts with the Asante lacked a kente cloth of this type and quality.

So why is this piece so exceptional? The background pattern type is not particularly unusual. Asante cloths are named after the colour and arrangement of the warp stripes, in this case the layout of a broad yellow and green stripe with narrow white stripes on a red ground was called “Oyokoman amponhema.” It is a variation of the more common “Oyokoman” that alludes to the Oyoko matrilineage of the Asante royal dynasty, while the Mamponhemaa is the Queen Mother of Mampon, an important subordinate kingdom. Asante weavers use a second pair of heddles to weave weft faced blocks and supplementary weft float motifs on the warp faced background strip. Here the entire surface area of the cloth is covered by a vast array of different weft float motifs framed by more regular border areas. This style of cloth, which seems to have been woven only on Oyokoman patterned backgrounds, is called adwinasa, meaning “fullness of ornament,” or alternatively adweneasa, meaning, “my skill is exhausted.”

On most kente there is a design interplay between the areas covered by weft motifs and the undecorated warp striped background. On the finest old silk examples tightly woven clusters of supplementary weft designs shine out like jewels from the more subdued colours of the background cloth. An adwinasa cloth, the ultimate text of a master weaver’s skill, lacks this contrast and in consequence, to my eyes at least, most examples look relatively flat and lifeless. Here though the master weaver has been able to surpass the constraints of the form and impart a lively vitality to the cloth, primarily by making only very limited use of the more densely woven “double weave” weft motifs to provide an irregular scattering of blocks of intense colour that draws in the eye to the great variety of the more subtle patterns.”

Returning to the archive of Asante cloths, one thought in particular strikes me, especially in comparison to the archive of Ewe cloths we posted the previous week. Pleasing though many of the cloths are, I note how few very top quality Asante silk cloths I was able to collect since the mid 1990s. The same relative paucity of really superb Asante pieces was apparent last month when I had the opportunity to look through a published collection of Ghanaian cloths here in London that was assembled mainly in the 1980s.

Top quality silk Asante cloths had densely woven blocks of weft design on a smaller, tighter, scale than more mundane pieces, creating a jewel like impact. Almost all would have been woven to order by weavers under court patronage rather than generally available to any man or woman rich enough to buy one, as was the case among the Ewe. However as the large collections of Asante gold jewellery assembled in recent years testify the inalienability of court regalia was more theoretical than actual. Some have no doubt been retained by local courts, while other would have decayed in poor storage conditions. However I would suggest that the most likely reason for their extreme rarity is that very few of these top quality cloths were actually produced, in contrast to the large number of more everyday pieces. Sadly, despite the wide interest in kente there has yet to be a detailed and extended piece of published field research on Asante weavers so we have no way of knowing how much time weavers spent on court orders, what the range of cloths was that different weavers produced and related questions. It seems to me likely that the collections assembled by Brigitte Menzel and Venice Lamb in the late 1960s and early 1970s actually encompass quite a significant proportion of the surviving examples. In a later post I will return to these two important collections and look at their accessibility both in print and online.