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date: 15 February 2025

Textiles in West Africa up to the 20th Centurylocked

Textiles in West Africa up to the 20th Centurylocked

  • Jody BenjaminJody BenjaminDepartment of History, University of California Riverside

Summary

Across the large, dynamic diverse space of West Africa—from the dense urban enclaves in Oyo, Kano, Kumasi, Jenne, and Timbuktu to the smaller towns and village settings of the Sahel or rainy tropics of the southern coast—textiles were important to the social, economic, religious, and cultural lives of local communities. In many parts of the region south from Lake Chad to the Bight of Biafra and west along the Atlantic coast to Mauritania, artisans have processed and woven textiles from raffia, bark, bast, wool, silk, and cotton that was used for clothing such as infant swaddling, wrappers, head ties, turbans, tunics, gowns, trousers, and burial cloths. Textiles have served a variety of utilitarian and ceremonial purposes such as a flexible form of exchange currency to pay a customs tax or to give as a dowry in marriage. Whether as artifacts of everyday use or exceptional splendor, West African textiles have reflected the region’s enormous historical, geographical, ethnic, and religious diversity, as well as the specificity of distinct areas and time periods. Archeologists, art historians, anthropologists, and historians have produced much scholarly literature on cloth both manufactured in and imported to West Africa. These works have debated the still imprecisely understood origins of cloth weaving in West Africa, the use of natural dyes, and the impact of the capitalist global economy that began to emerge in the 18th and 19th centuries on local textile manufacturing and consumers. The study of textiles, especially their circulation and use before the 20th century, challenges the notion of West African societies as either static or isolated from the evolving global scene.

Subjects

  • Archaeology
  • Cultural History
  • Economic History
  • Historiography and Methods
  • West Africa
  • Women’s History

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