Tag: Traditional textiles

There is a question I have been sitting with. Has any African academic written about how poverty causes the decline of local cultures and traditions?

The answer is yes. They have. And what they have found should stop us from talking about "cultural preservation" as if culture exists separate from economics.

In the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, among the amaMpondo communities, researcher Nontuthuzelo Mtsini of Walter Sisulu University documented something striking. The political upheavals and economic decline after the postcolonial period resulted in job losses, corruption, crime, poverty, and the loss of the philosophy of ubuntu embedded in cultural beliefs. Her findings are direct: poverty and unemployment were the major causes of the decline of ubuntu among communities. The elders she interviewed indicated that extreme poverty was caused by political tension, economic decline, and cultural changes. When people cannot feed their families, when there are no jobs, when the economy contracts, the transmission of cultural knowledge from elders to children breaks down. You cannot teach ubuntu when you are migrating for work. You cannot pass down weaving techniques when you cannot afford materials. This is not cultural decline as abstraction. This is poverty as erasure.

Dr Chika C Mba, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, made a striking argument at the Africa Wiki Challenge 2025 launch. He used marriage ceremonies as a concrete example. Africans now spend double on traditional weddings and Western-style "white weddings." The abuse of our own culture and identity leads directly to poverty and impoverishment. This is the cycle. When a family spends money on two weddings instead of one, the money leaves the community. When they choose foreign customs over their own, they are not only spending more—they are signaling that their own traditions are not enough. The message is internalized. The next generation sees the foreign as aspirational. The local becomes "traditional" in the pejorative sense—backward, poor, not for people who have made it.

Atoyebi and Yunusa, writing in the Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology (2024), examined cultural practices among the Idoma and Ogugu peoples of North-Central Nigeria. Their paper highlights how certain traditional beliefs, inheritance of women by their deceased husband's relation, widow's succession rights, refund of bride price after divorce—exemplify what they call the "feminization of poverty." This is not an argument against tradition. It is an argument that poverty and culture cannot be separated. When a practice contributes to poverty, the practice itself becomes vulnerable. And when the practice is abandoned, the entire knowledge system that surrounded it, including the textile traditions, the ceremonial cloths, the symbolic patterns, can disappear with it.

A 2025 study of Ethiopian weavers documents that poverty directly threatens the survival of traditional handwoven garments like the "habesha kemis." With roughly 39 to 43 percent of Ethiopia's 130 million people living below the poverty line (less than $3 per day), demand for traditional handwoven clothes has sharply declined as families cannot afford the higher cost of handmade garments. One weaver with three decades of experience earns only $68 to $102 per month before deducting raw material costs. After 30 years of weaving, this barely covers survival—there is no surplus to pass the craft to a new generation. The youngest weaver in the workshop, 23, is already planning a career change because "the economy isn't what it used to be." This is not just lost income. It is lost transmission.

Getachew, Alemu, and Wudu's 2025 study at Bahir-Dar City documents how poverty exacerbates the challenges facing women weavers. Women face economic difficulties including material shortages and outdated technology. The study notes that household consumption is prioritized over purchasing traditional hand-woven garments—when a family must choose between food and a ceremonial cloth, food wins. The handloom sector's decline is directly linked to deteriorating economic conditions that make handcrafted goods unaffordable for local consumers.

Araya and Beyene's 2024 study on cultural appropriation in Ethiopia's garment weaving industry found that poverty erodes cultural value in two ways. First, when cheaper, mass-produced imitations of traditional designs flood the market due to lack of IP protection, the price of authentic handmade garments is undercut. Second, poverty affects the mindset of educated Africans, who come to see traditional textiles as "cloth for the poor, illiterate, rural dwellers." This is the psychological dimension of poverty. When a traditional cloth becomes associated with economic hardship rather than cultural pride, younger generations reject it in favor of foreign styles perceived as more "modern" or "aspirational."

Amanor-Wilks' 2024 study on the Kente economy in Bonwire, Ghana, documents how the productive role women once played as cotton growers and spinners has been eroded by economic pressures. The research found that while more women are weaving than ever before, they continue to face enormous pressure to stop because the income is insufficient to sustain households even as the traditional gender taboo on women weaving has been suspended.

Areo's 2013 study on Adire (Yoruba indigo-dyed cloth) documents that the art suffered a "lull" in the 1950s due to the flooding of Nigerian markets with cheaper, untaxed imported textiles while locally produced ones were taxed. Hand in hand with this was the mindset of educated Nigerians who then saw Adire "merely as rural cloth for poor, illiterate, rural dwellers." This is the direct link: poverty, enforced by colonial and post-colonial economic policies, led to cultural devaluation, which led to near extinction of the craft.

These studies are not about "preserving culture" in a museum sense. They document material reality: when people cannot afford to buy handmade textiles, weavers cannot afford to weave. When weavers cannot afford to weave, they do not teach their children. When they do not teach their children, the knowledge dies. This is not cultural decline as abstraction. It is poverty as extinction.

The academic literature on poverty and textile decline concentrates heavily on West Africa and Ethiopia. But there are sources from other regions, they just require more searching and often come from non-academic channels such as NGO reports, news articles, and economic studies.

In Namibia, a 2025 Coastal Trade Fair report documents that local fashion designers and tailors struggle because consumers demand lower prices than what handmade garments cost. Maria Franciskus, a fashion designer, stated: "The struggle is that sometimes we buy material and people are demanding low prices… we make a small profit, and it's not enough." The National Museum of Namibia's documentation of traditional leather processing notes that "relative poverty was also reflected in the fact that poorer people were not able to obtain cow fat to keep their skins in good condition." When poverty prevents people from maintaining traditional garments, the knowledge of how to process and care for them erodes. No academic study from Namibia specifically on poverty and traditional textile decline exists.

In Zambia, World Vision reports that due to prolonged drought and climate change, traditional agriculture is no longer reliable, forcing rural families to seek non-agricultural livelihoods. The Tailoring Enterprise Development program was created to equip vulnerable households with sewing skills. This is economic adaptation, but it also represents a shift away from traditional textile knowledge toward production for external markets. This is an NGO report, not academic research. No Zambian academic has published specifically on poverty and traditional textile decline.

In Somaliland, a 2025 report on the artisan industry documents that "traditional crafts such as pottery, blacksmithing, beadwork, and basket weaving are at risk of disappearing due to modernization, cultural stigma, and limited intergenerational transfer." Youth involvement in artisan trades is deterred by "low prestige, inconsistent earnings, and lack of structured growth paths." The Radio Ergo report on Galkayo shoemakers documents that traditional shoemakers have gone out of work because "people have changed their ways… now just throw away broken shoes to buy new ones instead of seeking repairs." One shoemaker, Salad Mahamud Hassan, used to earn $10 daily. Now he lives in a displacement camp and cannot feed his children. This is poverty caused by the decline of traditional crafts, and poverty accelerating the decline. The Somaliland report is from an NGO; the shoemaker story is journalism. No Somali academic has published peer-reviewed research on this topic.

In Tanzania, Pendo Bigambo and colleagues (2024) published a study on Tanzania's batik industry in the African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation & Development. The study found the industry is informal, predominantly women-owned, and faces challenges including poor access to funds, scarcity of tools and materials, and repetitive designs due to lack of creativity training. This is a peer-reviewed academic study by Tanzanian researchers.

In Zimbabwe, a news report on cotton farming documents that the collapse of the cotton industry has "spelled doom for communities where the crop is grown." Farmers have abandoned cotton due to low prices, switching to maize. When raw cotton production collapses, the material base for traditional textile production disappears. This is journalism, not academic research. No Zimbabwean academic study specifically links poverty to traditional textile decline.

In Malawi, a 2007 IPS news report documents that following trade liberalization, Malawi saw an influx of second-hand clothing. Consumers prefer cheap imported clothes because "up to 65 percent of Malawians are living in poverty, which means having less than 1 US dollar per day." Local textile manufacturers cannot compete. Farmers are abandoning cotton because prices are too low. The textile industry has collapsed. This is journalism, not academic research. No Malawian academic study specifically links poverty to traditional textile decline.

An English-speaking researcher will not search in Portuguese. They will not search in French. They will not dig through Angolan journals, Mozambican university repositories, or Cabo Verdean conference proceedings. The information exists, but it is not accessible. When African researchers publish in Portuguese or French, their work does not circulate in English-dominated academic databases. When English-speaking African nations do not translate that research, they are not learning from their neighbors. The weaver in Angola and the weaver in Ghana cannot read each other's struggles because the language barrier is a wall. The system does not need to destroy the knowledge. It only needs to ensure the knowledge never circulates.

In Angola, peer-reviewed research exists. Celestino José Taca, publishing in the Angolan journal Revista Samayonga (Volume 4, Issue 2, 2026, pp. 267-277), conducted fieldwork in Luena between February and June 2025. He writes:

"A pobreza multidimensional constitui uma barreira que afecta, de maneira preocupante, a transmissão de saberes culturais. A valorização cultural de manifestações como o semba e a escrita Sona continua, mas a pobreza e a exclusão educacional ameaçam estas práticas."

Translation: "Multidimensional poverty constitutes a barrier that worryingly affects the transmission of cultural knowledge. The cultural valorization of expressions like semba and Sona writing continues, but poverty and educational exclusion threaten these practices."

This is an African academic publishing in an Angolan journal, directly linking poverty to the potential decline of cultural manifestations. While it does not focus exclusively on textiles, it establishes the framework: poverty erodes the material and social basis for cultural transmission in Angola.

The official Angolan news agency Angop published a report on 17 March 2022, documenting the decline of traditional professions in Bengo province:

"Os alfaiates, sapateiros e costureiras tradicionais estão a tornar-se escassos na província do Bengo. Os jovens não demonstram interesse em aprender estas profissões devido às baixas receitas e ao custo elevado dos materiais. Grandes quantidades de roupa importada pronta-a-vestir e a industrialização são citadas como causas directas."

Translation: "Traditional tailors, shoemakers, and seamstresses are becoming scarce in Bengo province. Young people show no interest in learning these professions due to low income and the high cost of materials. Large quantities of imported ready-to-wear clothing and industrialization are cited as direct causes."

Antonio Gaspar, a 60-year-old shoemaker, states that the province lacks these services, forcing people to travel to Luanda for repairs. David Chambo, a shoemaker for over 20 years, personally trains over 50 young people but says it "has not been easy." This is official documentation from Angola's state news agency, citing multiple artisans by name, with direct quotes about poverty, imported goods, and generational disinterest as drivers of decline.

Angolan researcher Leonardo Tuyenikumwe published a scientific book in 2024, "Os khoinsan (khun e khwe) de Angola e seus desafios actuais" (The Khoisan of Angola and Their Current Challenges). He writes:

"Os khoinsan (khun e khwe) de Angola enfrentam desafios actuais graves. A situação da pobreza extrema e da fome está a forçar estas comunidades a mudar o seu estilo de vida e a abandonar práticas ancestrais."

Translation: "The Khoisan (Khun and Khwe) of Angola face serious current challenges. The situation of extreme poverty and hunger is forcing these communities to change their lifestyle and abandon ancestral practices."

The book explicitly links poverty to the erosion of cultural traditions among indigenous peoples in Angola.

In Mozambique, Cardoso Esboi of the Catholic University of Mozambique published a study in 2007:

"A produção de algodão é a cultura não alimentar com maior rendimento e cria auto-emprego para a maioria das famílias rurais. No entanto, os baixos níveis de educação, a dependência de factores naturais (clima, pragas) e a falta de infra-estruturas sociais limitam os agricultores de aproveitar plenamente as condições favoráveis do mercado."

Translation: "Cotton production is the highest earning non-food crop and creates auto-employment for most rural households. However, low education levels, dependence on natural factors (weather, pests), and lack of social infrastructure constrain farmers from taking full advantage of favorable market conditions."

This is a Mozambican researcher directly linking cotton to poverty. When cotton farming fails to lift farmers out of poverty, the material base for textile production erodes. No Mozambican academic has published specifically on the decline of traditional capulana due to poverty—a central textile tradition in Mozambique. The gap confirms the point: research on traditional textile decline is limited.

In Cabo Verde, the pano d'obra (meaning "laborous cloth") was "highly prized for trading along the West African coast, from the second half of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century." From the 19th century, "a marked decline in the manufacture of these historic textiles is witnessed due to the demise of the local cotton and dyes production, alongside with a lack of demand for them, particularly the ones with high-value price." Today, local weavers use mostly imported yarn, including synthetic. The decline is documented, but the researcher presenting this at the Textile Society of America 2024 Symposium is from the University of Porto, Portugal—not a Cabo Verdean scholar. No academic source by a Cabo Verdean scholar exists on this topic.

For Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea, no academic sources by local scholars were found. This is a complete research gap. It does not mean the phenomenon does not exist. It means African researchers have not yet documented it—or the documentation exists but is not indexed in accessible databases.

The focus on cotton in African textile production is not natural. It was engineered. Before Europeans arrived, Portuguese-speaking Africa used raffia, palm fiber, sisal, wild rhubarb root dyes, and other local materials. Cotton became dominant because it was exportable. Colonial regimes controlled it, channeled it into global trade, and extracted it for profit rather than local use. The knowledge of how to work with raffia, palm fiber, and sisal was not written. It was not patented. It was not passed down. And because those materials had no export value, their knowledge systems were not valued.

The Kuba people of Central Africa are renowned for a specific process that turns stiff raffia plant fiber into a soft textile. Men weave the base cloth from fine raffia fibers. Women then create intricate geometric patterns using a specialized cut-pile embroidery technique. After the pile is cut, the fibers are rubbed together, which gives the surface a silky lustre reminiscent of velvet, hence the name "velvet raffia." This was historically used as a form of currency, as ceremonial dress, and to adorn royal stools. An unprocessed raffia fiber is stiff, but after these specialized techniques, it can be as soft as cotton, with a luxurious velvet-like feel. This is not just a craft. It is a sophisticated material engineering process.

The argument that raffia is rough and cotton is soft is historically inaccurate. It ignores the existence of specialized, high-skill techniques that produce a textile of exceptional quality, softness, and prestige. As poverty increased, communities could not afford the time or resources for the labor-intensive velvet technique. They defaulted to the quicker, stiffer versions of raffia, or they abandoned raffia altogether for cheaper, imported cotton. Over time, this created a false narrative that "raffia is stiff" and "cotton is soft." The knowledge to make velvet raffia is at risk of being lost, not just a craft disappearing, but the disappearance of a specific, sophisticated material engineering process.

The objects remain. But they remain under European control. The British Museum holds nearly 8 million objects. Only 1 percent are on public display at any time. The other 99 percent are in storage. The raffia cloth from Equatorial Guinea (1820) sits in Reading, England. The Angolan raffia costume (1929-1936) sits in Montreal, Canada. The objects are not destroyed. They are contained. Sealed. Removed from the communities that made them. The knowledge that the object represents, the technique, the material understanding, the transmission from one generation to the next, can die even as the object itself is perfectly preserved. The weaver dies. The language shifts. The materials become unavailable. The ceremony stops. The child moves to the city. The museum catalogues the cloth. The cloth is safe. The knowledge is not.

Hoarding is not destruction. It is preservation in a cage. The object remains. The people change. The knowledge thins. The museum wins.

Oliver Mtapuri's edited volume "African Perspectives on Poverty, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Innovation" (Springer, 2022) dedicates chapters to the "Onomastic and Conceptual Pathologisation of African Culture as a Creation and Perpetuation of African Poverty in Zimbabwe." The title alone says enough. When African culture is pathologized—treated as the cause of poverty rather than the solution, the logic is inverted. The cure becomes abandoning culture. The abandonment leads to more poverty. The cycle continues.

The research exists. African scholars have documented it. South Africa. Nigeria. Ghana. Ethiopia. Zimbabwe. Angola. Mozambique. The evidence is clear: poverty destroys the material basis for cultural transmission. But the research is fragmented. The language barriers prevent circulation. The museums hold the objects but not the knowledge. The economic policies continue to favor imported goods over local production.

African textile knowledge is declining, in some spaces perhaps already extinct. When will we document what remains before it is gone, when will we build systems that keep it alive, not just preserved in a crate in a foreign country.

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References

· Mtsini, Nontuthuzelo. "Reinstating cultural beliefs and Ubuntu in the AmaMpondo communities in the Eastern Cape province, South Africa." E-Journal of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, Vol. 6 No. 9 (2025). Walter Sisulu University, South Africa.
· Mba, Chika C. Speech at Africa Wiki Challenge 2025 launch. GhanaWeb, 25 May 2025. Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.
· Atoyebi, Timothy Abayomi and Yunusa, Edime. "Cultural Practices and Women's Rights among Idoma and Ogugu Peoples of North-Central, Nigeria: Implications for Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development." The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, Volume 22, No. 2, November 2024, pp. 102-114. Prince Abubakar Audu University, Nigeria.
· Getachew, Alemu, and Wudu. 2025 study at Bahir-Dar City, Ethiopia.
· Araya and Beyene. 2024 study on cultural appropriation in Ethiopia's garment weaving industry.
· Amanor-Wilks. 2024 study on the Kente economy in Bonwire, Ghana.
· Areo. 2013 study on Adire (Yoruba indigo-dyed cloth).
· Wayessa, Bula S. "My Meals Are in the Pots: Making Pots and Meals in Wollega, Southwest Ethiopia." African Archaeological Review, Volume 40, 2023, pp. 519–529.
· Laitin, David D. and Ramachandran, Rajesh. "Language Policy as the Culprit of Africa's Growth Tragedy." Journal of Politics, 2025. Stanford University / Monash University Malaysia.
· Mtapuri, Oliver (ed.). African Perspectives on Poverty, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Innovation. Springer, 2022.
· Taca, Celestino José. "Diversidade Cultural, Social e Económica em África com Ênfase em Angola Desafios e Perspectivas Contemporâneas." Revista Samayonga, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2026, pp. 267-277.
· Angop (Angola News Agency). "Profissões tradicionais em risco de extinção no Bengo." 17 March 2022.
· Tuyenikumwe, Leonardo. Os khoinsan (khun e khwe) de Angola e seus desafios actuais. Vamos Editora, 2024.
· Esboi, Cardoso. "Impact of Cotton Production Among Cotton Farmers in Maringue District of Sofala Province – Mozambique." Universidade Católica de Moçambique (UCM), 2007. Available at: http://www.repositorio.ucm.ac.mz/handle/123456789/99
· Textile Society of America 2024 Symposium. "A Contribution to the Preservation and Revival of the Cabo Verdean pano d'obra Textiles."
· Hansen, Karen Tranberg. "Riches from Rags or Persistent Poverty? The Working Lives of Secondhand Clothing Vendors in Maputo, Mozambique." Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2012, pp. 222-237.
· Bigambo, Pendo et al. 2024 study on Tanzania's batik industry. African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation & Development.
· Namibia Coastal Trade Fair 2025 report.
· World Vision Zambia. Tailoring Enterprise Development program reports.
· Solidaarisuus. 2025 report on artisan industry in Somaliland.
· Radio Ergo. Report on Galkayo shoemakers.
· IPS news agency. 2007 report on Malawi second-hand clothing.
· Reading Museum. Raffia cloth from Equatorial Guinea (1820). Collection record.
· Redpath Museum, McGill University. Angolan raffia costume (1929-1936). Collection record.
· British Museum. Papel cloth from Guinea-Bissau (c. 1989). Collection record.

There is a word that diplomats and academics use. Soft power. Let me translate.

Soft power means getting what you want without using force. You do not send soldiers. You do not impose sanctions. Instead, you make people want what you have. You make your culture, your products, your values seem attractive, modern, and desirable.

When a young person in Lagos saves money for months to buy a Louis Vuitton bag made in France, that is soft power. When a fashion designer in Accra studies pattern-making at a Chinese university and returns to teach Chinese cutting methods, that is soft power. When a family in Abidjan chooses Dutch wax prints for a wedding because "that is the real fabric," that is soft power.

No one forced them. They were attracted. The attraction is the instrument.

I am not stating it is wrong for Africans to learn new techniques in textiles. That is not what this post is about. The exchange of knowledge across cultures is not the problem. The problem is the asymmetry. External actors have strategies, budgets, and coordinated frameworks. They study our markets, our tastes, our vulnerabilities. We do not fund research into how their strategies operate. We do not train diplomats in textile diplomacy. We do not build shields. The result is not cultural exchange. It is extraction wearing a friendly face.

External actors have been using textiles to project soft power into Africa for centuries. The Dutch have done it since 1846. The French do it through luxury brands. The Chinese are doing it now through cheaper fabrics and cultural centres. The Americans have done it through trade agreements, development programmes, and diplomatic initiatives.

They all have strategies. They all have budgets. They all study African markets, African tastes, and African vulnerabilities.

We have not funded research into how these strategies operate. We have not trained diplomats in textile diplomacy. We have not built shields.

This post is an attempt to change that. Not to adopt their frameworks. To understand them, translate them, and help us build our own systems as a shield. We do not need to copy what they have built. Their systems serve their interests, not ours. What we build will look different. It will be rooted in our own logic, our own values, our own ways of organising knowledge. The shield is not a replica. It is a response.

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What Soft Power Is and What It Can Achieve

Soft power was coined by Joseph Nye in 1990. He defined it as "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments."

When a country possesses soft power, it does not need to make concessions or trade-offs to achieve its goals. It simply gets its way "softly." Soft power operates through the accumulation of "political capital"—the ability to rally others around its objectives.

Soft power can generate favourable perceptions of a country's people, culture, and policies, facilitate greater cooperation between nations, help change target countries' policies or political environments, and prevent, manage, and mitigate conflicts.

But soft power also constrains. A reputation for honour, coherence, and values dictates unpalatable political choices. Sudden deviance from a country's projected image leads to loss of trust. This is why external actors invest so heavily in maintaining consistent, attractive cultural narratives. They cannot afford to be exposed.

Soft power originates from three primary sources: culture (both "high brow" and popular forms like art, fashion, music, film, and textiles), political values (democracy, human rights, individualism, freedom, as projected internationally), and foreign policies (perceived as legitimate, multilateral, and having moral authority).

In the context of fashion and textiles, soft power operates through luxury branding that positions certain aesthetics as aspirational, the global dominance of certain design vocabularies that become "neutral" or "universal" while erasing their origins, educational and exchange programmes that train designers in foreign frameworks, and museum exhibitions that canonise some textile traditions while marginalising others.

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How to Recognise Soft Power When You See It

You do not need a degree. You need to ask four questions.

1. Who profits? If the fabric is worn in Accra but the company is registered in Amsterdam, the profit leaves. That is soft power at work.
2. Who frames the story? If a luxury house calls a bag "a modern homage to the global traveler" but does not mention the expulsion of migrants that gave the bag its name, they are controlling the narrative. That is soft power.
3. Who sets the standard? If Chinese universities train African designers in Chinese cutting methods, and those designers teach those methods to their students, soon the "right way" to sew will be Chinese. That is soft power.
4. Who defines "quality"? If Dutch wax prints are considered "real fabric" and locally made textiles are considered "traditional" or "not for business," the definition of quality has been captured. That is soft power.

These four questions are your detection framework. Use them.

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External Soft Power Actors – How They Operate

The Netherlands: Vlisco and 180 Years of Market Dominance

The Dutch company Vlisco has been producing wax prints for West and Central Africa since 1846. Nearly 180 years. The fabric is designed in the Netherlands, registered in the United Kingdom, and given popular names by African women traders called "nanas." The power dynamic is clear: European designs, European profits, African naming, African consumption, African cultural meaning attached to a European product.

The Vlisco story is the same pattern traced in our "Research is national security" series. African capital tried to buy the company. The bid was higher. It was rejected. The company remains European-owned. The soft power continues to flow outward.

France: Luxury Branding and the Capture of "Taste"

French perfumes constructed a "fashionable ethos" that positioned France as the arbiter of taste globally. This is soft power through scent and packaging—textile-adjacent because fashion and perfume are marketed together and signify the same aspirational lifestyle.

In 2021, Louis Vuitton released a Kente-inspired menswear collection designed by Virgil Abloh (American of Ghanaian descent). The suits sold out globally. No credit to Ghanaian weavers. In 2025, they released the "Ghana Must Go" bag—a luxury version of the woven polypropylene bag used by West African migrants. The bag is named after a painful chapter in Ghanaian history—the 1983 expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria. Louis Vuitton markets it as "a modern homage to the global traveler." The original bag was a symbol of displacement. They turned it into a $3,000 accessory.

Ghanaian journalist and Kente Ambassador Amma Prempeh analysed this: "Both collections treat West African aesthetics as visual motifs rather than cultural inheritances. They do not credit local makers or designers for their sources. Instead, they use broad themes like 'heritage' and 'migration,' detaching designs from their sociopolitical roots."

The soft power works. The profits leave. The original creators are not credited.

China: Gradualism, Affordability, and Cultural Centres

Chinese wax prints initially entered the market as counterfeits of Dutch designs. Today, brands like Hitarget, Phoenix, and Binta Wax compete directly. Not because they are superior. Because they are cheaper. Affordability is soft power when it shapes what people can buy, what they consider "good enough," and which factories stay open.

Nigerian researcher Sandra Oliver‑Mbonu has documented how the China Cultural Centre Nigeria uses fashion shows to strategically stage Chinese textile heritage alongside Nigerian fabrics. They showcase China's sartorial expertise while fostering supposedly "transcultural" dialogue. Off the runway, Nigerian designers incorporate Chinese aesthetic elements into everyday garments.

But here is the warning. These exchanges are not neutral. They invoke historical memories of colonial dress politics. They generate ambivalent responses that reveal post‑colonial tensions between authenticity and cosmopolitan aspiration.

Fairuzah Atchulo, a Ghanaian PhD candidate, is documenting another layer of this infiltration. Her research focuses on how sizing systems in global fashion exclude African bodies. She asks: why are there no "African sizes" on international platforms? Her answer is "the entangled histories of colonialism in global sizing systems" – a form of neo‑colonial control imposed through fabric and fit.

China's approach favours gradualism, where subtle changes tweak preexisting styles. In Mozambique, consumers balance these influences, seeking a "novidade" (novelty) that is neither fully foreign nor fully local. The term is "not too African, not too Chinese."

The United States: Trade Agreements, Development Programmes, and Economic Leverage

US soft power in textiles operates primarily through trade and development initiatives rather than cultural branding. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has been the central instrument since 2000, offering duty-free access to the US market for over 6,000 product lines from eligible sub-Saharan African countries. The apparel provisions, including the transformative third‑country fabric allowance, became the backbone of export success stories in Lesotho, Kenya, and Madagascar.

The impact has been significant. Kenya's apparel exports to the United States under AGOA grew from $55 million in 2001 to $603 million in 2022, constituting 67.6 per cent of the country's total exports to the US.

However, this soft power comes with conditions. In 2025, when AGOA expired and new US tariffs were introduced, the consequences were severe. Lesotho, where textile and apparel products made up over 85 per cent of its $2.37 billion exports to the US, saw its garments facing 15 per cent tariffs. The result: young people's unemployment rose to 50 per cent, and the Lesotho government declared a two‑year state of emergency.

The US also uses grants and co‑investment to shape the African apparel industry. In 2021, the West Africa Trade & Investment Hub, funded by USAID, provided a $1.35 million grant to establish a model garment factory in Ghana, creating 800 fair‑wage jobs with at least 70 per cent going to women. The stated goal was to demonstrate that "ethical garment manufacturing can be the norm."

But here is the warning. These initiatives are not charity. They serve US strategic interests, including diversifying supply chains away from Asia and creating favourable conditions for American buyers. The soft power message is: the US helps Africa build industry. The intended audience is not just Africa but the world watching. The result is favourable perceptions of the US as a benevolent partner—even as tariff policies simultaneously undermine the same industries in other African countries.

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The Recognition Gap – How African Soft Power Is Systematically Undervalued

The Global Soft Power Index 2026 ranks the United States first, China second, Japan third, and the United Kingdom fourth. No African country appears in the top tier.

This ranking matters. It shapes global perceptions of "value." When Chinese silk, French luxury, and Italian leather are ranked as "high soft power," they command premium prices. When African textiles are not ranked, they are perceived as "commodities," not "brands."

The Index reveals a structural problem. The metrics used to measure soft power – familiarity, reputation, influence, governance, culture, education, business environment – were designed in the Global North. African textile systems are not measured because the frameworks were not built for them.

This is the same pattern we have traced across our work. The patent system was not built for collective knowledge. The legal frameworks were not built for traditional knowledge. The soft power metrics were not built for African cultural influence.

We do not need to seek recognition from these frameworks. We need to understand them so we can protect ourselves from them. And we need to build our own ways of organising, valuing, and projecting our knowledge, based on our own logic, not theirs.

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African Counter‑Soft Power – The Shield Already Exists

The response to external soft power is not rejection. It is projection. Building African soft power that operates on African terms.

Ghana has demonstrated how this works. At the 2026 African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ghanaian ministers wore traditional smocks (Batakari/Fugu). The result: foreign ministers from across Africa requested their own smocks in national colours. Ghana is now planning a "fugu and kente" exhibition in Zambia, and its ambassadors have been instructed to organise "Fugu and Kente Fairs" for national day celebrations.

Lagos State is doing the same. Governor Sanwo-Olu's administration is explicitly investing in Adire as "a strategic driver of diplomacy, innovation, and economic growth" – turning "heritage into an engine for diplomacy and economic growth."

Historically, Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar (1886) used handwoven silk textiles as diplomatic gifts to US President Grover Cleveland to challenge US recognition of French colonization. The Bamileke people of Cameroon used ndop cloth as gifts among elites across chieftaincies, with geometric designs conveying royal hospitality, diplomacy, and sacred knowledge.

Africans have always understood textiles as tools of diplomacy and influence. The difference is that our ancestors did not call it "soft power." They just did it.

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What We Must Do – Building the Shield

We do not advocate rejecting external textiles or closing markets. The shield is not a wall. The shield is awareness plus our own systems.

Awareness means ordinary people can recognise soft power when they see it. They know why Louis Vuitton named a bag after an expulsion. They know why Chinese wax prints are cheaper. They know why US-backed factories in Ghana produce for American brands. They make informed choices.

Our own systems means African governments investing in textile diplomacy. Not copying the structures of France, China, or the US. Not replicating their metrics or their methods. Building what works for us.

What our systems will look like:

· They will be rooted in African logics, not Western frameworks
· They will centre collective knowledge, not individual patents
· They will be accountable to African communities, not foreign shareholders
· They will measure success by African priorities, not global rankings designed elsewhere

African governments must:

1. Train ambassadors in textile heritage. Use locally made fabrics for state gifts. Mandate local fabrics for official functions. Require cultural centres abroad to feature African textiles.
2. Establish textile diplomacy units within foreign ministries. Deploy textiles as strategic gifts at bilateral meetings. Embed textile promotion in trade missions.
3. Fund African scholars documenting soft power. Sandra Oliver‑Mbonu and Fairuzah Atchulo are doing rigorous, timely, African-led research. They should be scaled, funded, and placed at the centre of national security research.
4. Build intentional educational pipelines. Ensure students who study design abroad also study local textile systems. Fund apprenticeships with master weavers alongside university degrees.
5. Use the AfCFTA to harmonise textile standards and create a continental market for African-designed, African-produced, African-branded textiles. Not to replicate European standards, but to set our own.
6. Measure what matters to us. Track what we value: community wellbeing, cultural continuity, ecological sustainability, local ownership. Use data to inform our own decisions, not to seek validation from external rankings.

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External soft power is not a conspiracy, It is strategy, It is funded, It is coordinated, It works.

We have not funded the counter‑research, not built the shield. We have left ourselves exposed to attraction without awareness, desire without understanding, and market dominance without local capacity.

We do not need to adopt their frameworks. We do not need to replicate their systems. We need to understand them so we can recognise when they are operating on us. And we need to build our own systems—based on our own logic, our own values, our own ways of organising knowledge—as a shield.

The first step is awareness. The second step is our own systems, not copies, not replicas bud responses.

Ghana showed what the shield looks like at the AU Summit, Lagos State is building its own shield and the scholars are doing the research. The weavers are also doing the work. We must fund this work, scale it, and protect it. The shield is not a wall rather it is awareness plus our own infrastructure.

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References

· Atchulo, Fairuzah M. "Standardized size and sizing systems and neo-colonialism in global fashion." ERC Project "China Africa Fashion Power" (CAFP), University of Amsterdam.
· Brand Finance. "Global Soft Power Index 2026."
· Eicher, Joanne and Erekosima, Tonye. "Cultural authentication" framework for Sino-African fashion.
· Lemire, Beverly. The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society. 2010.
· Nye, Joseph S. Jr. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Public Affairs, 2004.
· Oliver‑Mbonu, Sandra Ifunanya. "Soft power in stitches: China's fashion projection in Nigeria." MA Thesis, University of Victoria, 2025.
· Prempeh, Amma. "Louis Vuitton's Kente and Ghana Must Go: West African aesthetics as visual motifs." 2025.
· USAID West Africa Trade & Investment Hub. "Model garment factory in Ghana." 2021.
· Various news reports. Ghana's "smock diplomacy" at 39th African Union Summit, February 2026.
· Various news reports. Lagos State Adire diplomacy and cultural soft power investment, June 2025.

In the arc of the Niger River, where the desert meets the inland delta, a distinctive wool textile tradition developed that stands as one of West Africa's most sophisticated material technologies. The Niger Bend region—spanning what is now Mali and Niger—was historically a crossroads where Saharan camel caravans transferred goods to boats navigating the river. It also became, according to textile scholars Bernhard Gardi and Michelle Gilbert, "the foremost center of technical and visual diversity in West African treadle-loom weaving traditions."

What makes this tradition remarkable is not just its beauty but its engineering. The weavers of the Niger Bend produced wool textiles using two advanced techniques: extra-weft patterning and tapestry weave. These are not simple weaving methods. Extra-weft patterning involves adding non-structural threads that float across the surface to create complex, raised designs. Tapestry weave requires the weaver to manage multiple colored weft threads simultaneously, creating distinct blocks of pattern that form geometric compositions.

The wool itself comes from Massina sheep, raised in the Inland Delta of Mali—the only area in Sub-Saharan Africa where wool is traditionally produced. This is not incidental. The textile system is intimately linked to the social system of the Fulani people who own the sheep. The knowledge is encoded in animal husbandry, material practice, and visual language simultaneously.

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The Algorithmic Pattern System

The patterns on these textiles are not random. They follow a rule-based logic that textile researchers have only recently begun to decode. The foundational element is a motif called bitshirgal—an "onset" pattern that serves as the generative seed for all other designs. All other motifs are recombinations of the different elements of the bitshirgal.

This is algorithmic generation. A finite set of elements produces an indefinite number of variations. Not in theory. Woven by hand.

The checkerboard pattern, achieved on the narrow-strip loom by alternating sections of light and dark weft threads, is mathematically systematic. The Smithsonian Institution notes that this pattern is related to "magic squares" that feature precise mathematical progressions.

The Niger Bend weavers did not write code. They encoded logic in thread.

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Two Major Textile Types

The tradition produced two distinct categories of wool textiles, each with its own purpose and design logic.

Kaasa were heavy covers that changed significantly in appearance over the 20th century. A mid-20th century kaasa blanket in the Smithsonian collection demonstrates the checkerboard pattern achieved by "rapidly tossing his shuttle" as the weaver alternated light and dark weft threads.

Arkilla (also called arkilla jenngo) were ceremonial marriage covers that maintained the same design language for centuries. The Textile Museum describes a 1940s arkilla as a "beautiful and complex woven panel" designed to hang inside or outside Tuareg tents. The word arkilla means "mosquito net"—the panel offered protection against the harsh mosquito-laden environment of the Niger Bend.

The construction is sophisticated. A typical arkilla is composed of fourteen narrow strips sewn together. A Fulbe weaver would create "an arrangement of triangles, chevrons and other motifs that has meaning in the Tuareg culture," often spending up to four months completing a single commission.

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The Third Category: Wool Ornamentation on Cotton Ground

A third category featured wool ornamentation on a cotton ground, woven in the northeastern part of Burkina Faso, particularly around the town of Dori. These textiles were made by weavers of the Djerma (or Zarma) people, rather than the specialized Fulani maabuuɓe who produced the full-wool textiles.

The British Museum holds a striking example of this category, acquired in 1937. The cloth is constructed from eleven hand-woven cotton strips sewn together, with the pattern formed from bands of lines in continuous supplementary weft thread and discontinuous motifs including camels. The warp ends are twisted into tassels. Such cloths are called 'suban' and were used as marriage gifts.

The distinction in social status between weavers is significant. While the kaasa and arkilla were made by the specialized maabuuɓe caste, these wool-cotton covers "were made by weavers of lower status." The 1905 French abolition of slavery in their West African territories profoundly transformed the weaving landscape. A generation or more later, "formerly enslaved weavers versed in traditional techniques started their own weaving businesses supported by women who bought industrial threads." This shift helped diffuse extra-weft patterns and tapestry weave eastward, influencing Zarma weaving in Niger and Hausa weaving in Nigeria.

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The Weavers: Maabuuɓe

The people who made the full-wool textiles were highly specialized male weavers called maabuuɓe (singular: maabo). They formed a distinct social group, a kind of specialized knowledge caste whose expertise was passed through generations. This was not casual craft. It was hereditary, technical knowledge.

The textiles were commissioned by Tuareg patrons, nomadic pastoralists who did not weave themselves but who valued the wool covers for their tents and ceremonies. A Fulbe weaver might travel to the Tuareg camp with his assistant and a simple pedal loom, spending months completing the project.

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The French Colonial Attempts to Industrialize the Massina Sheep

The Massina sheep—the source of the wool—attracted the attention of French colonial administrators who saw an opportunity to supply the French textile industry. Between the 1920s and 1940s, they launched a series of interventions to "upgrade" the indigenous sheep for industrial wool production.

Georges Hugaud, a French veterinary student, submitted a 1934 thesis titled "Le mouton du Macina, son amélioration en vue de la production lainière" (The Macina Sheep, Its Improvement for Wool Production). The thesis proposed methods for increasing wool yield, specifically through cross-breeding local Macina sheep with European Merinos—the premier wool breed of Europe.

R.T. Wilson's 1981 analysis documents the "causes of the failure" of these colonial attempts. The Merino, bred for European climates and intensive management, could not tolerate the environmental conditions of the Inland Delta—seasonal flooding, arid periods, disease pressure. The Fulani traditional system of pastoral management did not conform to the industrial model the French attempted to impose.

The colonial intervention sought to replace an indigenous knowledge system with a European framework. It failed. The indigenous system did not need saving. It needed to be recognized for what it was: a sustainable, locally-adapted technology for producing wool.

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The Reach of the Niger Bend Textiles

The influence of these engineered textiles was not contained to the Niger Bend. The wool covers were traded 1,000 kilometers south to the Akan kingdoms of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, where they were called nsaa and attained great ritual significance.

The technical influence also moved eastward. Extra-weft patterns and tapestry weave slowly diffused to the region stretching to Lake Chad. This is how, as Gardi and Gilbert document, "the rich Zarma weaving of the Republic of Niger came into being and Hausa weavers in Nigeria 'discovered' tapestry weaving." A much older line of influence went straight into Ewe weaving of Togo and Ghana.

One tradition, many offshoots. The Niger Bend was not isolated. It was a center of technical innovation that shaped weaving across West Africa.

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The Absence of Protection

None of this was ever patented. Not because it lacked value. Because the patent system was not built for collective, oral, embodied knowledge.

The Niger Bend weavers—the maabuuɓe—did not file patents. They passed knowledge through caste, through family, through apprenticeship. The system worked for them. It did not fit the Western intellectual property framework.

But the knowledge is still there. The patterns are still there. The logic is still there. The Massina sheep still produce wool in the Inland Delta. The rule-based design system still generates new variations from the old motifs.

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Engineering as Integration

What makes the Niger Bend wool textiles an "engineered" system is not any single feature. It is the integration.

Western Framework Niger Bend Reality
Separate categories (engineering, art, agriculture, social structure) All integrated into one system
Written documentation required Knowledge transmitted through caste, family, apprenticeship
Patent system for individual inventors Collective, multi-generational knowledge production
Raw material extraction Animal husbandry linked to social system of Fulani people
Product designed for market Commissioned for specific cultural and ceremonial use

The West would separate these into different disciplines—textile engineering, art history, animal science, sociology. The Niger Bend knowledge system never made those separations. The weaver knew the sheep, the loom, the pattern logic, the client, the ceremony, and the trade route as one interconnected field of knowledge.

This knowledge is real. It is. We will finally recognize it—not as heritage, not as craft, not as tradition—but as engineering. As technology. As an African knowledge system that deserves protection, development, and its place in the story of global innovation.

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References

· Gardi, Bernhard and Gilbert, Michelle. "Arkilla, Kaasa, and Nsaa: The Many Influences of Wool Textiles from the Niger Bend in West Africa." The Textile Museum Journal, Volume 48, 2021, pp. 24-53.
· Wilson, R.T. "Livestock production in central Mali: Attempts to produce raw materials of animal origin for the French textile industry during the colonial period." Textile History, Volume 12, 1981, pp. 104-117.
· Wilson, R.T. "The Macina wool sheep of the Niger inundation zone." Tropical Animal Health and Production, Volume 15, 1983, pp. 189-196.
· Hugaud, Georges. Le mouton du Macina, son amélioration en vue de la production lainière. Veterinary thesis, École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort, 1934.
· Gillow, John. African Textiles. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003.
· The Textile Museum, George Washington University. Collection object 1977.23.2 (Arkilla jenngo, Mali, 1940s).
· Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Collection object 75-9-1 (Kaasa blanket, Mali, mid-20th century).
· British Museum. Collection object 2018,2036.361 (Kaasa njokwaaka, woolen blanket, Mali, c. 1940-1980).
· British Museum. Collection object Af1937,1002.4 (Wool ornamentation on cotton ground, Dori, Burkina Faso, acquired 1937).
· Schaeder, Karl-Ferdinand. "Le Tissage en Afrique au sud du Sahara", Pantena Verlag, Munich, 1987.

Introduction

Modern technology tells a convenient story about itself.
It begins in Europe.
It advances through invention.
It culminates in machines.

Everything else—everything before—is reduced to craft, culture, or tradition.

But this story depends on a fragile assumption: that technology only begins when knowledge becomes mechanical. If we reject that assumption, even briefly, the timeline collapses.

Long before machines, there were systems capable of encoding information, executing instructions, and generating complex, repeatable outputs. Those systems were textile systems. And textile production is not just craft—it is one of the foundational technological systems that shaped industrialization, automation, computing, and global capitalism (including slavery and colonial extraction).

Once we begin there, it becomes impossible to ignore a second truth: the intellectual foundations of modern technology were not only global—they were selectively recognized.

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African Looms: Technology Without Recognition

Before mechanization, looms across Africa already functioned as precision technologies. In West Africa, strip‑weaving traditions—seen across regions including present‑day Ghana, Nigeria, and Mali—relied on narrow‑band looms, tension control systems, pattern memorization and execution, and modular construction (strip assembly into larger cloths).

These were not simple tools. They were controlled environments for executing patterned logic. The weaver configures the loom (setup phase), encodes pattern rules mentally or culturally, and executes sequences through repeated motion. This is not improvisation. It is structured.

As Mozambican mathematician Paulus Gerdes—who spent decades documenting African mathematical heritage—writes: “In many African crafts, mathematical ideas are not taught as abstract concepts but are embedded in the techniques themselves.” Gerdes’s work, particularly his studies of Mozambican and Angolan weaving, shows that African artisans used symmetry, repetition, translation, and rotation as fundamental operations in design.

This embedding is critical. Because it reveals something often ignored: the absence of written formulas does not mean the absence of mathematics. It means the mathematics is being performed.

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Weaving as Algorithmic Execution: The Tellem Case Study

To understand weaving is to understand instruction. A textile is built through ordered sequences, repeated operations, and conditional variations. Each row depends on the previous one; each pattern depends on a rule.

The Tellem people, who lived in the Bandiagara cliffs of present‑day Mali, left behind textiles that continue to challenge assumptions about pre‑industrial design. These textiles display geometric repetition, symmetry across axes, and structured variation within constraint. What makes them significant is not just their visual complexity but their generative logic.

Patterns are not isolated images. They are constructed through repeatable units, transformation rules, and extendable sequences. Gerdes’s work on African textiles broadly shows that such systems involve what he calls “systematic exploration of symmetry and pattern construction.” These are the same operations used in computer graphics, pattern generation algorithms, and digital modeling systems.

What the Tellem textiles demonstrate is that a finite rule system can produce an indefinitely extendable pattern. This is the essence of algorithmic generation—not in theory, but in material form.

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The Benin Bronzes: African Metallurgy as Parallel Innovation

African technological sophistication was not limited to textiles. The Benin Kingdom (in modern‑day Nigeria) produced some of the world’s most technically advanced metal castings—the so‑called Benin Bronzes. Using the lost‑wax method, Benin artisans created lifelike heads, intricate plaques, and ritual objects from at least the 13th century onward. Their work displayed not only extraordinary artistry but also mastery of alloy composition, inlay techniques, and large‑scale casting.

Yet the raw material—brass—came from Europe. Portuguese traders brought brass manillas (bracelet‑shaped currency) from Germany’s Rhineland to West Africa as part of the same trade networks that carried enslaved people. African artisans melted these imported objects and transformed them into works of profound cultural and technical achievement. When British forces looted Benin City in 1897, they took thousands of these objects, sold them to museums, and erased the knowledge systems that produced them.

This pattern—African skill combined with raw materials extracted through colonial trade, followed by violent appropriation—mirrors what happened with textiles. In both cases, the colonial narrative reframed African innovation as mere “craft” while European institutions profited from the objects and the knowledge embedded in them.

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Infinite Pattern, Recursion, and the Ifá Information System

Modern computing relies on the idea that simple instructions can generate complex outputs and that systems can scale without losing structure. This is the foundation of fractals, recursive algorithms, and procedural design.

The research of Ron Eglash, a scholar of African fractals, makes this connection explicit. He writes: “Many African designs use recursive scaling, where a pattern is repeated at different levels of size.” This is not symbolic; it is structural. “These are not just designs, but processes.” That distinction matters, because processes are what define computation.

African knowledge systems extend this logic beyond textiles. The Ifá system of the Yoruba people—documented extensively by the Nigerian scholar Wande Abimbola, who served as Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University—is built on 256 odu (signs) generated through a combinatorial, binary‑like process. When a babalawo (priest) casts the sacred palm nuts or opele chain, they produce a specific odu based on established rules. Each odu is linked to a vast corpus of verses (ese) that encode history, philosophy, medicine, and ethics. The interpretation follows structured pathways, applying stored knowledge to the querent’s situation.

Western scholars labeled Ifá a “divination system.” The term carries assumptions of irrationality, mysticism, and guesswork. But Ifá is better understood as a knowledge system—a logical, rule‑based method of storing, retrieving, and applying information. The operations are not random; they follow predictable combinatorial logic. The years of training required to memorize the ese are no different from the training a computer scientist undergoes to master programming languages and algorithms.

In fact, Ifá and modern artificial intelligence share a fundamental structure. When you consult an AI, you ask a question; the system processes it through a vast dataset, retrieves relevant patterns, and generates a response based on encoded rules. A babalawo does the same: the querent’s concern is mapped to an odu; the odu retrieves the appropriate verses; the babalawo applies the wisdom to the situation. One practice is called “divination”; the other is called “artificial intelligence.” The difference in naming reflects not the nature of the practice, but the racial and colonial hierarchies that determine which knowledge counts as “science” and which is dismissed as “tradition.”

Long before the formalization of binary code in Europe, African knowledge systems such as Ifá developed complex combinatorial and binary‑like structures for storing and processing information. These systems, alongside textile pattern encoding, demonstrate that computational thinking was not invented in the West but has multiple global origins—many of which were later marginalized during colonialism.

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The Industrial Revolution: Mechanization Without Acknowledgment

Textiles drove the Industrial Revolution. Mechanized spinning and weaving transformed production. But this transformation relied on raw materials extracted through colonial systems, labor extracted through slavery, and knowledge extracted through global contact.

European mechanization did not arise from a vacuum. The first successful power loom, patented by Edmund Cartwright in 1785, was developed in a context where British factories processed cotton grown by enslaved Africans in the Americas and sold finished cloth to West African consumers whose preferences shaped global production. The logic of weaving—sequencing, repetition, pattern encoding—had existed for centuries in African and other non‑European textile systems. Industrialization scaled that logic, but it did not invent it.

Why, then, did Africa not develop its own mechanical looms? Some scholars point to divergent technological trajectories: African ironworkers used bloomery furnaces, which produced malleable iron perfect for forging tools and weapons but not molten iron for casting large machine components; European blast furnaces, developed partly for cannon production, enabled cast‑iron looms. From this perspective, the difference reflects material constraints and choices, not a hierarchy of “advancement.” Yet this framing, while common in academic literature, risks deflecting attention from the more fundamental issue: African textile industries were actively undermined by colonial policies that flooded markets with cheap European machine‑made goods, redirected raw materials, and dismantled local production. Whether African ironworkers could have eventually developed cast‑iron looms under different conditions is a question that remains open—and one that colonial violence foreclosed.

As Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian, wrote in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: “The only positive development in Europe was at the expense of Africa and other parts of the world.” This applies not only to resources—but to systems of knowledge.

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The Politics of Recognition: Why Knowledge Was Categorized by Race

The problem is not that African systems lacked sophistication. The problem is that they were not recognized as such.

Cedric J. Robinson, author of Black Marxism, argues that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions.” This includes how knowledge is categorized. Under this system, African systems became “craft” or “tradition,” while European systems became “science” and “technology”—even when both operated through pattern, logic, repetition, and transformation.

This erasure was not passive. Colonial collecting was systematic. Take the Hina textile from northern Cameroon: a cotton fabric taken during a German “punitive expedition” in 1908, when villages were burned and people killed or taken hostage. The cloth was sold to a museum, inscribed with the catalog number of the officer who led the assault, and its original name, maker, and meaning were lost. Such looted textiles joined Benin Bronzes and other objects in European collections, where they were reclassified as “ethnographic artifacts” rather than evidence of technological sophistication. Colonial regulations often required that objects acquired during state‑sponsored expeditions go to museums, ensuring that African knowledge was physically removed and reframed.

The connection between textiles and computing is not speculative; it is historical. Punch cards from the Jacquard loom influenced early computing. Pattern encoding maps directly onto binary logic. Mechanical repetition prefigured automation. But beneath this history is a deeper continuity: the logic of computing did not originate with machines. Machines inherited it. And that logic was already present in textile systems, pattern traditions, and knowledge practices across Africa and its diaspora.

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Conclusion: The Technology That Was Always There

The question is no longer whether textiles contributed to modern technology. The question is: why were they never fully recognized as technology in the first place?

If we redefine technology as systems of structured knowledge and processes that encode and reproduce information, then textiles—especially African textile systems—are not peripheral. They are foundational.

And the history of technology, as it is currently told, is not incomplete by accident. It is incomplete by design.

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References

· Abimbola, Wande. Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus. Oxford University Press, 1976.
· Eglash, Ron. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. Rutgers University Press, 1999.
· Gerdes, Paulus. Geometry from Africa: Mathematical and Educational Explorations. Mathematical Association of America, 1999.
· Gerdes, Paulus. African Mathematics: From Bones to Computers. University Press of America, 2008.
· Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
· Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle‑L’Ouverture Publications, 1972.
· Soloum, Salomé. “The Hina Textile: Colonial Looting and Museum Collections.” TRAFO Blog, 2025.
· Skowronek, Tobias, et al. “German Brass for Benin Bronzes.” Journal of Archaeological Science, 2023.

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Part III: Men's Dress – The Sugar Sack as Fabric

Perhaps nowhere is the tension between tradition and necessity more visible than in men's traditional clothing. The Chobolobo article is explicit:

"The clothing was made from sugar and flour packaging. In the past, sugar, and flour used to come in big sacks. The resourceful minds of the locals took these sacks and created clothing with it."

This single sentence contains a world of meaning. It tells us that what is now considered "traditional" men's attire—the cream-colored pants and shirt worn at cultural celebrations—began as industrial waste, repurposed by people who had no other options. The resourcefulness was theirs; the necessity was imposed.

The Global Practice of Sack Clothing

This was not unique to Curaçao. Across the Atlantic world, from the 1880s through the 1950s, people repurposed flour and sugar sacks into clothing, bedding, and household items. The practice intensified during the Great Depression and World War II, when textiles were scarce and expensive. In the United States, feed sacks were so widely used that by the late 1930s, an estimated three million Americans were wearing feed sack clothing—dresses, shirts, quilts, curtains, sheets, mattress covers, pajamas, and even undergarments. In Norway, women made blouses and undergarments from flour sacks, sometimes leaving the printed labels visible as a quiet joke about the origins of their clothing. In the Turks and Caicos Islands, elders recall that underwear was made from the bags that flour came in, and seamstresses would obtain cloth and supplies from merchant boats.

The practice was born of poverty, but it was sustained by skill. Women everywhere developed techniques to transform coarse, stamped sacks into wearable garments. They knew how to remove printed labels—soaking in green soap, scrubbing, bleaching in sunlight—and how to soften rough fabric through washing and beating. This was not tradition in the sense of cultural inheritance passed down unchanged. This was tradition as survival strategy, repeated wherever people faced scarcity.

What the Curaçao Record Shows

In Curaçao, men wore "cream colored pants with a loose shirt or a button-up shirt of a similar shade." That cream color was not chosen from a palette of options. It was the natural, undyed color of the unbleached cotton sacks in which flour and sugar arrived on the island. The garment was defined by the material available, not by aesthetic preference.

The Chobolobo source places this practice within living memory, noting that today's traditional clothing uses "different types of textile that are more colorful and with patterns." The flour sack is gone, replaced by fabrics chosen for beauty rather than scarcity. But the cream color persists—reproduced deliberately, in finer materials, as a marker of heritage. The connection between the color and its origin has been broken. What was once the signature of poverty is now a signifier of tradition.

The Labor Behind the Garment

The Chobolobo article tells us what the sacks became, but it does not detail how they were transformed. To understand that, we must look to community knowledge preserved through generations of Curaçaoan women, and to the broader Caribbean context of textile practices.

The coarse sackcloth would have been stiff, uncomfortable against skin, marked with printed labels from the mills. Before it could become clothing, it had to be worked. Women developed techniques:

· Softening the fabric through beating, washing, and working the fibers until they yielded

· Stiffening it with cassava paste to create crisp creases and a finished appearance worthy of formal wear

· Adding lace for embellishment and dignity, refusing to let their families wear plain sacking

The cassava paste is particularly significant. Cassava—manioc, yuca—was an indigenous crop of the Americas, long cultivated by the Arawak, Carib, and Taino peoples long before European arrival. By the time of slavery, it had become a staple throughout the Caribbean, valued for its versatility and its ability to grow in poor soils. The starch could be extracted by grating the root, mixing with water, straining through cloth, and allowing the sediment to settle. The resulting paste could be used wet or dried and stored.

Jill Becker's research at the University of Technology, Jamaica, confirms that cassava was used in Caribbean textile applications, including resist dyeing. The Caribbean Association of Home Economists has documented cassava's role in regional textile crafts. Scientific studies verify that cassava starch increases the stiffness of cotton fabric, making it ideal for creating the crisp finish required for formal wear. And the practical method—accessible to anyone with access to the root—involved mashing, straining through cloth to produce "starch milk," and applying the wet sediment directly to fabric.

In Aruba, ethnographic sources note that ground cassava was "used as starch for fabrics," a practice carried from indigenous ancestors through generations. The knowledge of how to process cassava for food and for cloth was part of the inherited wisdom of Caribbean women.

The Unrecorded Labor of Women

Notice who performed this labor. The Chobolobo article tells us that women sewed their own clothing. It tells us that traditional clothing is still "often made by elderly women." But it does not tell us about the hours of beating fabric to soften it, the careful preparation of cassava starch, the delicate addition of lace trim. This work was too mundane to record, too feminine to merit documentation, too ordinary for the archives.

And yet this unrecorded labor was the very thing that transformed a flour sack into a garment worthy of being called traditional. The men's cream-colored shirt, now a symbol of Curaçaoan heritage, began as a sack, softened by hand, starched with cassava, and trimmed with lace by a wife or mother who refused to let her family wear plain sacking. She could not control the economic conditions that left her dependent on flour sacks for cloth. But she could control what she made of them.

The Question of Tradition

So we return to the question that runs through this entire study: Is this tradition, or is this necessity?

The men's cream-colored shirt is both. It is necessity because it began as a flour sack, the only material available to people too poor to buy cloth. It is tradition because generations of women developed the skills to transform that sack into something wearable, even beautiful. It is necessity because the color was not chosen. It is tradition because that color has been remembered and reproduced long after the sacks themselves disappeared.

The connection between the shirt and its origin is broken. Most people who wear it today at Seú or other cultural celebrations do not think of flour sacks. They think of heritage, of identity, of belonging. And they are not wrong. The heritage is real. But it is a heritage forged in scarcity, not chosen in freedom. The shirt carries within it the memory of poverty, even if that memory has been smoothed over by time and pride.

Creative Survival

The details of how survival was made creative—the softening, the starching, the lace—were acts of dignity performed in conditions that offered little dignity. The women who did this work could not choose their material. But they could choose what to make of it. They could choose to add lace. They could choose to starch the fabric until it held a crease as sharp as any gentleman's. They could choose to transform a sack into a garment their husband or son could wear with pride.

This is not tradition as timeless inheritance, passed down unchanged from ancestors who designed it in freedom. This is tradition as creative survival—the material record of a people who, denied everything, made something of their own. The connection may be broken, but what was made in that broken space still matters.

Part IV: Headwraps and Straw Hats – Status, Labor, and Performance

The Headwrap: African Continuity and Sartorial Insurgency

The headwrap styles documented at Chobolobo—Punta di Skálo for labor, Pèchi Yaya for celebration—reveal how a single garment could encode complex social information. The Punta di Skálo's supportive knot was functional: it allowed women to carry buckets of fish or vegetables door-to-door as vendors. This was not ceremonial dress; it was workwear, designed by women for women's labor.

Yet these same headwraps, when made of finer Madras cloth and tied in the Pèchi Yaya style, became garments of celebration, worn to baptisms and first communions. The same practice—wrapping the head—could signify either subsistence labor or spiritual occasion. The difference lay in the cloth and the tie, choices made within tight economic constraints.

But to read the headwrap only through the lens of function or occasion is to miss its deeper significance. Recent scholarship has reframed the Afro-Creole headwrap as a site of what Nicole Willson terms "sartorial insurgency"—a form of revolutionary counternarrative authored by women of colour through acts of creativity, ingenuity, and domestic labour. In the colonial circum-Caribbean, headwraps were not merely practical accessories; they were material texts through which Black women asserted agency in societies designed to deny it.

The colonial archive, dominated by the voices of white men, often reduced women of colour to the trope of the "tropical temptress"—a figure of seduction, excess, and degeneracy that served to justify racial hierarchies. Yet encoded within these very accounts, Willson argues, is a subtextual fear of Black female agency. The elaborate headwraps that so fascinated and unsettled colonial observers were not signs of submission but of rebellion. They represented what Danielle Skeehan has called "extra-discursive and material texts"—traces of Black female insurgency that bear unique witness to experiences the formal archive sought to erase.

Before the headwrap even touched the hair, there was the labor of grooming—combing with forks, plaiting, twisting, and threading hair with twine, practices carried directly from Africa that prevented tangles and maintained a sense of cultivated personhood in conditions designed to strip it away.

The Tignon Laws: Imposition and Subversion

This tension between control and creativity is nowhere more visible than in the history of the tignon laws of Louisiana. In 1786, Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró issued a decree requiring all women of African descent—whether enslaved or free—to cover their hair with a knotted headwrap. The stated purpose was to maintain racial distinctions and curb the "audacious" displays of free women of colour, whose elaborate hairstyles and fashionable dress were seen as threatening to the social order.

The law was intended as humiliation. The headwrap had long been associated with enslavement and labour; forcing all Black women to wear it was meant to mark them as inferior, to strip them of the visual markers of status and beauty they had claimed for themselves.

But the women subverted this intention. Rather than accept the headwrap as a badge of shame, they transformed it into an opportunity for creativity. They sourced the finest fabrics—silks, satins, imported Madras—and wrapped their heads in increasingly elaborate and artistic styles. They added jewels, feathers, and ornaments. What was meant to diminish them became a canvas for their artistry and a marker of their dignity. The tignon law did not suppress Black women's self-fashioning; it inadvertently created a new tradition that spread throughout the Americas.

This history matters for Curaçao. While the Dutch Caribbean had its own specific legal codes, the pattern is consistent across the colonial Americas: headwraps were sites of struggle between the impulse to control Black women's bodies and the determination of those women to define themselves. The Punta di Skálo and Pèchi Yaya are not merely functional or festive styles. They are the descendants of this longer history—styles that carry within them the memory of both oppression and resistance.

Straw Hats: Local Craft, Imperial Education, and Global Markets

The men's straw hat tells a parallel story of stratified necessity, but with its own distinct entanglements of labour, colonialism, and global commerce. The Chobolobo source notes that for work on the kunuku (plantation), men wore locally hand-braided straw hats with "damaged edges and were less finely braided." These were functional objects, made from local fibers, designed for sun protection, and discarded when worn. For formal occasions, however, men sought hats imported from Cuba—finer, better made, status objects. The local product was for labor; the imported product was for presentation.

But the story of straw hat production in Curaçao is more complex than this simple hierarchy suggests. As Charlotte Hammond's research documents, from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, straw hat making in Curaçao became entangled with colonial education, international exhibitions, and global capitalist markets.

Up until 1946, as a strategy of the Catholic church's "civilising mission," young women in Curaçao were trained to plait the so-called "Panama hat" at technical schools run by the church. The schools focussed on training young Black women in sewing and a range of hat-plaiting techniques. The church legitimised this education as an important tool to combat unemployment and instil respectability and morality in young Curaçaoan women. The ideology underpinning this "civilising mission" touted the education of a work ethic—imposed by God—as a means to counter the threat of idleness associated with sinful activity and the post-emancipation freedom of enslaved workers.

The products of this labour were often exhibited at international expositions and exported for sale in Europe and the United States. A report from the Brussels 1910 world exhibition describes the huge sales of both "simple" and "finely woven" straw hats from Curaçao that led to a second shipment quickly selling out. Conscious of the economic potential, the Dutch reporter lamented the lack of funds allocated to bring several Curaçaoan women hat braiders to the exhibition "to better acquaint them with the requirements of the European market." The bulletin reveals Dutch admiration for this indigenous skill, yet this respect was ambivalent: local craft production was framed as outside modernity, static, and unable to meet the "progressive" standards of a European market without foreign intervention.

Hammond's analysis is trenchant: missionary education that claimed to modernise, industrialise, and revalue local handicraft skills for the benefit of local populations instead perpetuated colonial gendered and racialised divisions of labour. These schools prepared and disciplined students for factory work in global textile industries. The straw hat industry in Curaçao was not simply a matter of local craft serving local needs; it was integrated into a global capitalist system that extracted value from Black women's labour while simultaneously devaluing it.

Counter-Plantation Knowledge and Resistance

Yet even here, within systems designed for exploitation, there were spaces of resistance. Drawing on Jean Casimir's concept of contre-plantation (counter-plantation), Hammond explores how histories of indigenous craft knowledge during specific periods of resistance nurtured what she calls "disidentification with a gendered logic of labour exploitation and racial capitalism."

Casimir's concept is crucial: the contre-plantation refers to the ways enslaved and freed people developed survival strategies and cultural practices on the margins of the formal plantation economy. Craft knowledge, developed covertly on the margins of the plantation or through urban artisanal production, nourished resistance to continued attempts to restore plantation economies after emancipation. When young women in Curaçao learned to plait straw, they were not simply absorbing a colonial work ethic. They were also participating in a longer tradition of indigenous craft knowledge that had sustained their ancestors through slavery and into freedom.

The straw hat, like the headwrap, is thus a contradictory object. It carries the marks of its production within colonial education systems and global capitalist markets. But it also carries the knowledge of hands that learned from mothers and grandmothers, techniques that predated the missionary schools and would outlast them. The "damaged edges" and "less finely braided" work hats that men wore on the kunuku were not merely inferior versions of the fine Cuban imports. They were products of a different economy—one oriented toward survival and use rather than export and profit.

Conclusion: What Covers the Head Tells a Story

Both the headwrap and the straw hat, then, are sites where multiple histories converge. They are functional objects that protect from sun and labour. They are markers of status that distinguish work from celebration, local from imported. They are products of colonial economies that sought to discipline Black bodies and extract value from Black labour. And they are canvases for creativity and resistance, through which women and men asserted their dignity and their personhood.

The Punta di Skálo with its supportive knot, the Pèchi Yaya for special occasions, the rough work hat for the kunuku, the fine Cuban import for formal wear—each carries a story. Together, they remind us that what covers the head is never merely covering. It is communication, identity, memory, and sometimes, insurgency.

Part V: The Seú Parade – From Labor to Spectacle

The Seú harvest parade, held annually on Easter Monday, is described as a celebration of "connectedness to mother nature" and a reenactment of enslaved workers dancing and singing while carrying their harvest to the storage house. Today, over forty-five groups—nearly five thousand people—process through the streets of Otrobanda and the western districts, their colorful costumes and headwraps transforming the route into a river of movement and memory.

But the transformation of this procession demands critical analysis. What was once a forced march—enslaved people transporting the fruits of their unpaid labor to their enslavers' storehouses—is now a voluntary cultural parade. The songs of resistance become heritage performances. The work clothes become costume. The question at the heart of this study—tradition or necessity—finds no clearer expression than in the annual journey of the Seú.

The Ritual in History

The Seú tradition emerged during slavery, specifically around the harvest of sorghum, a grain introduced from West Africa that became a staple crop on Curaçao's plantations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the purpose of the Seú celebration was to thank the gods for the harvest. Enslaved workers would cut the sorghum stalks in the fields—men doing the cutting, women gathering the harvest into baskets—and then process, singing and dancing, to the magazina (warehouse) where the crop would be stored. After the harvest was secured, celebrations continued in the square near the plantation house, where the shon (landowner) could observe the festivities.

The ritual unfolded in three distinct phases. The first phase was the harvest itself, accompanied by the rhythmic playing of the kachu (cow horn). The second phase was the procession to the warehouse, with workers singing songs in a fixed rhythm. The third phase, after the work was complete, brought the community together to sing and dance to the music of the tambú drum.

These phases encoded within them both the structure of enslaved labor and the creative response to it. The songs that accompanied the harvest and procession were work songs—but they were also repositories of memory, complaint, and coded resistance. The tambú music that closed the celebration carried particular danger: it was considered pagan by the Catholic Church and threatening by the colonial authorities. After emancipation, the tambú portion of the Seú was banned outright, an explicit attempt to suppress the creativity of the Afro-Curaçaoan population.

Suppression and Revival

The trajectory of the Seú after emancipation mirrors the larger story of Afro-Curaçaoan cultural expression. With the arrival of the Shell oil refinery in 1915 and the accompanying modernization, the Seú gradually lost its original function. The harvest economy that had given it meaning was being supplanted by industrial labor. The tradition risked fading entirely.

It was rescued by women. In the 1940s and 1950s, Ursulita Martis led an effort to breathe new life into the Seú celebration. Thanks to her work, and to the many women who carried the knowledge of songs, dances, and dress, the tradition was revived. What had been a labor ritual tied to the agricultural calendar became an annual cultural parade, a conscious performance of Afro-Curaçaoan identity.

This revival was not simple preservation. It was transformation. The Seú became something new: a celebration of heritage rather than a requirement of labor. The participants were no longer enslaved workers compelled to march; they were free people choosing to remember. The songs were no longer sung under the eye of the shon; they were offered to ancestors and to the community.

The Costume Today

Today's Seú features "colorful clothing designs and headwraps" that "reflect both the modernization and the creativity of the community." The saya ku djèki is now made from "different types of textile that are more colorful and with patterns." The flour sack is gone, replaced by fabrics chosen for aesthetics, not scarcity. The cassava paste that once stiffened a man's collar has been forgotten by all but the oldest families. The lace added by candlelight survives only in the heirlooms passed down through generations.

The men wear straw hats—but these are no longer the rough work hats with "damaged edges" worn on the kunuku. They are finer, more deliberate, chosen to complete an outfit rather than to shield a laborer from the sun. The distinction between local work hat and imported formal hat has blurred into a single "traditional" accessory.

And yet, the connection to the past is not entirely lost. Participants still speak of honoring their grandinan (ancestors). The music still uses instruments born of the plantation—the chapi (garden hoe), the kachu (cow horn), the tambú drum. The procession still moves un pia un pia (slow step by slow step), as it did when workers carried their harvest to the warehouse. The body remembers what the mind may have forgotten.

Is This Loss or Gain?

The question is unavoidable. The parade preserves memory, but it also sanitizes it. The contemporary viewer sees beauty and tradition; they do not see the flour sack, the cassava paste, the lace added in candlelight by women determined to create dignity from deprivation. The design has been abstracted from its conditions of production. The struggle that produced it has been smoothed over by pride and by time.

This is what Jean Casimir, the Haitian sociologist, might call the movement from plantation to counter-plantation. The plantation was the system that planted people to plant crops, that reduced human beings to adjuncts of commodity production. The counter-plantation was everything the enslaved and their descendants built in opposition to that system: the smallholdings, the kinship networks, the cultural practices, the autonomous spaces where dignity could be cultivated even in the absence of freedom.

The Seú, in its origins, was a product of the plantation—a ritual embedded in the rhythms of forced labor. But in its survival and transformation, it became something of the counter-plantation. It became a space where Afro-Curaçaoan identity could be performed, remembered, and passed on. The flour sack became a shirt. The work song became a heritage. The forced march became a voluntary parade.

This is not simple loss, nor is it simple gain. It is the complex process by which oppressed people take the materials of their oppression and make something of their own. The connection between the Seú of the eighteenth century and the Seú of today is broken—but what was made in that broken space still matters.

The Carnival Connection

Scholars of the African diaspora have traced similar transformations across the Americas. Raphael Njoku's work on West African masking traditions and diaspora masquerade carnivals shows how enslaved Africans carried with them not static customs, but dynamic practices of memory and performance. The masquerade, like the Seú procession, served multiple functions: it was a form of spiritual practice, a method of social control, a technique of remembering, and a medium of resistance.

When Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas, these practices did not simply disappear or survive unchanged. They adapted. They incorporated new materials, new contexts, new meanings. The Caribbean carnival traditions—Trinidad's Carnival, Cuba's comparsas, Haiti's rara—all bear the marks of this creative adaptation. They are neither purely African nor purely European. They are something new, born of the violent encounter between worlds.

The Seú belongs to this family. It is Curaçao's version of a pan-Afro-diasporic phenomenon: the transformation of forced ritual into voluntary celebration, of labor into performance, of survival into art.

Conclusion: What Do We Call Tradition?

This analysis has traced the threads of Curaçaoan dress through:

· The holds of Dutch slave ships carrying Madras cloth, traded for human beings on the African coast

· The backs of enslaved women wrapping African-style headwraps from European fabric, transforming commodity into memory

· The sumptuary laws of colonial regimes that sought to control Black women's bodies, and the creative subversion of those laws through fabric and style

· The empty flour sacks of the post-emancipation poor, transformed into cream-colored shirts that would become markers of heritage

· The cassava root, mashed and strained into starch to give those shirts shape and dignity

· The lace, added by hand, turning necessity into beauty

· The missionary schools that trained young women in straw plaiting for global markets, even as they sought to discipline them into colonial norms

· The Seú parade, transforming forced labor into voluntary celebration, work song into heritage performance

At every stage, the clothing now called "traditional" was shaped by forces its wearers did not control: the global textile trade, the economics of slavery, the scarcity of the Depression, the social codes of colonial society, the educational interventions of church and state. Yet at every stage, Curaçaoans made choices within those constraints. They preserved African headwrap styles. They sewed their own garments. They developed techniques—softening, starching, embellishing—that turned industrial waste into wearable art. They wore their best to baptisms and their work-wraps to sell vegetables. They adapted masking traditions from West Africa to new contexts, new materials, new meanings.

The Counter-Plantation Framework

Jean Casimir's concept of the counter-plantation offers a powerful lens for understanding what this process means. The plantation system was designed to reduce human beings to adjuncts of commodity production. It sought to strip them of memory, of culture, of autonomous social life. But the enslaved and their descendants refused to be reduced. They built something else on the margins of the plantation: smallholdings, kinship networks, religious practices, aesthetic traditions. They created, in Casimir's terms, a "counter-plantation" that existed in opposition to the logic of the master.

The traditional clothing of Curaçao is a product of this counter-plantation. It was made from the scraps and discards of the plantation economy—the coarse fabric issued to laborers, the empty sacks that had held imported flour. But it was made according to aesthetic principles that remembered Africa. It was worn with a dignity that the plantation never intended. It was passed down through generations of women who taught their daughters to sew as their mothers had taught them.

This is not to romanticize. The counter-plantation was not a space of freedom; it was a space of survival within unfreedom. The clothing made in that space bears the marks of its origins. It is simple, modest, economical. It is made from what was available, not what was desired. But it is also beautiful, creative, meaningful. It carries within it the stories of the women who made it and the men who wore it.

So: Is This Tradition or Necessity?

The answer is both. It is necessity transformed by generations of creativity into something that feels like tradition. It is the flour sack, remembered not as poverty but as resourcefulness. It is the cassava paste, forgotten by written records but preserved in the hands of families. It is the headwrap, African in origin, Caribbean in practice, Curaçaoan in identity.

To call it merely "traditional" is to erase the struggle that produced it. To call it merely "necessary" is to erase the artistry that elevated it. The truer term might be survival design—the material record of a people who, denied everything, made something of their own.

The Broken Connection

The title of this essay names the problem: the connection is broken. The flour sack is no longer a flour sack; it is a "traditional" cream-colored shirt. The headwrap is no longer a marker of African identity preserved under oppression; it is a festive accessory. The Seú parade is no longer a memory of forced marches; it is a tourist attraction and a source of community pride. The cassava paste, the lace, the softening techniques—these survive only in the memories of the oldest women, if they survive at all.

This is not to say that contemporary Curaçaoan dress is inauthentic. Authenticity is not located in a fixed past, frozen and unreachable. Culture is always changing, always adapting, always making itself new. The women who sew saya ku djèki today for the Seú parade are not less authentic than their grandmothers who sewed from flour sacks. They are simply working with different materials, different contexts, different meanings.

But the broken connection is itself part of the story. It is what happens when oppressed people take the materials of their oppression—whether fabric from Dutch merchants or sacks from imported flour—and transform them into something of their own. The break is not a loss; it is the space where creativity happens. It is the gap between what was imposed and what was made, between the master's provision and the wearer's meaning.

What Remains

What remains, after this analysis, is not a simple story of victimhood or of triumph. It is a complex story of people who, facing conditions not of their choosing, made choices nonetheless. They chose to remember Africa in the wrapping of a headwrap. They chose to add lace to a flour sack. They chose to revive a harvest ritual that had lost its original function. They chose to pass their knowledge to their daughters.

The clothing they made carries the marks of these choices. It is modest because modesty was required of them, but it is also beautiful because beauty was something they required of themselves. It is economical because materials were scarce, but it is creative because creativity was how they survived. It is traditional because they kept making it, generation after generation.

So, what do we call tradition?

Perhaps we call it this: the material record of a people's ongoing conversation with their past, conducted under conditions not of their choosing, but carried out with whatever materials they had at hand. The connection may be broken, but the conversation continues. And what is made in that broken, continuing space—the shirt, the headwrap, the parade, the song—is worthy of the name tradition, if we understand that name to mean not timeless inheritance but creative survival.

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References for Post 2 (Parts III, IV, V & Conclusion)

Allen, R. "The Harvest Ceremony Seú as a Case Study of the Dynamics of Power in Post-Emancipation Curaçao (1863-1915)." Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2010): 13-29.

Becker, Jill. "Cassava Resist Dyeing: Traditional dyeing techniques in a new environment." Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of The University of the West Indies Schools of Education, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, April 2013.

Casimir, Jean. The Haitians: A Decolonial History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Casimir, Jean. "La plantacion y la contraplantacion en la Historia del Caribe." In La Invención del Caribe. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997.

"Cassava Resist Dyeing." Caribbean Association of Home Economists. http://caribbeanhomeeconomist.org/cassava-resist-dyeing/

"Curaçaose muziek." Wikipedia. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura%C3%A7aose_muziek

"Episode CXXI -121: Yuca an Amerindian cultural heritage." Aruba Today, September 2021.

Hammond, Charlotte. "Straw craft, imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as tightly braided sites of gender production in Haiti and Curaçao." Journal of Material Culture 28, no. 4 (2023): 515-538.

Jenson, Deborah. "Plot and counter-plantation: Jean Casimir and captive modernity." Cultural Dynamics 36, no. 3 (August 2024): 360-366.

Kirkland, Teleica. "Clothing as Resistance." Costume Institute of the African Diaspora. https://ciad.org.uk/directory/clothing-as-resistance/

Njoku, Raphael Chijioke. West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals: History, Memory, and Transnationalism. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2020.

Njoku, Raphael Chijioke. "Igbo/West African Masquerade Culture and the Dynamics of African Diaspora Carnivals." Lecture, Frontier Culture Museum.

Rathgeb, Jody. "Wear? Where? Keeping Islanders clothed in 'the old days'." Times of the Islands, Summer 2022.

"Seú." Wikipedia. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seu

"730. Curaçao's Thanksgiving Parade." 1000 Awesome Things About Curaçao. https://1000awesomethingsaboutcuracao.com/2013/04/12/730-curacao-awesome-thanksgiving-parade-seu/

Systad, Gunnhild. "The Use of Flour and Sugar Sacks in Clothing, Bedding, and More." Norwegian Textile Letter, February 2020.

The Story Behind the Traditional Clothing of Curaçao. Landhuis Chobolobo.

"Unraveling the History: When Did Flour Sacks Become Fashion?" Fashion Trend Tips, August 2025.

"A Sliver of Deep Blue Cloth." Haptic & Hue podcast, April 2023. https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

Willson, Nicole. "Sartorial insurgencies: Rebel women, headwraps and the revolutionary Black Atlantic." Atlantic Studies 19, no. 1 (2022): 86-106.

Introduction: The Problem with "Tradition"

When visitors to Curaçao admire the vibrant saya ku djèki during the Seú parade, or when cultural festivals showcase women in elaborate headwraps and men in cream-colored shirts, these garments are presented as timeless expressions of Curaçaoan identity. They are called "traditional dress."

But this label obscures a more uncomfortable truth. What we celebrate as cultural heritage was born from the bodies of taken African people—men and women torn from their homelands, forced into the holds of Dutch slave ships, and deposited on an island where they would be required to rebuild identity from fragments. This essay interrogates, through a critical design lens, how the experience of enslaved Africans—their trauma, their memory, their creativity—shaped what became Curaçao's traditional clothing. It asks a fundamental question: Is this tradition, or is this necessity—preserved, polished, and rebranded over generations?

The garments now called "traditional" were not designed in freedom. They were assembled from the materials of oppression: the cargo lists of Dutch merchants, the coarse fabric issued to laborers, the empty flour sacks of impoverished families, and the starch of a cassava root grown on land they did not own.

Yet there is something more at work here—something that resists simple explanations of material scarcity. The saya ku djèki—that distinctive combination of wide skirt and fitted top—is not unique to Curaçao. Travel across the Black diaspora, and you will find its echoes everywhere. In Brazil, the baiana dress of Salvador's Carnival carries the same volumetric skirt and elaborate headwrap. In Colombia's Palenque, in the pollera of Panama, in the bata of Cuba's Santería practitioners, in the nagua of Venezuela's Afro-descendant communities, the same silhouette appears and reappears. It emerges in the quadrille dress of Haiti and the douillette of Martinique. The forms are not identical—each carries the imprint of its specific colonial power, its local materials, its particular history—but the family resemblance is undeniable.

What are we to make of this? The connections are not always scientifically traceable. There is no single shipping manifest documenting the movement of a skirt pattern, no colonial decree that mandated this particular silhouette across Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies. And yet the form persists—a deep structure carried in memory, in muscle, in the hands of women who taught their daughters to sew as their mothers had taught them. It suggests that taken African people, dispersed across the Americas, developed similar aesthetic solutions to similar problems: how to dress modestly under the gaze of oppressors, how to preserve dignity through fabric, how to signal identity through silhouette.

This opening observation—that the saya ku djèki belongs to a pan-Afro-diasporic family of dress—points toward research still to be done. If the same form appears in Curaçao and Brazil, in Cuba and Colombia, what does that tell us about the deep connections that survived the Middle Passage? What knowledge traveled not in books but in bodies, not in patterns but in memory? This essay focuses on Curaçao as a case study, but the questions it raises ripple outward, inviting future scholars to trace the threads that bind the Black Americas together.

Part I: The Raw Materials of Oppression – Textiles in the Slave Era

Before there could be a saya ku djèki, there had to be fabric. And in 17th and 18th century Curaçao, fabric arrived not for the comfort of the enslaved, but for the profit of the enslaver. The very fibers that would eventually become "traditional dress" first touched the island as cargo—listed in ledgers, exchanged for human beings, and distributed according to the logic of empire.

The Dutch Textile Machine

The Dutch were master textile traders. Through the Dutch East India Company (VOC), they flooded the Atlantic world with Indian cottons—calicoes, chintzes, and the distinctive plaid Madras cloth. By the 1600s, these fabrics were reaching Curaçao, but their journey tells us everything about the broken connection this essay traces. These textiles arrived not as goods for the enslaved to wear with pride, but as:

· Currency in the slave trade, exchanged for human beings on the African coast

· Cargo to be re-exported to Spanish colonies

· Payment for plantation infrastructure

· Clothing issued to enslaved laborers at the lowest possible cost

Madras cloth, now celebrated as a symbol of Afro-Caribbean identity, arrived as a commodity of empire. Its transformation into a marker of resistance and belonging happened despite its origins, not because of them. The same fabric that wrapped African bodies in the hold of a slave ship would later wrap the heads of their descendants in ceremonies of freedom. The connection between origin and meaning is not just broken—it is violently severed and painstakingly repaired by generations of women who refused to let the cloth carry only the story of their oppression.

The Paradox of Trade Cloth

This paradox deserves attention. The Dutch did not import Madras cloth for enslaved people. They imported it as trade goods—to be sold, bartered, and exchanged along the West African coast for more human cargo. That some of these textiles eventually reached the hands of enslaved people in Curaçao was incidental to their purpose. They were not gifts; they were the loose change of a brutal economy.

And yet, once in those hands, the cloth was transformed. A length of Madras—called injiri or 'George' by the Kalabari people of Nigeria, who had worn it for centuries before the slave trade—might be woven in South India, shipped by Dutch merchants to the West African coast, and exchanged for enslaved human beings. That same cloth, carried across the Middle Passage in memory as much as in baggage, might end its journey as a headwrap in Curaçao—wrapped in a style that remembered Africa, worn with a dignity the Dutch never intended. The cloth carried the violence of its journey, but it also carried possibility. This is the broken connection made visible: the same object can contain both trauma and resilience, both theft and creation.

Clothing the Enslaved: The Bare Minimum

When enslaved people were given clothing—and the word "given" itself is a deception, for nothing was given that their labor did not purchase many times over—it was not an act of kindness but of economic calculation. Coarse, cheap fabrics were imported specifically to outfit laborers at the lowest possible cost. These included:

· Osnaburg: a rough linen named for the German city where it was produced, stiff and uncomfortable against skin

· Low-grade cotton: often unbleached, undyed, and quickly worn thin

· Heavy wool: entirely unsuited to the tropical climate, likely issued because it was cheap, not because it was appropriate

These were the textiles of subsistence. They were designed for durability, not dignity; for covering, not expression. The Dutch were not interested in whether enslaved people felt human in their clothing. They were interested in whether the clothing would last another season before requiring replacement.

And yet—and this is the central tension of this entire study—even these scant materials became sites of meaning. As scholarship on Curaçaoan women documents, enslaved women took the rough fabric they were issued and made something more of it. They did not simply wear what they were given; they transformed it.

The Headwrap: Memory in Cloth

Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in the headwrap. The styles documented at Landhuis Chobolobo—Punta di Skálo with its supportive knot for carrying buckets, Pèchi Yaya for special occasions—are not European inventions. They are direct lines back to the African continent, preserved through the Middle Passage, adapted to new materials and new circumstances.

The headwrap tells us something crucial about how taken African people approached cloth. When they received coarse osnaburg or cheap cotton, they did not see only what the Dutch intended. They saw possibility. They saw memory. They saw a way to continue, in a new land, practices their mothers had taught them. The cloth may have been European, but the meaning was African.

This is an early act of what we might call design resistance: the refusal to let material be merely material, the insistence on imprinting identity onto even the most meager resources. The headwrap is not just a piece of fabric wrapped around hair. It is a repository of memory, a marker of occasion, a tool for labor, and a statement of selfhood—all at once.

The Connection That Was Never Supposed to Survive

The Dutch textile machine was designed to move goods and people as efficiently as possible. It was not designed to preserve African aesthetics or enable cultural continuity. And yet, despite every effort to strip enslaved people of their identities, the knowledge of how to wrap a head, how to style fabric, how to make cloth carry meaning—this knowledge survived.

It survived in the hands of women. It survived in the whispered instructions from mother to daughter. It survived in the muscle memory of fingers folding and tucking fabric. It survived because taken African people refused to let it die.

The connection was broken, yes—violently, deliberately, systematically broken. But it was also repaired, stitch by stitch, wrap by wrap, generation by generation. The saya ku djèki and the headwraps of Curaçao are not simply "traditional dress." They are the material evidence of that repair.

Looking Ahead

This chapter has traced the raw materials of oppression—the fabrics that arrived in Curaçao as cargo and currency. But materials alone do not make clothing. The next chapter examines how taken African people, particularly women, transformed these materials into the garments we now call traditional. It asks: When you are given nothing but coarse cloth and memory, what do you make? The answer is the saya ku djèki.

Part II: The Saya ku Djèki – Whose Design, Whose Modesty?

The saya ku djèki—a long skirt paired with a flared, button-up shirt—is today's iconic Curaçaoan women's outfit. It is described as modest, practical, and beautiful. But a persistent narrative lingers in some histories: that this modesty was imposed upon enslaved and freed women by the wives of slave masters, who, threatened by the presence of Black women in their households, sought to cover them according to European Victorian standards.

This explanation is too simple. More importantly, it is an explanation that erases agency. It assumes that Black women were passive recipients of dress codes rather than active participants in their own self-fashioning. The scholarship on dress in the Caribbean tells a different story—one in which African women retained, nurtured, and adapted their own aesthetic traditions, making conscious choices about when to resist and when to accommodate.

The Narrative We Must Challenge

The claim that slave masters' wives imposed modesty on enslaved women rests on a plausible premise: that white women in colonial households felt threatened by the presence of Black women and sought to control their appearance. This may well have happened. But to conclude from this that the saya ku djèki is simply a hand-me-down of Victorian modesty is to ignore everything we know about how enslaved women actually used dress.

If modesty were purely an imposition, we would expect to find records of enslaved women passively accepting whatever clothing was given to them. Instead, the historical record shows the opposite. Enslaved women exercised significant control over their clothing, using it as a symbol of resistance against European attempts at cultural annihilation. They maintained and nurtured African cultural characteristics in their dress, preserving aesthetic values that had nothing to do with Victorian morality.

What the Scholarship Actually Shows

Steeve Buckridge's foundational work on Jamaican women's dress documents that African cultural features—folklore, music, language, religion, and dress—were retained and nurtured in the Caribbean because they guaranteed the survival of Africans and their descendants. Dress was not a passive accommodation to white expectations; it was an active strategy of survival. Women had some control over their clothing whether as resistors or accommodators. The key word here is control.

When European elements did appear in enslaved women's dress, Buckridge argues, this was not simply imposition. Changes from more African modes to more European-influenced styles accompanied greater possibilities for social mobility. Women made calculated choices: adopting certain European elements could open doors, but this was a strategy, not submission. As Buckridge puts it, resistance and accommodation were not polar opposites, but melded into each other.

The Evidence of Colonial Fear

If slave masters' wives were so successful at imposing modesty, why did colonial authorities feel the need to pass laws controlling what enslaved women wore? Charlotte Hammond's research on the francophone Caribbean documents that dress was so powerful a form of expression that it stirred the colonists to restrain this seemingly dangerous form of slave ascension through legislative prohibition. These ordinances policed the way certain bodies could be attired precisely because enslaved women were dressing in ways the colonizers found threatening, not compliant.

The existence of these laws tells us everything: enslaved women were not passively accepting the dress codes of their oppressors. They were actively using clothing to assert themselves, and the colonial state had to intervene to stop them.

The Evidence of Creativity

Perhaps most powerfully, Danielle Skeehan's work reveals that enslaved women used clothing as a medium of authorship. She documents the case of Coobah, an enslaved seamstress in Jamaica, who embroidered names and messages onto another woman's smock—creating what Skeehan calls a "material epistle" that circulated publicly on the wearer's body. This was not passive acceptance of imposed modesty. This was a woman using needle and thread to "write" her own stories of love and kinship, to assert her own voice in a world that denied her literacy.

As Skeehan argues, these material texts complicate our understanding of who counts as an "author" in the Atlantic world. Enslaved women converted the very tools of her labor as an enslaved seamstress into a medium through which she can tell stories of love and kinship, as well as sexual exploitation and loss.

The Question of African Aesthetics

If the saya ku djèki is not simply an imposed Victorian garment, what are its sources? The scholarship points to African aesthetic values that survived the Middle Passage. Buckridge discusses the aesthetic value of West African women's dress and the African customs that were brought to Jamaica and nurtured across generations. The headwrap traditions documented in Curaçao—Punta di Skálo and Pèchi Yaya—are explicitly linked to African origins. Why would headwraps retain their African connections while the saya ku djèki did not?

The answer is that both retain African aesthetic sensibilities, adapted to new materials and circumstances. The wide skirt and fitted top silhouette that appears across the Black diaspora—from Brazil's baiana to Cuba's bata to Curaçao's saya ku djèki—suggests deep structural continuities that cannot be explained by European influence alone.

Revisiting the Chobolobo Timeline

The Chobolobo source states that traditional clothing started after the slavery times with our ancestors. This timing is significant, but not for the reasons usually given. After 1863, formerly enslaved women were free—but they were also poor. Their clothing had to serve multiple purposes: affordable, durable, appropriate for labor.

But this does not mean they simply adopted whatever styles were available. As Buckridge's work shows, even in freedom, women continued to make choices about their dress that reflected both African heritage and strategic accommodation to new social realities. The saya ku djèki was often made from the same fabric or a combination of two or three patterns. This pattern-mixing was not merely economical; it was a continuation of African aesthetic practices that valued pattern and texture.

Conclusion: Whose Modesty?

So, whose modesty does the saya ku djèki represent?

The evidence suggests that the question itself may be wrong. The garment does not represent someone else's modesty imposed upon Black women. It represents the choices of Black women themselves—choices made within constraints, yes, but choices nonetheless. They chose when to retain African modes and when to adopt European elements. They chose how to wrap their heads and how to mix their patterns. They chose, like Coobah, to use needle and thread to tell their own stories.

The modesty of the saya ku djèki may have less to do with Victorian morality and more to do with African values of dignity, self-presentation, and community. It may reflect what it meant for a woman to present herself with respect in a world that denied her respect at every turn.

The question lingers, but the scholarship shifts its terms. It is no longer: "Did white women impose this on Black women?" It becomes: "What did Black women make of the materials they had, and what stories did they tell through the clothes they made?"

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📚 References for Post 1 (Introduction, Parts I & II)

Becker, Jill. (2013). Cassava Resist Dyeing: Traditional dyeing techniques in a new environment. Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of The University of the West Indies Schools of Education, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.

Buckridge, Steeve O. The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1750-1890. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004.

Buckridge, Steeve O. "Dem caa dress yah!" : dress as resistance and accommodation among Jamaican women from slavery to freedom, 1760-1890. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 1998.

Buckridge, Steeve O. African Lace-Bark in the Caribbean: The Construction of Race, Class, and Gender. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Contiguous Cloth: Textiles and the Slave Trade in New Netherland. The Gotham Center for New York City History.

Curaçaoan Women in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries. Brill Publishing.

Design History In Curaçao. Design Encyclopedia.

Hammond, Charlotte. "Costuming Colonial Resistance in the New World." In Entangled Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean, 48-81. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018.

Indian Cotton Textiles in the 18th-Century Atlantic Economy. LSE Research.

Madras and the Poetics of Sartorial Resistance. Age of Revolutions.

Skeehan, Danielle C. "Materializing the Black Atlantic: African Captives, Caribbean Slaves, and Creole Fashioning." In The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.

Systad, Gunnhild. (2020). The Use of Flour and Sugar Sacks in Clothing, Bedding, and More. Norwegian Textile Letter.

Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market. Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA).

The Story Behind the Traditional Clothing of Curaçao. Landhuis Chobolobo.

Utilization and Characterization of Cassava Starch as a Natural Thickening Agent for Reactive Dye Printing on Cotton Fabric. ResearchGate.

White Gold: Cassava as an Industrial Base. Scientific Research Publishing.

How to Make Laundry Starch from Cassava. Starch Project Solution / Doing Group.

The African continent has a rich and wide textile practice spanning since the beginning of times. Hook based textile practices was also part of this rich heritage. It is therefore no mystery, that the craft of Crochet has become very popular in contemporary African nations. This popularity, however, exists within a paradox: many contemporary African practitioners understand crochet as a European import, severed from knowledge that their own continent possesses millennia-deep traditions of hook-based fiber manipulation.

Early ancient hooks were found, possible a crochet hook in ancient excavated site of Karanis in Egypt.

"Karanis; Crochet Hook (?); Bone (Unidentified)." In the digital collection Kelsey Museum of Archaeology Art & Artifact Collection. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/k/kelsey/x-0000.02.1769/7_2527p02. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 19, 2026.

This bone implement, housed at the University of Michigan, is one of several such tools recovered from Egyptian excavations. Implements from Karanis confirm that the technological principle of manipulating fiber with a hook was understood and practiced in ancient Africa. The tools are fashioned from materials that would have been readily available—bone, wood, ivory—suggesting that the technology was neither rare nor imported, but indigenous and established. While Eurocentric scholarship often defaults to cautious language ("possible crochet hook"), the evidence speaks for itself.

The Ancient Chebka Lace, needle-knotted stitch is a close relative to the filet crochet. Initially practiced in Tunisia, it was used to create geometric bands, while the filet crochet techniques allows you to create complete projects including vests or table wear.

Ref: https://coutaubegarie.com/lot/157092/26525906-three-entre-deux-and-one-carre-in-chebka-lace-north-africa

Chebka was first practiced by individual women in Tunisia to adorn their traditional garments. The technique later spread to Algeria and Morocco, where it remained in use. Its geometric patterns reflect design languages common across North Africa, developed entirely independently of European influence. The structure is identical in principle to filet crochet's netted grounds, but Chebka predates the European systematization of filet crochet by centuries. It represents an African solution to creating decorative net-like grids.

Under the disguise of atrocities committed in the name of benevolent missionary works, Nuns used textile practices to gain access to vulnerable communities, where they taught practices that were stolen from African nations and re-packaged and re-introduced as another way to further penetrate our communities.

The white nuns teaching "Western European embroidery and lace techniques to local girls. A practice continued under NGO's

Source: https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/regional-traditions/middle-east-and-north-africa/pre-modern-middle-east-and-north-africa/embroidery-and-the-white-sisters

The photograph shows White Sisters in what is now Burkina Faso, circa 1930, instructing local girls in techniques presented as "Western European embroidery and lace." Yet Chebka lace, which these same nuns would have taught in North African missions, was not European at all. It was North African. The pattern is consistent: African techniques were extracted, stripped of their origin, and then taught back to Africans as European knowledge. This was not cultural exchange. It was cultural erasure. Nuns gained access to vulnerable communities by offering textile instruction, while simultaneously dismantling the very traditions that had produced those techniques. The goal was not education but domination—spiritual, cultural, and economic.

The knotless Netting is a material example of another African nations, Cameroon, Indigenous hook based textile technique. This netting sack called Nkekelewe, comes from the Mafa people in Cameroon. It is made using a knotless netting technique.

Source: https://portal.hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/catalog/93f3405f-1823-4a24-886c-80c524a1eb60

The Mafa sack was collected in 1965 by Paul Hinderling and donated to the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum at Berkeley. It is made from bean fiber cordage, materials that would have been locally available. The object is catalogued with the technique explicitly identified: knotless netting. This is not a guess. It is documentation.

Ref: https://collections.rom.on.ca/objects/527320/adult-sock

The knotless netting technique is being made using bean fiber cordage. It is not a colonial-era introduction, it is an indigenous Cameroonian object that was collected in 1965, representing a longstanding local practice that survived despite colonial violence.

The Mafa knotless Netting technique predates knitting and crochet, with the oldest known fragments dating to c. 6500 BCE from the Judean Desert. Knotless netting, technically termed nålbinding, is an ancient technique whereby a single needle creates fabric through a series of loops and passes. The same technique appears in Egypt in the form of Coptic socks from the 4th to 7th centuries CE. The Royal Ontario Museum holds multiple examples (910.130.143, G1281). The National Museums Scotland holds a divided-toe sock from Akhmim (A.1911.315). The Petrie Museum houses a pair excavated from Hawara (UC16766). All are made using nålbinding—knotless netting—the same technique the Mafa people used to make their sack. European crochet, as codified in the nineteenth century, is a latecomer to a technological family Africa had already mastered.

Ref.: https://www.nms.ac.uk/search-our-collections/collection-search-results?entry=404856

This is not coincidence. It is continuity. The technology existed in Africa for thousands of years before European crochet was systematized. When Europeans claim crochet as their invention, they erase this history.

The future of African Hook textile practices

You don't have to go too far on TikTok to find a large community of Africans practicing the craft of Crochet. They hail from all the African nations. They create amazing looking designs, largely inspired by European aesthetics. It could be that these young and older practitioners were introduced to this technique from a European perspective, not knowing that their continent has a long established legacy with hook based textile practices.

That is why, it is important that Timbuktu research and design emphasise the rich textile heritage and practices in pre-colonial Africa.

The colonial project did not just steal land and resources. It stole knowledge and then sold it back. It taught us to look to Europe for validation, to value European techniques over our own. The result is a generation of African creators who can produce stunning crochet work but have never seen a Mafa netting sack or a Coptic sock or a piece of Chebka lace. They do not know that their ancestors were doing this work. Practitioners are introduced to crochet through patterns and tutorials presenting it as a Western craft. They are not shown the evidence. They inherit a severed history.

While the contemporary practice of Crochet and Hand knitting might differ from ancient practices, we uphold the fact that practices, like cultures, evolved. The African hook textile practices with practice changes and includes new techniques making it not far fetched to claim also crochet as emerging from African practices.

We do not need to prove that ancient Africans did exactly what European crocheters do today. That is not how culture works. We need to show that the technology—manipulating fiber with a hook to create fabric—was present in Africa for millennia. We need to show that African women were creating openwork textiles with needles and hooks before European contact. We need to show that when colonial nuns arrived to "teach" lacemaking, they were often teaching techniques that originated in Africa. The claim that crochet emerges legitimately from African technological traditions is not sentimental—it is factual.

An academic study by Vivian Korankye at the Takoradi Technical University, demonstrate that we seek to investigate how our heritage practices can inform our future contemporary practices. Vivian investigates techniques for innovating indigenous vegetable-tanned leather into yarn.

Manipulating Indigenous Vegetable-Tanned Leather for Use in Crocheting Art

The study explores techniques and methods used in converting indigenous vegetable-tanned leather into yarns that can serve as an alternative material and convert the locally made yarns into crocheted ladies containers and footwear using different stitches.

Ref: https://www.prophy.ai/article/169067466-Manipulating-Indigenous-Vegetable-Tanned-Leather-for-Use-in-Crocheting-Art/

The study employed a qualitative methodology combining descriptive and studio-based approaches, sampling crochet artisans, leatherwork teachers, and leather technologists. The study concludes that indigenous vegetable-tanned leather is suitable for use in making crocheting yarns due to its strength, flexibility, and suitability for hook construction. Spiral cutting techniques emerged as the most appropriate method for cutting leather into yarns, with recommended processing steps including cutting, softening through wet pounding, and dyeing using vat or mixed dye methods.

This research matters because it starts from African material and African technique. It does not ask permission from European tradition. It does not seek validation from European institutions. It simply works with what is here—leather tanned using indigenous methods, yarns produced by African hands, crochet hooks held by African fingers. It takes an African material and applies African research to develop contemporary applications. It is a continuation of the same technological tradition that produced the Mafa sack and the Coptic socks and Chebka lace.

Conclusion

The evidence is not ambiguous. Bone tools from Karanis. Chebka lace from Tunisia. Knotless netting from Cameroon. Coptic socks from Egypt. Hook-based textile practices constitute an authentic and enduring dimension of Africa's material culture, dating back millennia. Colonialism disrupted this heritage, stole credit for it, and repackaged it as European charity. But the techniques survived, and the knowledge persists.

The work now is to remember. To recover. To refuse the colonial narrative that taught us to forget.

“African solutions for the African peoples”

This has become a popular slogan among African people around the world. But what would it really entail and how would we go about creating African solutions in a Global mindset?

For the past 20 years the conversations intensified around Decolonisation and Decoloniality. African and Caribbean nations heighten their need to have the conversations transformed into actions, yet the larger sentiment of fear was holding us back. 

Not necessarily the fear of change, but rather the fear of failure. Who was going to chance their life’s into implementing long held sentiments, with millions of the fate of their people in their hands. It is never a small task. The risk not only for livelihood, but a change that could cost you your life. 

With so many external stakeholders subverting advancements of the African to force status quo multi level strategies implementation could usher in some impact for a long-term approach.   

Fabric remains found on the continent, dates back at least to the 10th century, some even earlier. We know of all the major and minor empires that existed in ancient times. The intricacy of the textiles found were so particular that it needed to be studied to be able to be recreated. And even as it was recreated, its essence, the ideas and philosophies that inspired the designed were never captured. 

They were relegated to geometrical understandings and mathematical content excluding the connectivity of these textiles. European taught seeks to extrapolate, take apart and keep apart, then assembly in a foreign context. Whereas the African Heritage textiles produced by the many nations were visualising each peoples paragons, communicated and express principles.

These textiles were produced in a system, a process, a collaboration of many knowledges coming together to manufacture covers suitable for our skin and the environments we were living in with the richly available resources.

An intact heritage would inspire designs to flow from it. Engineers and creative practitioners would be inspired and embolden by the visual availability of artefacts that was produced by predecessors informed by their lands, climates, languages and cultures. 

For Africans that were colonised and displaced, having their narratives interpreted and presented as factual by colonists and enslavers, the linear development of its society permanently derailed. The process of restoration could never exclude our forced interactions and subjections, except we actively counter the misrepresentations in all areas, disband them and decolonises first and foremost.

Ground work has to be done to address inaccuracies in the Heritage management stage to better inform the future and continuations of textile design and productions whit-in Africa and the Caribbean.

We would be in a unique position to learn from all tried and tested strategies, examine them to inform our own robust strategies. Strategies and approaches that evolved from a variety of sources including referencing our own sources can be transformed to innovate textile knowledge systems unique to the African continent. 

Frameworks and Methodologies designed to solve our particular circumstances should be explored and even encouraged. Such Frameworks and Methodologies would adjust the African continents trajectory in Textile manufacturing and Design, making Africa’s design solutions sufficiently unique to recapture local markets while recuperate its position on Global scale. 

“….al human beings need development in order to live well. Intended developments must be people-centered, people-intended and people oriented. (Nkwazi Mhango, 2018, P13, Development Naivety and Emergent Insecurities in a Monopolised World).

The African peoples can not afford a development with post-humanism practices at its heart. Our interconnectivity to our land, languages and humanity practices does not support a space where human beings take a back space, it is not African taught. 

In Maendeleo philosophy, the ability to bring development to ones home area provided a way of shoring up legitimacy, it must be a responsible one based on the consent and needs of its stakeholders . (Nkwazi Mhango, 2018, P14, Development Naivety and Emergent Insecurities in a Monopolised World).

And these sentiments can be uphold by developing solutions that perhaps other countries do not have. The dynamics from North, East, West and South of Africa differ yet the result of the impact was the same. The factors that were implemented were largely the same and were able to be applied with the same result around the continent, so will be the solutions. 

The initiation of change starts with our Heritage management, giving it a new space in our societies. Our heritage and the outcome of the analysis of the artefacts based on the owners interpretations would then inspire new design frameworks and methodologies, leading to unique design outcomes specific to the various African nations.

We need to formulate key questions, Identify continually the problems affecting us and actively solve them. Adjusting our practices and Praxis as required in a flexible manner would allow us more room to make the moves necessary for a new textile industry in Africa.  

Intra-Africa exchanges could contribute to the early growth of many clothing manufacturing as governments adjust their policies to the peoples requests and requirements.  

The traditional textile processes will prove to be having lower accessibility issues then the automated expensive machines yet it can be more time consuming to bring the end product to market. The larger textile industry developments would not have to rely on a single strategy for its deployment, rather the amalgamation of strategies cantered around African taught would usher in the new era of the Africans. 

In order for the textile industry on the African continent to become prosporoues, the handcrafted textiles and the machine produced textiles, we have to bring something unique to the table that is not already here. The main disadvantage we currently have on the continent is the many external nations that have had, and continue to have, a long history in exploiting and looting the continent, a history of re-writting the African stories and appropiating indigenous African designs as their own.

The reclamation of our legacy: The main Phase

This phase has been developing since the declarations of 'indepence' from African nations from 1950's onward. While it had its growing pains, the process of reclamation of our ancestral legacy is desicive, driven by our strong heritage of identity and our strong will to counter historical and future erasure. We demanded the return of the remains of our fathers and mothers that were used as either throphies of battles, 'medical' studies or displayed in zoo's and museums to be gauged at and rediculed. We demanded the return of all our ancestral artifacts that were stolen, alongside recognation of our ancestors legacy. It was an upward battle for black people around the world to counter the mis-education that we inherited from the educational system that we went through which was designed to maintain and sustain a lie designed to oppress the African people around the globe.

We have had many academics that were ignored, discredited and rediculed for their knowledge of African history and African ideologies. Their work was never recognized or actively censored in a system where knowledge had to be filtered through european taught. These academics remained standfast in their arguments and left us with a trail and a body of investigative work that we can use today to further connect the knowledges we once possessed. It is this reconnection, that will pass through our current practices, allowing us to design and produce exceptional products and unique design aestetics for current and future markets.

The Economy of design

' Looking back enables looking foreward.'

The global product trade is driven by designs. Aesthetic design, problem solving designs, ecological design, sustainable design and luxury designs, solving design and product demands that were created through colonization and force.

The values and ideologies of these products does not necessarily represents real solutions for our continent. Some 'solutions' are gateways to bigger problems. Many designs are created to suit the culture, they adress specifically a conteporary solution to a cultural question. Hence you will find for example products in Indonesia and Malaysia that are not suitable for the european market, not because the product is not beautiful and 'modern', but because its specific use addresses a cultural practise that you will not find in Europe, or you will not find sufficiently in Europe to sustain mass imports of that product. It is not economically viable.

Due to enslavement, colonization and brutal force, Europeans saught to tranform certain aspect of our culture in order to secure economic benefits for their businesses.

Contrary to popular knowledge, resist dye was not a new phenomenon to the continent. It was another of the many textile practices that African textile practitioners practiced. It might not of been practiced throughout the continent, but there is clear evidence of resist dying of African traditional textiles, that today is done using wax, but was practised prior using Kasava paste. 

Further research has to be conducted in how this traditional practise can be revived on the continent to avoid environmental problems similarly experienced by other countries. It does not have to be part of our growing processes.

Instead of innovations around further development of the kassave paste as a sustainable and ecological product to use in textile dying, an industry plaqued by poluting its surroundings, a harsher material for the environment, wax, was / is used. It was an existing technique that Europeans were able to trade in, they did not bring the technique to the continent, they first destroyed Africa's textile industry and inserted themselves in it. It was an hostile takeover.

Kassava is a product consumed all over Africa, its biggest producers are African nations such as Nigeria. Devising methods from which resist dye can be used, would not only put made in Africa products on the market but would avoid high cost of import and it would be a product easily available in case of any logistic disturbances. 

Having design solutions that caters to the local culture allows for innovations whitin the culture. This not only contributes to the preservations of the culture but also allows for culture continuation practices in contemporaty settings.

Where traditionally, African artisans and craftmans were hightly valued and respected, changed during the periods of colonizations. Parents only encourages their childrens to pursuit professions such as doctors, lawyers and politicians where the income is perceived as being more secured.  Childrens were sent abroad to Europe and America to study at prestigious schools to only see how the Europeans and Americans value and incorporate their heritage into their daily lifes.

What was described as old on the African continent was placed behind thick secured glass in expensive luxury buildings called museums in Europe. It is alongside this that Africans abroad re-discovered the true value of their culture and perceived how their ancestral artifacts were informing the Europeans and Americans innovations and future develpments. This revelation now provided Africans abroad with the courage neccessary to reclaim their heritage and develop this for their own countries futures. Today you will find South-Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and other African Nations being powerhouses where it comes to innovative fashion design inspired by their own traditions. Textiles and cloths are being innovated by Africans for Africans. African designers are learning about their ancestral practices and combine this with their contemporary design knowledge producing beautiful aestetics, unique to the African continent.

African Design Thinking

Design Innovations informed by traditions, translated and transfered by African designers

African designers have long been under-estimated and neglected, by not only the international community but also by our own societies. Their designs always adressed solutions for the societies that they are part of but more often then not they are overseen in projects where they can be of signigicant impact for the local culture. Like with many aspects of life, it was the European taught and aestetics that was taking presidence over our own, hence African designers inital focus to be recognized in their field is to produce European focused designs. Most of our important artifacts were taken abroad making it inaccessible to children growing up to learn about them in the midst of a European centered curriculum. But children that were sent broad for studies observed how 'old, insignifican, non-existing, backward' objects were taken special spaces in the colonizers communities. They came to understand how their histories was informing their oppressors future and dominance.

The Tellem legacy textiles are a rare collection of over 500 fragments of fabrics found in the caves of Bandiagara, a place in the Republic of Mali, south of the river of Niger.

These fragmens consisted of clothes, blankets and some accessories such as belts and head wears.

While no looms were found in these burial caves, we can re-construct these looms based on the fabrics found, the known regional weaving looms and the culture continuation practices of the region.

Fabrics analysis for the reconstruction of the loom

The fabrics consised of fragments made from wool and cotton. The samples that were examined were not complete loom width.

A sample was 65 cm with the selvage only on one side. This leads to the conslusion that the loom used to weave this piece was larger than 65 cm. In West-Africa the 15-inch loom was made famous, the larger looms are not associated with ancient African weaving tradition but they should.

The sampled fragments were made using both coarse yarn as well as finer structured yarn. They were plain weave, wet-faced plain weave and warp-faced plain weave. The lenght of the warp varied anywhere between 6 meters to 17 meters long.

Technical informations published in the book, Tellem Textiles, based the width of the textiles as being the width of the loom. I strongly disagree with this. It is possible to work all types of width on a wider loom. A loom can have a width of 80 cm, yet textiles of 40, 50, 65 cm can be woven on such loom.

Because a fabric fragment is 15 cm wide does not mean the loom is 15 cm, it could mean that a loom of 70 cm was threaded to produce a piece of 15 cm. It is also known that the looms that produced the Tellem fabrics must of gotten a reed. This conclusion is based on the end result of the designs:

• With a reed weaving one under and one over will produce a textile in warp-faced plain weave, warp threads would be more visible.
• with a reed weaving one under and one over, you can easily produce textiles in plain weave, warp and weft threads can be shown equally.
• Or weft-faced plain weave, making weft threads more visible.

Known regional looms

The West-African region, which largely consist of 2 great empires of Africa; The mali Empire and the Songhai Empire, is known for intricate woven fabrics on single shaft weaving looms. Weavers developed different looms to weave different textile products. They also demonstrated preferences in loom design in relation to the yarn/ fibre type they were using (Rafia, cotton and wool).

Our master weavers also developed looms that were specifically designed to be used by a specific gender, they developed looms for males to weave on and looms for females to weave on.

• The upright weaving loom

The upright weavin loom is a loom that is setup up-right in a vertical position. This loom was/ is used to weave smaller finished projects using courser materials such as Rafia and course wool. They would produce mats, rugs and blankets on these looms.  

• The Horizontal men treadle loom

These horizontal looms were in most cases exclusively used by men. Perhaps due to the physical excersion required in using these types of looms. They were used in the creation of wider cloths.

The West-African region had many more designs of weaving looms, it was numerous yet the only one that has been accosiated with the African traditions of weaving were those that were made accesible for the missionaries that were reporting on this, were able to observe. Perhaps because during this time in Europpe, they did not know this type of loom or they were amazed the type of creativity African weavers derived from this simple loom. These looms were used to weave 15-20 inch stripes of fabrics that were then sold on the market. Buyers would then be able to purchase a variety of stripe patterns and when combinning have a multitute of designed cloth with unique paterns. The original pattern makers!

Looms were further developed by its user over the centuries and these looms were very valuable and passed on. Perhaps this is the reason why no remains of looms were found in the Tellem caves. Each type of loom had many variations throughout the regions.

Cultural practices today

While there was industrialisation in the African textile sectors, the industry at large was desimated by colonization and unfair business strategies, yet the region of the ancient Songhai Empire continued their weaving practises on the local looms. Some of the looms today might have been replaced with a stronger structure and is heavier making the place of work less mobile. The reeds, previously made from thin shavings of wood and strong yarn, are now mosty metal and incase of preference nylon thread. Some weavers still opt to weave on these exact ancestoral designs , many of these looms, because of the quality of wood used, enjoys a long existance .

There were no looms found in the burial caves, while the people buried were buried with the posession they had or practiced prior to dead. This could mean that the looms were considered a valuable posession, that was to be passed on and not taken to the grave.

During this time fabrics were  highly valuable items and used as currency. So the technology to produce currency was of equal value. As many different looms were developed to produce cloth, the Tellem Textiles were very unique among all the heritage textiles of this region because the patterns they designed was not only highly mathematical in nature (creation of a mathematical formula) but their system of work/ of designing the patterns resulted in the perfect infinity pattern creation that was automated already in the 10th century (perhaps even earlier).

What loom would they have designed to be able to construct such patterns?

The few researchers that looked at the heritage textiles found next to these patterns also other designs/ weaving styles that they wanted to attribute to other regions. While this is possible, I would argue of the ingenuity of the Tellem weavers to be able to produce a variety of weaving styles. You have to incorporate legacy practices of the African people today. Culture, Identity and heritage have always been very strong among the African Nations. These strong traditions were passed on from generations to generations and while innovations took place along the way, you could always pin-point the origin.

Why would African weavers not be able to produce a variety of design styles? People moved around the place and nations interacted with eachother.

The Tellem weavers worked on a variety of looms. They would develop, next to the 15-20 inch loom, also wider looms, different versions of the Horizontal treddle loom or more specialised looms for their designs.

The Dogon nation, that currently live in the region, use a version of the horizontal treddle loom. It could be that the Dogon came with this loom to this region, or found this loom there.

The origin of the Tellem people themselves is also a mystery. Could it be that the Tellem people have a habit of moving away when not feeling secure? If they have the habit of moving away where were they prior to moving to the caves, and what made them seek refuge in that area?

Throughout the African continent there are a variety of looms developed for local needs. The Tellem looms needs further research in oder to provide a more accurate quess. For now their textiles gives us tangible proof of limited technical information that could be furter build on only if we find the descendants of the Tellem today.

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