The History of African Textiles: A Continent, Not a Print

By Liza Colbeck, founder of IN OUR NAME

A few years into working with the African Union, someone showed me a length of Kuba cloth from the Congo, dense, geometric, the surface raised like velvet. I'd spent three decades in fashion by then. I had never seen anything like it, and I had no idea why not.

That gap, between how rich this history actually is and how little of it reaches the outside world, is what this piece is trying to close. Not the whole story. Nobody has room for that. But enough of it that "African print" stops sounding like an adequate description of anything.

One Word, Fifty-Four Countries

Start with the problem: "African textiles" gets used as if it means one thing. It doesn't. It means Ghanaian royal cloth and Congolese raffia velvet and Kenyan striped cotton and South African beadwork that functions like a written language, traditions separated by thousands of miles and, in some cases, thousands of years, that happen to share a continent and nothing else. Lumping them together isn't just lazy. It erases the thing that makes each of them worth knowing about in the first place.

West Africa: Cloth as Rank, Record, and Rumour

Ghana's Kente is the one most people think they know, strip-woven cotton and silk associated with the Asante and Ewe peoples. The popular version of its origin story, two men taught to weave by watching a spider spin, makes for a nice legend and a shaky history: real scholarship treats the actual origin as genuinely disputed, with competing Asante and Ewe claims. What survives the argument is the meaning: Kente was royal and ceremonial, and its colours carried meaning, though not fixed or universal meaning, readings shift by specific cloth, region, and oral tradition, but gold is widely tied to wealth, green to growth, black to the presence of the ancestors.

Mali's bògòlanfini, mud cloth, is a slower, muddier kind of magic. Bamana men weave the cotton strips. Bamana women do the alchemy: soaking the cloth in a bark solution that turns it gold, then hand-painting fermented river mud onto it in patterns that react with the fabric's tannins and darken to black and brown as it dries. Nothing about that pattern is random. It's a code, tied to specific events, specific meanings, readable to anyone raised inside it.

Nigeria's àdìrẹ belongs to Yoruba women, who developed genuinely sophisticated resist-dye techniques, tied, stitched, or painted freehand with cassava paste, centuries before Western tie-dye borrowed the same basic idea and stripped out most of the skill.

And then there's the fabric everyone assumes is the oldest of all, and is actually the newest: wax print, the "Ankara" you see everywhere. Here's the part most retellings leave out, and it's a genuinely strange one. In the 1800s, the Dutch were trying to mechanically knock off Indonesian batik and sell it back to Indonesia. It flopped, the Javanese could spot a fake, and the crackled "flaw" in the machine print read as cheap rather than beautiful. Around the same time, the Dutch colonial army had recruited thousands of West African soldiers, mostly from the Gold Coast, to fight in the Dutch East Indies. The often-told version says these soldiers came home with real Javanese batik in their trunks, and that the taste for it they left behind is what made the failed Dutch imitation sellable in West Africa instead. It's a genuinely good story. It might also be more legend than fact, historians have pointed out that most of the recruits weren't paid until their final port, which makes "returning home with fabric-filled trunks" logistically awkward. Either way, the fabric that gets called quintessentially African started as a failed Indonesian knockoff, sold into West Africa on the back of a war most people have never heard of. Precision matters here too: it's "wax print," not a stand-in word for anything colourful.

East Africa: The Cloth Nobody Writes About

This is the part of the story that gets left out most often, and it happens to be the part closest to home for us.

The khanga was born in Zanzibar sometime in the 1880s, most likely from plain imported cotton that traders began dyeing and block-printing with spotted patterns, said to resemble the guinea fowl, kanga in Swahili, which is where the name comes from. Every khanga carries a border and a central design, both present from the cloth's earliest days in Zanzibar in the 1870s and 80s. The printed message came slightly later, appearing around the turn of the century, at first often in Arabic script, before becoming a standardised feature of the form. In an era when East African women's public speech was tightly constrained, that printed line became one of the few ways to say something in public and get away with it, a proverb, a warning, occasionally a pointed jab at a rival or a husband, hiding in plain sight on a piece of cloth everyone assumed was just decoration.

The kikoy is something else entirely: woven, not printed, its pattern built into the structure of the cloth by coastal weavers rather than dyed on afterward. Its striped cotton tradition owes a real debt to the Indian Ocean trade that connected the Swahili coast to India, Arabia, Persia, and the Somali Benadir coast for over a thousand years before Europe ever arrived, merchants along these routes brought fine cotton cloth into Zanzibar, Mombasa, and Lamu, and the striped weaving tradition that grew up alongside it is still visible in kikoy today.

Central Africa: The Deepest Toolkit on the Continent

If any region genuinely earns the claim of the widest range of textile technique, it's the Kuba kingdom of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it's worth actually explaining why rather than just asserting it.

Kuba cloth starts with raffia palm fibre, harvested, dried, and woven by men into a base cloth. Then it passes to women, who do the real magic across four distinct techniques: embroidery, appliqué, patchwork, and dyeing. The most famous result is cut-pile embroidery, sometimes called "Kasai velvet," raffia thread stitched under the base cloth and trimmed so close to the surface it develops an actual plush, velvet-like nap, without a single fibre of actual silk or wool involved. Finished cloths were wrapped waist-down, layer over layer, for ceremonies, and in the nineteenth century, decorated raffia cloth functioned as genuine currency, used to pay tribute and settle legal disputes. It was also buried with the dead, wrapped around the body at the conclusion of a funeral, cloth as both status symbol and final rite.

Bark Cloth: Older Than Weaving Itself

Uganda's bark cloth predates weaving as a technology entirely, it's made by beating the inner bark of the Mutuba fig tree until it softens into fabric, no loom involved. In the Buganda kingdom, this has historically been the hereditary work of the Ngonge clan, producing cloth specifically for the royal family and, more broadly, the community, worn as ceremonial dress, used in burial shrouds, and treated as a marker of status and continuity between generations. The tree survives its own harvest and keeps producing, a genuinely sustainable material practice that predates the word "sustainable" by centuries. UNESCO proclaimed it a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage in 2005, then formally inscribed it on its Representative List in 2008.

Southern Africa: Beadwork as a Spoken Language, and Shweshwe as a Cloth of Its Own

These are two entirely different things, worth keeping separate rather than folding into one paragraph.

Beadwork among the Zulu, Xhosa, and Ndebele peoples of South Africa functions less like decoration and more like a language with real grammar, colour and pattern combinations that could communicate courtship interest, age, marital status, and social rank to anyone fluent enough to read them. The raw materials shifted over centuries, from shell and bone to imported glass as trade routes expanded, but the underlying code held. Xhosa beadwork in particular was suppressed for periods during apartheid and, in that context, wearing it became an act of quiet defiance as much as adornment.

Shweshwe, by contrast, is a printed cotton fabric, not beaded at all, originally imported from Europe in the nineteenth century and absorbed so completely into Lesotho and South African daily life through generations of washing and wear that it now reads as thoroughly local, a foreign textile that got claimed rather than an indigenous one that got borrowed. Its story runs in the opposite direction from wax print's, and that contrast is worth sitting with.

How Colour Actually Got Made

Before synthetic dye existed, colour came out of the ground, and the process could be genuinely alchemical. Indigo, made from plants including Lonchocarpus cyanescens, goes through fermentation and oxidation, the fabric emerging green from the vat before turning blue in open air, a transformation dramatic enough that indigo dyers across West and Central Africa were treated with something close to reverence. Camwood gave the deep red-orange reserved for royalty. Kola nut, more often chewed as a gesture of respect than used for dye, produced brown, and layered with indigo, near-black. Baobab bark yielded green. Hibiscus gave reds, pinks, and purples across West and North Africa. None of it was decorative in the casual sense. Colour signalled wealth, protection, status, and mourning, sometimes all at once, and every one of those dyes had to be found, prepared, and understood before a single thread went into the vat.

Embellishment carried its own separate weight. Cowrie shells, gathered from the Indian Ocean, functioned as actual currency across both West and East Africa well into the twentieth century, the East African coast was in fact a major historical conduit for the Maldive-sourced cowries that circulated inland, and independently as a widespread symbol of fertility and protection, sewn onto garments, worked into Yoruba masks, stitched alongside seeds into Kuba's finest ceremonial cloths. A shell that could buy something and mean something at the same time is not a small detail. It's the whole point: almost nothing on this continent's textiles was ever purely decorative.

Why This Still Matters

Cloth across Africa has functioned as record as much as covering, marking political events, the arrival of new religions, colonial rule, resistance to it. History in Africa can genuinely be read in cloth, not as a metaphor, but as something closer to literal fact. Understanding even a fraction of that, which fabric comes from where, what it actually meant before it became a pattern on a runway, changes how you look at all of it. That's really all this piece is for.