Ghanaian interweaving in the nineteenth century: a new perspective on Ewe and Asante textile history

Kente cloth is widely known in West Africa and beyond, especially in the United States. The name refers today to handwoven textiles, often made of rayon with bright color contrasts, which are composed of narrow strips sewn together edge to edge (Fig. 1). Most of the production of kente is currently concentrated in several villages around Kumasi (the Asante region) in the Twi-speaking area of Ghana; the Agotime area and coastal villages along the Keta Lagoon, both Ewe-speaking areas in Ghana and Togo; and in all major towns in this region. Many weaving workshops can also be found in Accra and Lome, and Ewe weavers, with their long tradition of migration, have settled in other major West African cities such as Lagos (Kraamer 2005a:72, 146-7, Clarke 1999:68-9, Klein 1998:37). (1)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The early history of kente cloth has received some scholarly attention (Lamb 1975:103-121; McLeod 1981:153-5; Ross 1998:78, 152), with a focus on textiles woven around Kumasi (Asante cloth). At the end of the 1990s, the history of these textiles was also debated in public discourse in Ghana, mainly in ethnic terms. The Ghanaian media focused especially on the supposed Ewe or Asante origin of kente (Kraamer 2005a:110-11). (2) In this article, I want to add to these discussions a new perspective on the nineteenth century histories of Ewe textiles in relation of Asante cloth, based on a combination of sources that have so far not been often studied. (3) It is possible to trace changes in precolonial African art traditions, even when extant objects from a specific period are limited in number. It is important to investigate this process of change, for although much of the literature in the last few decades has demonstrated over and over again that change lay at the core of many art traditions in Africa, African objects--especially pre-twentieth century works of art--are still often presented ahistorically (cf. Vansina 1984, Picton 1992, Ogbechie 2005:63).

One of the main characteristics of Ewe and Asante textiles is the alternation of weft- and warp-faced plain weave areas in one length of strip (Fig. 2). The use of two pairs of heddles, which enables this specific characteristic and is therefore crucial in the formal developments of both Ewe and Asante textiles, most likely, I argue, originated in the Agotime area. This technique spread to other weaving centers sometime in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century and was fully taken up by Asante and Ewe weavers at least by the middle of the nineteenth century, but probably earlier. The existence of different weaving centers in the Ewe-speaking area, along with the production of different types of textiles at certain points in time, complicates the history of Ewe textiles, in contrast to the more linear development of Asante textiles suggested by other writers (Lamb 1975:103-21; McLeod 1981:153-6; Ross 1998:78, 152). One indication of the several separate, though often interrelated paths at different weaving centers can be found in the current local linguistic terminology for classifying textiles in these places.

Techniques and Designs

In the Ewe-speaking area, the range of techniques and designs was already wide at the end of the nineteenth century, even though warp-faced plain-weave textiles, both from hand- and machine-spun cotton, outnumbered all other types (Figs. 3-4). Weavers from different centers east of the Volta river--including Agotime and the coastal area, the (Twi-speaking) Akwamu area around Anum, and the Peki region and further inland--produced a variety of textile types: warp-faced plain-weave textiles with warp-stripe patterns; weft-faced plain-weave textiles (Fig. 5); balanced plain-weave textiles with block patterns formed by different colored wefts (Fig. 6); supplementary weft-float figurative and nonfigurative motifs on a plain ground and framed by weft-faced blocks (Figs. 7-10); and weft-faced bands on a mainly warp-faced textile (Fig. 11). (4) It is unlikely for all of these to have been woven in any one place.

[FIGURES 3-11 OMITTED]

Until the first half of the nineteenth century, the range of techniques and designs woven in the Asante area is less clear. As there was only one weaving center, in and around Kumase, the variation was probably less than in the Ewe-speaking area. Asante weaving evolved from a warp-faced plain-weave tradition; there is no evidence of weft-faced plain-weave textiles. Asante weavers used red materials unravelled from other textiles (Romer 1965 [1760]:36; Bowdich 1966 [1819] :35), which they probably also used to weave balanced plain-weave textiles with weft- block and weft-stripe patterns formed by different colored wefts (Fig. 6). Some writers have suggested that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Asante weavers could have used some supplementary wefts to make weft-faced bands or even weft-float motifs (Lamb 1975:95-5, Ross 1998:152), but there is no hard evidence for this theory except that one would expect it would take a tradition more than a few decades to develop the complicated cloth with weft-float motifs and weft blocks (hereafter called a warp-faced textile with weft blocks) that appear in Basel Mission photographs from the 1880s (see BMA QD--30.044.0041 and D-30.18.066; Kraamer 2005a:175-6, 534). (5)