Strip Weaving: Côte d'Ivoire's Hand-Woven Cloth Traditions (Baoulé, Senufo) and Their Link to Ghana's Kente

In Côte d'Ivoire (in West Africa, French-speaking, the world's largest cocoa producer), many traditional hand-woven cloths are not made as one large piece. Instead, weavers first produce long, narrow strips and then sew them together side by side. This "strip weaving" is a technical logic shared across West Africa, and its best-known example is Ghana's kente. Once you understand the principle, you can read the structure, and the value, of hand-woven cloth from all over Côte d'Ivoire.

The basic principle of strip weaving

Taking kente as an example, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) explains that the weaver works on a narrow loom to produce a very long strip roughly the width of a hand, which is then cut into lengths and sewn edge to edge to form a complete cloth. Because the pattern blocks on each length must be exactly the same size for the design to line up once the strips are joined, the weaver has to calculate precisely while weaving. An Ewe kente in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York was made from a single long strip cut into twenty-four lengths and sewn together edge to edge.

Baoulé: tie-dyed warps and carved heddle pulleys

Material from the George Washington University Museum describes the division of labour in Baoulé weaving: women spin cotton into fine yarn and tie-dye the warp threads in indigo (that is, warp ikat); men do the weaving and sew the strips into a finished cloth. The pulleys that hang above the loom to separate the warp threads are often carved by Baoulé men and topped with birds, animals, masks or human figures. Such cloths are mostly worn by men as mantles or wrappers on special occasions.

The same source notes that the Baoulé learned the tie-dye technique in the 1950s and 1960s from the Dyula, a people known for their trading skills, and that the red stripes along the edges of the cloth also come from the Dyula. A Baoulé wrapper at the Cooper Hewitt design museum shows what the finished piece looks like: blue-and-white tie-dyed stripes woven into narrow strips, then sewn together with an offset to form a checkerboard, the tie-dye giving soft, blurred edges between the squares.

Senufo: strips as the base for Korhogo cloth

In the north, Senufo women likewise spin the yarn while men weave narrow strips about 10 centimetres wide. Sewn together, these strips also form the ground cloth for the famous painted Korhogo cloth. Wikipedia's entry adds that Korhogo cloth painters use strips of hand-spun cotton woven by neighbouring Dyula weavers.

The link with kente: one principle, different paths

There is also a historical geographical connection: the George Washington University material notes that the Baoulé migrated into Côte d'Ivoire in the 17th century from what is now southern Ghana, then the area of the Asante kingdom. Available sources do not, however, describe a direct transmission of weaving techniques between the two, so the safer conclusion is that they belong to the same regional family of strip weaving, each having developed its own patterns and uses.

One line for Asian readers

Next time you see a West African hand-woven cloth, look for the seams first: building a whole pattern out of narrow strips is where this craft shows its true mastery.

---

References: GW Textile Museum Collection Stories — Baule mantle; Cooper Hewitt — Wrapper (Ivory Coast); Minneapolis Institute of Art — Asante Kente Cloth; The Met — Man's kente (prestige cloth); Brown University, Off the Roll — Korhogo Textile (Senufo); Wikipedia — Korhogo cloth