Contemplating African Quilts
Awash In Colors And Textures

The African quilts that we see and cherish -- beautiful hand-woven fabrics -- become more pleasing with time. Whenever we relax we can feel their incredible influence wash over us.

The quilt magically wraps us in a visual experience that's the visual equivalent of blues, jazz or gospel, rich with color and symbolism.

African quilts have their roots in the distant past, resplendent with their particular textile techniques and cultural traditions. Each strip, all the bright colors, every design, pattern, and improvisation is a symbolic representation.

Can you imagine that? African quilts were produced two thousand years ago! As cotton was cultivated along the Niger River in Mali and used for fishing nets and woven cloth, quilts appeared.

African Quilts And Color

Blue and white designs, seen in much earlier cloths, are still made with local cotton dyed indigo blue. More recently, colorful fabrics were made by dismantling European cloth and redesigning the bright colors African-style.

Colorful Nasadua cloth, manufactured by the Asante weavers in Ghana, is the most popular West African textile. Formerly silk, it has been made with rayon since about 1947.

Strips are the preferred form in many African textiles whether they are woven, tie-dyed, starch-resist-dyed, or wax-resist-dyed. Cloth strips are a portable art that permits fluid designs in African quilts.

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Strips are such a vibrant tradition that they are an integral part of ceremonial costumes. For example, the Yoruba Egungun society in Nigeria honors ancestors, and creates festival costumes that young men wear to portray the ancestor's spirit.

African Symbols And African Craft

Maude Southwell Wahlman, writes in her book Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (2nd Edition) of the African influence on the history of music, dance, and speech in the New World. African influence on quilt making, an American folk art, is less well known.

One can trace African textile techniques, religious symbols, and aesthetic traditions, adaptations in the New World, to African American textile innovators. African American quilts are a unique blend of various African, Native American, and European traditions.

African quilt making resulted from trading between Brazil, Surinam, Haiti, Cuba, other Caribbean islands, Mexico, and the southern United States. Ms. Wahlman writes that men had traditionally been the primary textile artists in Africa, while on American plantations; the owners adhered to the European system of labor division.

African women became the principal weavers, seamstress, and quilters in southern society. African women produced utilitarian and decorative African quilts for both black and white households.

Many of their quilts were done in the traditional Anglo-American styles. However, those quilts made for personal, often utilitarian uses by African Americans were designed and stitched with African traditions in mind.

Thus African American women preserved many African textile traditions and passed them on from generation to generation over several hundred years.

Because improvisation is basic to many African aesthetic traditions, this heritage is not static. Each generation, indeed each quilter, is free to borrow from other traditions and add elements from his or her own cultural history."

More Interesting Tidbits

Other historic facts show that quilting is found on ancient Egyptian robes, on 19th and 20th century cloth armor worn to protect horses and cavalrymen, and also on protective charms of cloth and leather.

Piecing can be directly traced back to an Egyptian canopy quilt made from cut squares of dyed gazelle leather, circa 980 B.C. Piecing was also found in 8th century India, and the Chinese term po-na i means "something made of a hundred patches."

Some similar designs in African quilted textiles and African American quilts may be coincidental. This could be due to the technical aspects of piecing that cuts the cloth into geometric renderings such as squares and triangles.

Each technique: piecing, appliqué, and quilting - were found in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States; yet certain African American quilts are quite different from European or Anglo-American quilts. Their unique facets lie in diverse aesthetic principles, and differing technical and religious dimensions.

Stripping, Not What You Think

Strips are a major construction technique, a primary design element, and a symbolic form in West African, Caribbean, and African American textiles. Since the 11th century, most cloth in West Africa has been constructed from strips woven on men's small portable looms.

Most likely invented by the Mande peoples; strip-weaving techniques expanded by Mande Dyula traders travelling throughout West Africa. Long, narrow strips, once used as a form of money, are woven plain or with colorful patterns.

Some strips are gently tacked together to permit air to pass through, a form of a screen. The Tuareg use such cloths as tent hangings.

Woven strips are frequently sewn together into much larger fabrics to be worn as clothing or hung on the wall or as a banner. This process is so ancient as to be timeless and has become a tradition, one that has moved into the realm of aesthetic pleasure.

Isn't it great to know how and why unique objects come in to our lives and how African fashions can change and move you!

• Wahlman, Maude Southwell (2001). Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (2nd Edition). Tinwood Books. ISBN 1844210448.

I'm grateful to Ms. Wahlman for inspiring me to create this page on the quilts of Africa.

Feeling like an African quilt? Click the "Art For Sale" button on the menu to the left and browse my catalog of art. You just might be surprised to find some bold patterns there!

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