Black Material Geographies

Episode 2

Precolonial Textile Cultures, Pt.2

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

West Africa was the center of cotton production as early as the 11th century. But we often don't hear about this history. When we do hear about Black people in cotton, it is almost exclusively through the lens of slavery and the Americas. However, Tropical Africans were enslaved in no small part because of their expertise in agricultural cultivation and their experience in textile manufacture. In his book, Precolonial African Material Culture, my dad, Baba, has a chapter specifically on textile manufacturing.

Tarik Farrar:

One was that kind of old, that demon, that's still inside of me, of Africans of the Tarzan movies, and Africans running around almost naked or running around wearing raggedy animal skins. Even when Africans wore animal skins they were not raggedy, they tended to be very well made. But textile manufacturing in particular, I talk about barkcloth, which is not technically a textile. Textile manufacturers involves weaving in particular. It fascinated me because what's clearly the case is that as early as 500 BC people in West Africa where weaving something. Now we know that from the archeological culture, Nigeria, the Nok, N-O-K culture, which was long seen as the earliest iron working culture in West Africa, now it turned out not to be the case. But it was like 500 BC, it's in Nigeria.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

For some context in 500 BC, the entire world population was a hundred million and only 15 million humans inhabited the Western Hemisphere. All to say, textile cultivation and production in Tropical Africa is ancient and has a long history.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

My name is Teju Adisa-Farrar, speaking to you from the unseated territory of the Ohlone people. Welcome back to Black Material Geographies. Throughout the continent of Africa, humans were producing fiber and creating textiles in a way that we would now consider regenerative. For several centuries most products were created using only local natural materials because that's what was mostly available. From batik fabric to [mud cloth 00:10:43], there are thousands of traditions in Tropical Africa that use natural fibers to create cloth and use plants to dye them.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Mud cloth dates back to before the 12th century and originated in the country now called Mali. The Bambara people created and perfected this process. The Bambara word for mud cloth is Bògòlanfini. "Bògò" means clay or mud, "lan" means by way, and "fini" means cloth. Even in the language it describes the materials used in the process. Baba explains the process of how some fabrics were made in precolonial Africa.

Tarik Farrar:

The whole business of making cotton textiles, the types of looms, that kind of double-head loom, which was first invented in Iran and Persia centuries ago. And it spread throughout West Asia and North Africa, as a result of the spread of Islam. That all came in one package. The people who adopted this technology modified it. They took that loom and they transformed it. So, rather than producing wide strips of cloth, for example, they tended to produce very narrow strips of cloth, long narrow strips of cloth, which they then wove together.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Which is how mud cloth is made also?

Tarik Farrar:

Yes. Yes. I mean, because that's the way that it gets transformed in Africa. And then something like mud cloth, for example, the way that dyeing takes place is also something that's developed locally. So the technology is introduced a thousand years ago, but very quickly it's adapted to local tastes, and the availability of things to use is dye. Indigo dye, for example, is very common in West Africa, comes from two different plants. And that was something that was mastered in West Africa, particularly in the region that's now covers most of Northern Nigeria in adjacent parts of Niger. Primarily the Hausa people developed this type of indigo dyeing, which became very popular throughout the Islamic world. And some of the cloths found its way in Spain because it was this really lustrous deeply dyed indigo.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

So well before the trans-Atlantic slave trade artisanally made African textiles were finding their way around the Eastern Hemisphere of the world. Beyond textiles, the landscape of Africa has been transported around the world to benefit all of us. It is really not an exaggeration to say that all of us have a piece of Africa in our homes.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

The world owes a debt to Africa for the resources that have been extracted that we all interact with and use on a daily basis. Approximately $41 billion leaves Africa every year. But when put in context of the overall GDP of Africa, it's over $7 trillion. One of the most well-known resources extracted from central Africa is cobalt, which is a mineral used in nearly every smartphone, laptop, and electrical vehicle battery.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Most of the world's cobalt comes from the Congo, which sits on top of more than three million metric tons of cobalt, which is about half of the planet's supply. The Congo's resource-rich lands have been plundered by Western powers for centuries. The Congo was a colony of Belgium until 1961, and under King Leopold II, as many as 10 million Congolese were killed. Some refer to this as the Rubber Terror. It has been called that because most of the violence and killing was done to extract natural rubber from the Congo for export, mostly to Europe and other places in the West. Kenyan artist, Tahir Karmali's series called STRATA, thinks about this extraction of materials from Africa and who benefits from it.

Tahir Karmali:

I just really interested in this notion of extraction of material from one location to be burned or used in another place. That eventually in the long run affects the environment and the ecology of which that material has been mined for the betterment of the simplicity of people's lives outside of that particular place. And then now, thinking about it in a larger scale, just how much Africa in general, especially Sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing these problems of climate change and climate degradation around them, for pretty much something that a lot of the people that live in that part of the world are not responsible for. It's an unfortunate reality where materials are extracted from one place, burnt in another place, with a betterment of other people. And then the degradation of the landscape from the people that those materials were originally extracted from, which is just a terrible reality, honestly.

Tahir Karmali:

And so the STRATA series really kind of focuses on that particular aspect of how supply chain works, and supply chain economics works, and then how these materials are transported from one place to another. And so that's basically kind of like the impetus of like thinking about the STRATA series, especially when it comes to mining and extraction of materials from the Congo, specifically.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

As with most extraction, the degradation takes place on the land, our physical environment, and the humans who are forced to provide the labor. The violence done to the earth to extract the resources that create the materials of our lives, has also been done to Black bodies whose livelihoods and lives depend on our consumption. When we look at material culture we have to understand not only its impact on the physical environment, but also the impact on our social and cultural environment. So while cobalt is central to the technological architecture of our everyday lives, Tahir thinks of textiles as part of human architecture in our everyday lives.

Tahir Karmali:

Well, I think textile is like our primary architecture. Like the first thing that really, when you think about the structures that surround us in terms of protection. The first thing that you put on your body is a textile. And so I think that I like using textiles because in its abstraction, because it's so immediately references the body, and anything to do with fibers or anything that we put close to ourselves. And also I really like textile because of its ability to sort of take different forms and channels in physical spaces. And it's easier to use textiles to reference the body. Especially, if you look at a lot of my work, they have this sort of more portrait versus the landscape orientation. So, it's definitely to do with how close we are to interacting with these materials. Everybody, but most people in the world are always constantly interacting with these fibers and textiles, and what is the material that surrounds it.

Tahir Karmali:

And also, especially with textiles, what's really interesting is how all of them are just made so differently. And how a lot of people are very unaware of how textile is made or even like cotton or... A lot of people actually, they can understand that cotton is grown, but they don't really understand necessarily how cotton becomes something. Or even silk, or how even raffia or Kuba cloth, or even mud cloth for that matter, literally that's cotton. But a lot of people don't really understand how textiles come into being, which I think it's interesting as a way to sort of teach people about how textiles are actually made, but then also pair it with a story which has a larger context.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

One such textile that Tahir works with is Kuba cloth. Kuba cloth has a long history in East and Central Africa. Like mud cloth, traditional Kuba is created using plants that grow naturally in the region in which it is made.

Tahir Karmali:

Kuba cloth is basically a raffia product, so it's made from raffia. It's very close to a palm based product. So that's basically dried and woven together and then beat so that it becomes sort of soft like a cotton, almost. And typically used for either room dressing or dressing architecture like interior adornment, also used for ceremonial performances and purposes. So, it's something that's like very dear to the Kuba Kingdom and Kuba tribes. It's typically dyed with a type of root, of which I should actually have on hand. It's a kind of... How do I say? Root dye and it's called [twool 00:12:06], actually. And it comes from also a fruit as well. And so they believe a lot about that dye holds some elements of spirituality, and so some of it is dyed. And it's interesting because it's a collaborative process between men and women as well in the tribe where the men weave and beat the cloth together.

Tahir Karmali:

Well, the women weave and then the men beat the cloth, and then they harvest the raffia itself. And then it's later adorned and dyed by the women. It's kind of interesting because the cloth itself, how they decide to create the patterns is very modernist. And it has these sort of abstract forms that are not necessarily something that you would typically associate with what the West would typically associate with African pattern making. And they're just really incredibly beautiful, especially the traditional ones, like the really old ones are very interesting. Nowadays you see a lot of Kuba cloth in interior design, you see it in Restoration Hardware.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Similar to Collective Closets, Tahir's art brings traditional artisanal African practices into modern conversations about aesthetics. Just as Mudcloth has become a popular home decor trend without any mention of its West African origins, you've probably seen a contemporary imitation of Kuba cloth and not even known.

Tahir Karmali:

And all of these sort of upscale furniture businesses in stores, and so they have these, they make cushions out of it, they make all these kind of things. But what they're using, isn't sort of like the traditional authentic way of actually making it. It's kind of like a short process, so it's similar to how you have fast fashion, there's also fast interiors. So, they just don't take the time work with villages and work with people to actually make it. They kind of develop like a... Appropriate the pattern making side of it, and a little bit to do with the raffia. I guess they use a little bit of raffia, but the way that they treat it's like a thicker weave. It's not necessarily as fine or as refined as traditional Kuba cloth.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

What is part of the process of creating the traditional Kuba cloth that you can identify as being different from this manufactured Kuba cloth?

Tahir Karmali:

Well, you see they have this really thicker sort of warp and weft. The warps and wefts of the textile are thicker, so they're less refined. In Kuba cloth, when you pull apart the leaves of the raffia after it's dried, they would actually pull thinner strands versus thicker strands. And so you would have thinner strands of raffia, which makes it sort of softer and more malleable. Then that would then be later beaten until it becomes soft and then the fibers are broken.

Tahir Karmali:

The horizontal fibers go in one direction, once those are beaten, they can kind of like separate even further. So, then it actually feels very similar to a raw silk or like a raw cotton or thin cotton material. It bends easier and it has a better drape and then it feels better on the body. But what you have with these other fast interior... Yes, they would use raffia, they would use these materials, but you'll have a wider warp and weft. So, you can actually visually see the weaving itself, but like the traditional Kuba cloth, you'll have to go really, really close to it to actually see the actual weave in the textile itself.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Authentic Kuba cloth is made by people from the Kuba tribe. The process is not fast and requires a lot of skill, often when traditional African culture is appropriated the version that results is much cheaper and less refined. But even before cultural appropriation, colonial powers literally took material culture out of Africa. Kuba cloth is one example.

Tahir Karmali:

Well, I think for the most part, when you see commercial Kuba cloth, like things in interior design stores, very few of them are actually from the Kuba tribes or the Kuba Kingdoms. Because actually a majority of them are acquired, well, not acquired, but were stolen and placed in museums across the world. So, a lot of the ones that you see in interior stores that would either be made somewhere in China or some sort of fast producing factory country in Africa. I can't imagine Restoration Hardware or anyone actually going to a village and waiting years for the amounts of product that they need, because it is a very slow process.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

About how long does it take to produce a garment for example, or a large piece of cloth that you might use for an installation?

Tahir Karmali:

Well, for me, it like a year to get all of the pieces of Kuba cloth that I needed. They're using this primarily for their own traditional ceremonial and adornment purposes. There might be some villages and some people who have managed to sort of turn it into an export business, but there's no way that these can actually get that refined level of Kuba cloth to a large market like Restoration Hardware or places that have such a high turnover. But you would be able to go to an antique store or some places in here in Brooklyn that specifically have African textiles. Those would be the incredibly expensive pieces of textile compared to what would be sold in a more sort of commercial space.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

In the Western world, we walk around consuming culture that has originated on the continent of Africa, with little or no recognition given to indigenous Africans who cultivated and developed aesthetics that so many humans around the world appreciate today. The exclusion of pre-colonial Africa's contributions to the world is a result of racist ideas developed to justify looting Africa and enslaving Africans in the Americas. Baba's book aims to challenge the stereotypes of Africa's inferiority.

Tarik Farrar:

The first half of the book simply looks at the development of the ideas about black inferiority. The first half deals with that, and how these ideas get into when African history begins to develop people begin to pay attention to it. In the second half of the 20th century, you begin to get African history classes. This notion of Africa has all of these ideas in it. These racist ideas that come from the past. So, what the first half of the book does is it follows the development of these ideas and then it attempts to refute them. But in order to refute them, of course you have to provide evidence of that.

Tarik Farrar:

And that's where the second half of the book comes in. It looks at these different aspects of material culture, African farming agriculture is seen as being primitive and back, that has to be addressed, and it does. The idea that African metallurgy of all things was somehow primitive. African made better steel than Europeans did for centuries. For centuries, they made better steel, better iron, the furnace technology was more advanced. The methods of producing different iron/steel of different qualities, I mean all that stuff was there. So, when Europeans first appeared in Africa, they didn't have anything to teach Africans about making iron.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

When we look to the past, we are able to understand why certain things now are overlooked and intentionally ignored. Thinking about materials, be it intellectually, as Baba does, using art as Tahir does, or in your brand as Collective Closets is doing, gives us insight into our current realities.

Tahir Karmali:

Any way of making something in this kind of old school or traditional way has always fascinated me. And I don't think that necessarily to talk about our contemporary issues, do we have to use contemporary materials to do so. I think that you can critique the world around us still using these older sort of strategies. And I kind of like that.

Tahir Karmali:

It's not that I'm like a Luddite in any way. I do think that technology has some benefits, but I think about how do we make people understand that there is a materiality and a humanity behind all of these particular machines that we use day to day. Because for the most part, a lot of them exist in our world in this kind of alien way. Like if you think about how you open an iPhone box or like how you would engage with an LED screen, it just feels very removed from sort of a tangible human reality. So, I like this idea of converting these materials into something that is immediately attached to our body. Because essentially they are actually made from our planet and they are actually helpful, but also very harmful at the same time, like everything else around us.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

It's time for the wind down. I invite you to take a deep breath and stretch your body. Release tension in your shoulders, jaw, neck. Taking a moment to reflect on and process our conversations today, our journey into traditional African textiles and artisanal approaches to fiber, our journey of honoring the earth under the continent of Africa that all humans benefit from. Let's just take a few moments to reflect on the themes we dove into today. I invite you to take a deep breath and thank yourself for listening to something new today. I invite you to take a deep breath and reflect on this debt we owe to Africa, to the humans whose labor creates our material realities. They are the ones owe our lifestyle to. Thank you to the land from which the world's resources come, Africa. Thank you for caring about Africa's innovative, ancient past, and honoring its future. Thank you for listening, learning, and experiencing the material geographies that we are all made of.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

You can subscribe to Black Material Geographies anywhere you get your podcast. Black Material Geographies is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. This podcast is a team effort. Thank you to the Black Material Geographies team, my Producer, Tiffani Rozier; Audio Editor, Rhae Royal; Researcher, Haven Ogbaselase; and Intern, Kai Stone.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield; Whetstone Radio Collective Head of Podcast, Celine Glasier; Sound Engineer, Max Kotelchuck; Associate Producer, Quentin Lebeau; Production Assistant, Amalissa Uytingco; and Sound Intern, Simon Lavender. With music by Philip Kelechi Nnamdi Iroh.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

You can learn more about this podcast at whetstoneradio.com, on Instagram and Twitter at @whetstoneradio. Subscribe to our YouTube channel Wetstone Radio Collective for more podcast video content. You could learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at whetstonemagazine.com.