19th Century Sub-Saharan African Clothing

Indigenous Dress and the Impact of Colonialism

Compare Asante and Ewe examples in the guide to kente cloth history.

At the start of the 19th century, sub-Saharan Africa's clothing traditions were extraordinarily diverse. In West Africa, the kente cloth of the Asante kingdom — woven in narrow strips on specialized looms and assembled into brilliantly patterned garments — remained a powerful symbol of status and identity.¹ Yoruba men wove aso oke cloth in narrow strips, some nineteenth-century examples enlivened with imported magenta silk.²⁰ Across the West African savanna, elite men wore voluminous status robes, called riga in Hausa, agbada in Yoruba and boubou in French, often of indigo-dyed strip-woven cotton.¹¹ In East Africa, Maasai men and women around 1900 still dressed entirely in leather, warriors in calfskin cloaks and women in sewn goatskin garments edged with a few rows of beads.¹³ The Iltalala age-set, warriors from 1881 to 1905, were the first to wear beads in larger numbers, and the elaborate beadwork now associated with the Maasai, which signals clan and stage of life, flowered in the twentieth century.^14,13

European colonialism reshaped African dress in uneven and often contradictory ways. Christian missionaries frequently pressed converts to adopt European-style clothing: Lutheran missionaries in the Transvaal treated it as an indispensable step toward becoming Christian, and read a convert's outward appearance as a mirror of his or her inner condition.¹⁵ Yet African communities rarely adopted European clothing on missionaries' terms. In Buganda in the 1880s and 1890s, the court of Kabaka Mwanga appropriated European garments and made them its own, and on Transvaal mission stations converts used European dress above all as a marker of social status.^16,17

Wax Print Cloth and New Textile Economies

One of the most significant textile developments of the century was the introduction of wax print cloth to West Africa.³ Dutch manufacturers, originally producing batik-style fabrics for the Indonesian market, found unexpected demand along the West African coast: Dutch printed cloth was reaching West African ports by about the 1850s, and in the late nineteenth century the Scottish merchant Ebenezer Brown Fleming introduced Dutch-made wax-printed batik imitations adapted to African customers' tastes.^3,4 These machine-printed fabrics were embraced and reinterpreted by West African consumers who assigned local names and symbolic meanings to specific patterns.³

In southern Africa, the Ndebele people developed a distinctive tradition of beaded garments, with surviving examples going back to the late nineteenth century, while Kanga cloths — rectangular printed cotton wraps — emerged as a characteristic garment along the East African coast, in demand there by the 1860s.^10,5,12 The importation of European cloth did not simply replace indigenous textiles; it created new forms of expression. In the Buganda kingdom, bark cloth was made in workshops in almost every village, though its production slowed after Arab caravan traders brought cotton cloth in the nineteenth century,¹⁹ while Yoruba towns such as Abeokuta remained centers of indigo dyeing.⁶ The interplay between local craft traditions and global trade created a textile landscape of remarkable richness and complexity.

Indigenous Innovation and Cultural Adaptation

The 19th century witnessed remarkable creativity in how African communities adapted new materials to existing aesthetic traditions. In southern Africa, Zulu men and women wore beadwork to indicate status and the passing of rites of passage, and to express group values and identities.⁷ Zulu beadwork — intricate patterns of colored glass beads strung into panels, necklaces, and garment embellishments — used imported European trade beads to create a distinctly African visual language: beadwork was exchanged in courtship and could carry messages through its colors and structure, though styles, colors and their meanings varied between groups, from area to area and from one generation to the next.^7,8,9

In West Africa, Yoruba women dyers — notably in Abeokuta, a nineteenth-century center of cotton weaving and indigo dyeing — decorated cotton cloth with tied and stitched resist patterns. This laid the foundations for adire cloth: the name was applied to resist-patterned indigo cloth around the turn of the twentieth century, and the hand-painted starch-paste method (adire eleko) dates from about 1910, when smooth imported shirting gave dyers a new surface.⁶ The Asante continued to innovate in kente weaving — in 1817 the British visitor Thomas Bowdich described cloths made "in all the varieties of colour, as well as pattern" — while maintaining the symbolic pattern systems that made each cloth a wearable text.^2,1 Along the Swahili coast, men wore the kanzu, a long white robe, with a hip wrap and a fez or turban in what a Berlin museum record of 1890 Zanzibar photographs calls the Swahili-Arab style,¹⁸ while women's kanga cloths became everyday dress; the printed Swahili sayings that give kanga a literary dimension were added from the early 1900s.^12,5

Sources

1. NEH on the Road: Wrapped in Pride — National Endowment for the Humanities.
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2. Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee — T. Edward Bowdich, John Murray, 1819 (Project Gutenberg edition).Reference 1
3. Vlisco and West African printed textiles — Textile Research Centre, Leiden.
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4. Brown Fleming and the Haarlem Collection — Helen Elands (ed.), Silvana Editoriale, 2025 (publisher's description).Reference 1
5. Kanga's Woven Voices — Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein, AramcoWorld, 2017.
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6. Nigeria60: Adire Archives — Amanda Kirby Okoye, Horniman Museum, 2020.
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7. Beadwork from Southern Africa — Gerald Klinghardt, Lindsay Callaghan and Sarah Schäfer, Iziko Museums of South Africa, via Google Arts & Culture.
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8. Coupling Up — The Bright Continent: African Art History, Cleveland State University (open textbook).Reference 1
9. Zulu Love Letter — Timothy S. Y. Lam Museum of Anthropology, Wake Forest University, 2013.Reference 1
10. 'Ndebele Beadwork': testament to a creative, resilient African people — The Baltimore Sun, 1990 (review of the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition).Reference 1
11. Prestige robe (riga) — Cleveland Museum of Art.Reference 1
12. Kangas from East Africa and India — Textile Travels, Textile Research Centre, Leiden.
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13. The Beaded and Associated Adornments of the Maasai — Michael Oehrl, BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers 35, 2023.
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14. Maasai beads: the interplay between Europe and Africa — Vanessa Wijngaarden, The Conversation, 2017.Reference 1
15. No longer Adams in a simple Eden: Culture and clothing in Hermannsburg missions in the western Transvaal, 1864-1910 — Kirsten Rüther, African Studies Seminar paper, University of the Witwatersrand, 1997.Reference 1
16. Power Dressing in East Africa: Clothing, Conversion and Culture Change from 1880 to 1895 — Katherine Fiona MacIntyre, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2006.Reference 1
17. Heated Debates Over Crinolines: European Clothing on Nineteenth-century Lutheran Mission Stations in the Transvaal — Kirsten Ruether, Journal of Southern African Studies 28(2), 2002 (abstract, African Union Library).Reference 1
18. Fruit market, Zanzibar (photograph, VIII A 20162) — Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1890, via Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.Reference 1
19. Barkcloth making in Uganda — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2008.Reference 1
20. Nigerian Men's Weaving — Adire African Textiles.Reference 1