The History of Clothing

Early Modern · Sub-Saharan Africa · 1500 - 1800

Early Modern Sub-Saharan African Clothing

From the gold-threaded kente of the Asante court to the coral-beaded regalia of Benin, early modern African textile traditions reflected sophisticated statecraft, thriving trade networks, and extraordinary artistic ingenuity.

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West African Textile Kingdoms

Brass plaque from the Kingdom of Benin showing a mounted figure flanked by attendants in patterned wrappers, British Museum British Museum, London. Photo: Mike Peel. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Asante Empire of present-day Ghana elevated kente cloth into one of the world's most recognizable textile traditions. Woven on narrow strip looms by male weavers, kente consisted of long, thin bands of silk or cotton stitched together into a large wrapper. Each pattern carried a specific name and meaning — some were reserved exclusively for royalty. The Asante sourced silk for their finest kente by unraveling imported European and Asian fabrics and re-weaving the threads into distinctly African patterns, demonstrating how global trade was absorbed and transformed by local artistic traditions. Kente was not only an Asante art: Ewe weavers to the east developed their own tradition, typically in cotton and often with figurative motifs such as birds.

Further east, the Kingdom of Benin (in present-day Nigeria) developed a court dress tradition of extraordinary elaboration. The Oba (king) and his chiefs wore garments adorned with coral beads — vast quantities strung into crowns, high collars, necklaces, beaded shirts, and aprons that sheathed the body in red. Coral was a royal monopoly, and its display signaled proximity to divine kingship. Beyond coral, Benin's weavers produced fine cotton textiles, while the kingdom's famous brass plaques depict warriors and courtiers wearing elaborate wrappers, leopard-skin regalia, and iron or brass ornaments that reflected a sophisticated visual language of rank and power.

Trade, Transformation, and Textile Exchange

Seventeenth-century Kongo cushion cover of woven raffia with interlaced geometric pattern, Etnografiska museet, Stockholm Etnografiska museet, Stockholm. Photo: Rose-Marie Westling. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5.

The early modern period brought transformative new materials into sub-Saharan African dress through expanding trade networks. From the Indian Ocean coast, Indian cotton textiles — block-printed and resist-dyed — flowed into East and Central Africa, becoming integrated into local dress customs. Along the West African coast, European traders — the Portuguese from the fifteenth century, followed by the Dutch and English — brought trade cloth, much of it Indian cotton re-exported through Europe alongside European fabrics, which African consumers adopted selectively, favoring certain colors and patterns while rejecting others.

Despite these imports, indigenous textile production remained vibrant. In present-day Mali, Fulani (Fulbe) communities became known for khasa (kaasa) blankets — thick wool wraps, sometimes incorporating handspun cotton, with geometric patterns; most surviving examples date from the 20th century, so how far back the form goes is uncertain. The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria developed aso oke cloth, a prestige fabric woven by men in narrow strips on double-heddle looms (Yoruba women wove broader cloth on upright looms) and used for ceremonial wrappers. In the Kongo Kingdom, raffia cloth woven from palm fiber was produced in enormous quantities, serving as both garment material and currency. The bark cloth traditions of the Great Lakes region — where the inner bark of fig trees was beaten into a soft, leather-like fabric — represented yet another independent African textile innovation that predated and persisted alongside imported fabrics.

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