Textile design

Textile design – African art

The problem of counterfeit textiles is not such a heart-wrenching story as that of counterfeit drugs. Still, it is a human story – mills closing, jobs lost, an art form disappearing. Further cooperation between the government and all stakeholders will help turnaround this trend which threatens one of Africa's best known products.
African Prints – The stories in the designs and colors
In pre-colonial times, standardized widths of cloth were used as a form of money in many regions of Africa. A regular number of the standard lengths were required to make a woman’s wrap, which served as a unit of value. May this be the origin of Africa’s love of breadths of bright beautiful fabrics?
Colors in African prints have an intimate association with tribes and regions. Sepia-ochre is generally accepted across Africa as the color used to represent earth, however, yellow is the color of initiation in Nigeria, while the combination of yellow/red belongs to the Igbo tribe of southeastern Nigeria.
African print designs fall into fours main categories:

• women’s lives (family, love, housework);
• town life and what it brings, good or bad (alphabet, television, money, power);
• nature (animals, flowers); and
• rhythms (music, drums).

Motifs in traditional African print designs often convey a metaphor and the design spins a tale. Beads in designs represent the African saying “Precious beads make no noise,” meaning that a good person does not need to blow his own horn. In the fabric below (right), the design depicts town life and uses the bottle-opener (cork screw) motif to connote the power it has brought.
The Nigerian Aso Ebi dress tradition encourages members of a particular social group or those attending a wedding, naming ceremony or burial to adhere to a design or color code. On weekends, it is common to see groups of people in such “uniforms” at bus stops and churches. The classic dice design below (left) symbolizes nobility and is often the “uniform” of senior women.

Variety is the hall mark of African print designs. There is an eclectic mix of old classics like the dice and bottle opener, and more contemporary designs with abstract motifs. ABC Wax in Ghana and Nichem in Nigeria, both part of the Cha Group, have libraries of over 35,000 designs with 200 new designs being created every year.