This week's meeting took place in the Danford Room where many of my anthropology lectures take place at the University of Birmingham. The room features walls adorned with artifacts from West Africa collected by CWAS (Centre of West African Studies) lecturers and patrons from the nineteen sixties to present day. Missing from the collection encased in the Danford room, however, is the University's surprising collection of West African cloth. Today some pieces were brought out of storage, and donning white gloves we set to viewing the collection hands-on.
Here are a few of my favorite pieces: (apologies for the quality of the photographs, they were taken on my phone)
This is a vibrant print, produced in India for African purchase. Prints like this are usually inexpensive to buy, but lack the prestige and the expensive materials of real African fabrics and prints.
This top (folded in half) is an example of African dip-dye cloth. This piece caught my eye as the dip-dye pattern is intricate yet simplistic due to the use of white space between the dyed areas. The gold embellishments around the collar and the pockets are incredible examples of embroidery.
This is a piece of Kente cloth, native to the Akan people of Ghana. Kente is made in strips of painstakingly woven pieces of cotton and silk, which are then sewn together to create a large cloth which can then be made in to clothing. This particular piece (which is over 50 years old) has symbols, not to dissimilar to Adinkra ones, woven into the strips of fabric two. It's hard to imagine how long this cloth would have taken someone to produce!
The second part of our meeting was set aside to design the "look" of Style Africa, which included designing posters and information booklets/fliers. Adam would then take our designs to a graphic designer and interpret them into the finished product.
....a final snap of us making a mess of the Danford room (:
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