13.8 Kente as an Indigenous Ghanaian Textile

The article talks mainly about the Kente cloth. It talks about the production process and sources that are needed in order to make it, the equipment used to actually create it and the weaving process which explains how it is weaved together. Kente cloth is a colorful silk and cotton fabric that is made of interwoven cloth strips and originates from Ghana. Originally it was made using Raffia, a straw type material but was later replaced by cotton yams that were locally hands pun and dyed. The cloths started off as just plain white but then they were introduced to a Dutch silk material which they began using and it regarded as prestigious, in other words, it was a higher quality. Nowadays the Kente cloth is made from a variety of materials from cotton, rayon to polyester.

To make the Kente cloth, they use something called a wooden loom. It is said to be a masculine thing and you will really only find men who are using it, unless it’s a specialist or professional who does it for a living. There are many accessories that go with the loom and without those you will not be able to create a proper Kente cloth. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szmRkDdR4eY

The Weaving Process

Many professional weavers study in Bonwire, which is a village that is strictly all about learning how to make the Kente cloth. Trainees are given miniature looms to study and slowly move up to using the big wooden loom. They start off by coming with a design, and then they must show a sample of their color combination, meaning the exact number and order of the threads in each color. 

It is a very complex job and you have patient and detail oriented. There are different types of looms, they can either be broad or narrow or high or low depending on the weaver’s technique. It also depends on whether you are making a male or female Kente cloth, because they differ in strip size. As many cultures can agree that technology is not always embraced with open arms. Preserving traditions is valuable to the culture. In the chapter, technology and Kente are meet half way. The loom requires human intervention only when there is a problem as in a thread breaks. The computerized loom is programmed to maintain by a human, but the actual work of production of the cloth is done by a machine. We related the article to today by everything becoming about mass production. Double the amount of products, in the less amount of time. 

An item like the Kenteis losing the uniqueness/value of the cloth by being produce by a machine.