- Museum number
- Af1956,27.10
- Description
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Mud cloth (bogolanfini) composed of 6 hand plain woven narrow strips hand sewn together selvedge to selvedge. The cloth has been decorated using a resist method (refer to curatorial comments) producing weft rows of repeating geometric patterns formed primarily using circles diamonds and stripes. There is also a border along two edges of the cloth.The ends of the textile are unhemmed.
- Production date
- 1900-1930 (circa)
- Dimensions
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Length: 137 centimetres
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Width: 84 centimetres
- Curator's comments
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Description from William Fagg, ‘The Webster Plass collection of African Art, an illustrated catalogue’, British Museum 1953, cat.11.
Cotton Bambara cloth comprising six strips woven on a five and a half inch loom, sewn together laterally, and afterwards painted with geometrical designs in natural colour, dark, medium and light brown by means of a fine river mud.
Provenance: Charles Ratton.
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J. Picton and J. Mack, African textiles (London, The British Museum Press, 1989), p.161, described the process of making a mud-cloth as follows: 'Narrow-strip cloth made of hand-spun yarn is first washed with water and dried in the sun. It is then dyed yellow with an infusion prepared from the leaves of Anogeissus leiocarpus and Combretum glutinosum. Mud from a dried-up pond which had been collected a year previously is applied to one side of the cloth according to the desired pattern. It is allowed to dry and then dipped in water to wash off the mud. The design appears in yellow on a dark ground. The yellow, however, is now removed. Peanuts, caustic soda, millet bran and water are mixed together and heated. This preparation is then carefully painted over the yellow design and the yellow turns brown. The cloth is then dried in the sun for a week, and the 'soda soap' is washed off leaving the design white on a dark ground. (John Donne, 'Bogolanfini, a mud-painted cloth ', Man, VIII 1973, discusses the chemistry of this curious process.) Some of these cloths, together with cloths simply dyed yellow or brown, are worn as tunics by hunters and other men.'
The same authors reproduce the cloth on p.160 with the following caption: 'Discharge-dyed cotton textile, Bamana, Mali. The ground fabric is woven of hand-spun cotton yarn in narrow strips on the man's double-heddle loom. It has been first dyed yellow and the design applied with river mud which 'saddens' the yellow, turning it dark brown. The yellow die in the unpainted areas has then been discharged with a caustic preparation, returning the fabric in those areas more or less to its original natural colour.'
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This cloth has been published by Sarah C. Brett-Smith in her monograph, 'The Silence of the Women: Bamana mud cloths', Milan (5 Continents) 2014, illustration 33, with the comment: ‘This cloth may be a basiae. In 1977 Koniba Traore, Kolokani’s official ‘chef du village’ identified this cloth as coming from the town of Merkoya, approximately 35 miles (55 km) to the north-west of Kolokani on the road to Mourdiah and Nara, one of the last Bamana outposts in the Sahel.’ On pp.106-9 she gives a further analysis of the cloth, which she suggests shows influence from a Saharan or Berber tradition and comes from the western Mali or eastern Senegal region, and which she compares with similar cloths in the Musée du Quai Branly collected in the first third of the XXc. Other cloths collected by Leo Frobenius before the First World War, and now in German museums (Brett-Smith ill.76), and the cloth illustrated as pl.32 of Silvia Dolz’s catalogue of African cloths in Dresden published in the 'Abhandlungen und Berichte der Staatlichen Ethnographischen Sammlungen Sachsen', 52, 2005, p.51), show similar complexity of design and light brown colour. The bogolan cloths that Brett-Smith illustrates from after the Second World War are much simpler in design and darker in colour. The BM cloth must also date from the first third of the XXc, and is the only bogolan of this early period in the collection.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1956
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- Af1956,27.10
