African textiles of the Kuba

The Kuba live in the Kasai river region of the Democratic republic of Congo (formerly Zaire.)  The embroidered and decorated raffia cloths that are produced by the Kuba are the best known survivors of this wonderful ancient African tradition that was at a time a widespread process across the all of central Africa. Kuba cloth is woven from the fib of the Rafia Vinifera Palm. The production of these textiles is a multiple stage process involving the participation of children, men and women of the same clan.  The process includes the collection and preparation of the raffia fibers for weaving and embroidery, weaving the basic cloth unit, dyeing the embroidery fibers, and embellishing the woven cloth with embroidery, applique, patchwork and dye.

In post-renaissance Europe, similar embroidered cloths that were acquired from the Congo kingdom along the West coast of Africa, and were prized possessions of the nobility alongside better known items such as Ivory and sculpture from Benin and Sierra Leone.  These embroidered cloth from the Congo were widely collected, and served as inspiration to artists such as Matisse (one such textile collector) and Klee, and were seen in Portuguese paintings dating back the 16th century.

The Kuba group of people are incredibly diverse, who had a distinct number of sub-styles of raffia cloth decoration, however in more recent years, some of these sub-styles have started to disappear. The two main groups of textile from the Kuba are long raffia dance skirts and smaller embroidered cloth panels (mbal), both of which were produced primarily for ceremonial occasions and court rituals which are in present day rare occasions.  The Kuba now mainly were factory produced clothing, no longer turning to the raffia textiles as adornment, though luckily the intricate process of the production of this cloth has been maintained due to the importance of the cloth in funeral celebrations. The Kuba believe that they would not be recognized by their clan ancestors in the afterlife unless they were appropriately dressed in high quality raffia textiles.

The quality of the workmanship in the textiles has weakened over the years, and the production coming out of the region today is not what it once was. The cloths that we see being produced still show the love for pattern, and a design flair that has made the Kuba well known worldwide.

As mentioned earlier, the Kuba predominantly produce two kinds of cloth, smaller embroidered squares and longer rectangular decorated pieces.

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Mbal (smaller squares) - The basic unit of Kuba weaving is the plain, undecorated square of raffia cloth (mbal), which is woven by men on an upright single heddle loom.  Although men also take part in the decoration techniques, the more labor intensive and prestigious "cut pile" embroidery is only produced by women.  The raffia thread is colored before weaving by using local plant dyes which are able to give shades of red, black, yellow and blue.  A needle is used to insert a strand of raffia into the plain square mbal in such a way that is goes under a crossover square between a single warp and weft thread, then it is drawn up again until the end of the strand on the cloth surface is only one or two millimeters long.  Using a small and very sharp knife, the raffia strand is cut very close creating two short tufts. There is no knot, but simply the tightness of the tightness of the weave that holds the stich in place.  This process is repeated over and over again until a linear block of the same color raffia is formed. The tufts are then rubbed over with the edge of the knife, splitting and fluffing the ends so that the ground cloth is completely covered by the pile. The design is simply worked out as the woman proceeds, usually elaborating a new combination of familar existing designs, without any overall plan being laid out ion the cloth in advance. It is estimated that it take a full month of embroidery to complete a single small square of cloth with this technique. The designs used in the cut-pile cloth are drawn from a huge repertoire of known patterns, at least a couple hunderd of which are identified by name, some of them used on other Kuba art forms such as wooden masks and sculpture, metalwork, mat-making and body scarification on women.   

Today, these textiles are purchased in large quantities for sale in United States and Europe, where their mastery of abstract for atracts great admiration. Most of the textiles coming out of the Democratic Republic of Congo are quite recent work, though some examples of older used and stored pieces are still available.

Longer Rectangular Textile skirts - The weaving of these textiles were once again done by the men, but the stiff woven cloth with loose uneven edges was completed and prepared for decoration by the women. The cloth is hemmed and softened before it is sewn into a larger garment, for the dancing skirt, and is pounded in a large wooden mortar where it is sometimes treated with dye. Initial belief was that all decorating was done by women, however more recent research has shown that men were responsible for decorating the rectangular skirts they would wear, while the women were more centered on the cut-pile embroidered panels. Among the decorative techniques that the men and women used are certain types of embroidery, applique and reverse applique, patchwork , dyeing and tie dyeing.  The dance skirts worn by women are up to nine yards in length, wound around the body several times and then folded down over a belt.  The men's skirts are considerably longer, and have distinct borders often with a fringe of raffia bobbles. Applique, often outlined and emphasized by sewing around the design area with a darker thread, is one of the two most important decorative techniques that the Kuba people used on their ceremonial textiles.  It is believed that these decorative techniques used by the Kuba started because of their need to cover holes caused by the rigorous pounding of the woven raffia in the mortar required ot achieve the desired level of softness.  Right angled, rectangular or sometimes round patches are sewn over the holes caused by th esoftening process on undamaged sections of the raffia cloth to balance the overall visual effect.