| Textile
Resources
Home Page - here
Bogolan gallery - view
bogolan we have for sale here
Bogolan Links:
Groupe
Bogolan Kasobané
Au
Coeur du Mali - great site in French
Bogolan References:
Aherne,T.D. Nakunte
Diarra, Bogolanfini Artist of the Beledougou (1993)
Brett-Smith,S.
"Symbolic Blood: Cloths for Excised Women" in Res 3
(1982)
Duponchel, P. Textiles Bogolan du Mali
(Musée d'Ethnographie - Neuchâtel - 2004)
Imperato,P. &
Shamir,M. "Bokolanfini: Mud Cloth of the Bamana of Mali."
African Arts 3(4) (1970)
Polakoff,C. African
Textiles and Dyeing Techniques (1980)
Rovine,V. Bogolan:
Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali (2001)
(c)Duncan Clarke, Version
10/25/2003 |
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In
recent years the stark black and white designs of Bogolanfini
have become, along with kente, one of the best known African
cloth traditions around the world. Bogolanfini, which translates
as "mud cloth", is a long established tradition among
the Bamana, a Mande speaking people who inhabit a large area to
the east and north of Bamako in Mali. The production of Bogolan
cloth involves a unique and lengthy procedure, which we can only
outline here. The raw material is provided by plain white cotton
cloth woven by men in narrow strips on the local version of the
double heddle loom. The plain cloth that is to be turned into
bogolan is first sewn up into a woman's wrapper cloth or
whatever other garment the customer requires. Although men in
Bamako have taken up a simplified form of bogolan dyeing in
recent years, in the Beledougou area it remains primarily a
women's craft passed on from mother to daughter. The cloth is
first washed in water and allowed to dry so that it can shrink
to its final size. It is then soaked in a brown solution made
from the pounded leaves of certain trees. Although the main
leaves used are widely known, specialists have their own precise
closely guarded recipes to give the best results. Once the cloth
has been soaked in the mixture it takes on a deep even yellow
colour which fades only slightly when it is spread out on the
ground to dry in the sun. It is now ready for the mud dye to be
applied. The mud used is collected from ponds and left to
ferment in a covered pot for about a year, during which time it
becomes black.
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The
artist carefully traces over the undyed areas to bleach
out the yellow ground dye. Picture from African
Textiles and Dyeing Techniques by Claire Polakoff |
Small pieces of
bamboo and flat metal spatula of various widths are used to draw
the design onto the cloth using the mud solution. When all the
designs have been drawn in outline she then uses a wider
implement to fill in the mud dye over the spaces left between
them. One of the unique features of high quality bogolan is that
it is the background not the designs themselves that are painted
onto the cloth leaving the design in the remaining undyed areas.
It can take several weeks of slow and painstaking work before
the whole cloth is covered. The cloth is then washed with water
to remove any excess mud leaving a black background from which
the yellow designs stand out. The whole process of dipping the
cloth in the leaf solution and outlining the designs with a
layer of black mud dye is then repeated, giving the cloth a
second coating of dye. The final stage is to apply a solution
that includes caustic soda to the yellow areas so that they are
bleached to the desired white. It would seem strange to begin
with a white cloth, dye it to yellow, then finish up by treating
the yellow areas so they become white again. The reason for this
apparently paradoxical procedure lies in the chemical processes
at work in the dyeing process. The active ingredient in the mud
dye is iron oxide, which is converted by tannic acid in the leaf
solution into a fast dye of iron tannate. The yellow stage is
therefore essential although as a colour it is not present on
the finished cloth.
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Our Bogolan Cloths CLICK HERE
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