Textiles: Aṣọ Òkè, Adìrẹ and Aṣọ Ẹbí

Cloth carries more social information among the Yoruba than any other made thing, and the proverb usually quoted to make the point is that we greet a person's cloth before we greet the person wearing it. Two production systems account for most of it. Weaving produces aṣọ òkè, the prestige strip-woven cloth, on two entirely different looms worked by men and by women respectively. Resist-dyeing produces adìrẹ, indigo-patterned cloth, which was a women's industry centred on Abẹ́òkúta and which in the 1920s and 1930s was a substantial export business before it destroyed itself in about three years. Both feed into aṣọ ẹbí, the practice of dressing a whole social circle in one cloth for an event, which is the form in which Yoruba textile culture is most visible today and which is a twentieth-century institution rather than an ancient one.

The two looms

Yoruba weaving is not one tradition. There are two looms, they produce different cloth, and the division between them is by gender.

The men's loom is a narrow-strip horizontal loom with a double heddle worked by foot treadles 1. The warp is stretched out along the ground for many metres in front of the weaver and tensioned by a dragged weight, and the weaver sits at the loom and works forward along it. The double heddle is the defining feature: two heddles on treadles let the shed be changed fast and let supplementary wefts be floated in for pattern. The product is a long narrow strip, and cloth is made by cutting the strip into lengths and sewing them selvedge to selvedge into a wide web.

The width of the strip is not fixed and the sources disagree, which is worth flagging rather than resolving falsely. Figures around four inches, roughly ten centimetres, are given for older prestige cloths, and figures around fourteen to fifteen centimetres for later commercial aṣọ òkè, with about twenty-two strips required for a woman's wrapper 12. The most likely reading is that strips widened over the twentieth century as production commercialised, but a reader should not take any single width as the traditional one.

The consequential technical fact is that pattern has to be planned before weaving starts. A weaver working a strip that will later be cut and joined must know in advance where every motif falls, because the strips have to register against each other across the finished cloth and a strip cannot be adjusted once it is off the loom 2. Aṣọ òkè patterns are therefore calculated in advance, colours and structure fixed at the outset, which is a different design process from working on a broadloom where the whole width is visible as it grows.

The women's loom is an upright single-heddle vertical loom 1. A fixed frame, one heddle, the shed partly opened by hand with a shed stick, producing a broad cloth in one piece. Its characteristic product is kìjìpá, a thick dense cloth of hand-spun cotton, usually indigo-dyed, made for wrappers and hard use rather than for display.

The gender split runs the other way from the crafts around it. Weaving on the narrow loom is men's work, as are bead embroidery, carving and smithing; pottery, dyeing, spinning and the vertical loom are women's. There is no single rule that assigns a craft to a gender, and the pattern has to be learned trade by trade.

The named cloths

Sányán is the highest-prestige cloth, woven from wild silk taken from the communal nests of the Anaphe moth, giving a beige to greyish tan colour, usually combined with cotton 1. The silk is gathered from caterpillar nests in the bush rather than reeled from cultivated cocoons, which is why sányán is expensive and why the colour is fixed at the natural beige rather than dyed.

Alááàrì is deep red or crimson, woven from magenta waste silk that until the early twentieth century was imported across the Sahara 1. This is the historically significant one: the colour is a direct index of long-distance trade, and a person in alááàrì was wearing the trans-Saharan trade on their body. Later alááàrì uses cotton with lustrous thread.

Ẹtù is deep indigo blue approaching black, with very fine lighter stripes in warp and weft, sometimes a single thread wide 1. The name means guinea fowl, and the speckled effect of the fine stripes against the dark ground is a direct reference to guinea fowl plumage. Sányán, alááàrì and ẹtù are the classic triad of prestige cloths.

Further named types appear in the literature with lower confidence and from thinner sourcing, including opa aro (dark blue with green stripes), ifun (light brown and navy), and waka (black ground with red warp stripes), together with a group of red cloths including aṣọ ìpo, which is associated with funerary use 2.

Aṣọ olóná, "cloth that has pattern," refers to figured weaving using supplementary weft floats to carry motifs across the strip. The best documented body of aṣọ olóná is Ìjẹ̀bú, and detailed technical description of it was not available in the sources consulted for this file; a reader wanting that should go to Duncan Clarke's work on Nigerian weaving or to Picton and Mack.

Ìṣẹ̀yìn in Oyo State is the historic centre of aṣọ òkè production and remains so, with Ọ̀yọ́ and Ìlọrin also significant 2.

By the middle of the twentieth century aṣọ òkè had moved out of everyday wear and become dress for major life-cycle events only 1. That is the niche that aṣọ ẹbí then commercialised.

Adìrẹ

Adìrẹ is patterned indigo cloth. The word comes from a di, to tie, and rẹ, to dye or to soak, so it means literally tie-and-dye, although most of the techniques it covers involve no tying.

The general distinction to hold is between aṣọ aláró, cloth immersed and dyed a solid colour, and adìrẹ, cloth patterned by resist, where part of the surface is protected from the dye so that it comes out light against the blue.

The three techniques

Adìrẹ oníkó, tie resist. Oníkó means the one with raffia, from ìkó, stripped raffia palm. Raffia is tied tightly around small objects gathered into the cloth, most characteristically hundreds of individual corn kernels or pebbles, producing small white circles on a blue ground 1. The cloth can also be rolled into ropes or folded concertina-fashion and bound, producing stripes and bands.

Adìrẹ alábẹrẹ, stitch resist. Alábẹ̀rẹ́ means the one with the needle, from abẹ́rẹ́. Stripped raffia is sewn through the cloth in a pattern before dyeing, and the stitched line resists the dye 1. One detail here is a genuine design decision rather than a technicality: the raffia may be unpicked immediately after dyeing, or it may be left in deliberately, so that the pattern emerges gradually as the stitching works loose through wear 1. That is a cloth designed to change over years.

Adìrẹ elékọ, starch resist. Elékọ means the one with starch paste, from ẹ̀kọ, cassava starch. Paste is applied to the cloth, the cloth is dyed, and the paste is scraped off to reveal the design in the undyed ground. Two methods, and the difference between them is historically important.

The first is freehand painting, traditionally applied with a chicken feather or a thin split rib cut from a calabash, drawing the design directly 1. This is the virtuoso method and it produces cloths that are unique.

The second is stencilling, an early twentieth-century innovation using metal stencils cut from the tin sheet that lined imported tea chests 1. This is a precise and datable technology transfer: a piece of colonial packaging repurposed as a design tool. Stencilling made repeat patterns fast and consistent, expanded production enormously, and is directly implicated in both the boom and the collapse that followed.

Named patterns

Olókun, "owner of the sea", named for the deity of the sea and of wealth, and the most prestigious of the elékọ designs 1. Olókun is also the deity who in Yoruba tradition owns beads, so the same name attaches to the most valuable cloth and the most valuable ornament.

Ìbàdàn dùn, "Ibadan is sweet", a celebrated elékọ pattern named for the city 1.

Sùnbẹ̀bẹ̀, usually glossed as the lifting up of the beads, referring to waist beads and carrying an erotic and fertility sense 1.

Jubilee, first produced for the silver jubilee of George V and Queen Mary in 1935, incorporating royal imagery 1. This is a hard date and it makes a point: adìrẹ patterns responded to events, absorbed foreign imagery, and were commercially opportunistic. The tradition was not a closed repertoire.

Who made it

Adìrẹ production was two trades, not one, and both were women's 13.

The alàdìrẹ made the pattern: tying, stitching, or painting the resist. The alaró owned and worked the dye pits, from aró, indigo and by extension the dye and the pit. A woman might buy imported shirting, apply or commission the resist, pay a dyer for the vat work, and sell the finished cloth into the market herself. The chain, its economics and its gender politics are the subject of Judith Byfield's The Bluest Hands 3.

Indigo

The plant. Yoruba indigo is èlú, Lonchocarpus cyanescens, now reclassified as Philenoptera cyanescens, a West African vine of the Fabaceae 4. It is not Indigofera tinctoria, the Asian indigo of the world trade, and popular sources routinely make this substitution. The distinction matters because the Yoruba plant is held to yield the more durable dye.

Processing. Leaves and young shoots are bruised to a pulp and formed into balls of about ten to twelve centimetres, sun-dried, and traded in the markets 4. Confusingly the balls are themselves called aró, the same word as the dye and the pit.

The alkali. Indigo pigment is insoluble and will not dye anything as it stands. It has to be reduced in an alkaline solution to soluble leuco-indigo, which the cloth absorbs, and which reoxidises to blue on contact with air. The traditional alkali is wood ash lye, leached with water to give a potassium carbonate solution 4. This is the reason for the characteristic sight of cloth coming out of a Yoruba dye pot yellow-green and turning blue as it hangs.

The vat. The ìkòkò aró is a large earthenware pot partly sunk into the ground, which is why the English is "dye pit" 4 The pot is fired pottery, which links the dyeing trade directly to the women potters treated in the file on metal and pottery. Depth of colour is controlled by how many indigo balls are charged into the vat, and the figures recorded for southwestern Nigeria run from about 50 balls for a bright blue up to about 150 for a blue-black 4. Depth is then built by repeated dipping and oxidation cycles.

Abẹ́òkúta. From the early twentieth century Ẹ̀gbá women turned adìrẹ from a household craft into a regional industry, with Ìtókù market in Abẹ́òkúta as its hub 13. The enabling condition was access to imported machine-woven cotton shirting through colonial trade routes: European cloth was cheap, wide, evenly surfaced, and took a painted starch resist far better than hand-spun kìjìpá ever had. A woman's wrapper was made from two pieces of shirting stitched together 1. Women controlled design, dyeing, distribution and sale, and the export markets reached the Gold Coast and Senegal.

The collapse and the revival

The peak was the 1920s and 1930s, when adìrẹ was a major craft industry in Abẹ́òkúta and Ìbàdàn 1.

It then collapsed, and the mechanism is well understood. Synthetic indigo and caustic soda spread, along with an influx of new and less skilled entrants, and quality problems followed that destroyed demand 1. Byfield dates the collapse to 1937 to 1939 3.

The chemistry explains the speed of it. Caustic soda, sodium hydroxide, replaced the wood ash lye because it works in hours rather than the days or weeks a fermentation vat takes to establish, and it is cheaper. It is also a far harsher alkali that degrades cotton fibre. Combined with synthetic indigo it produced cloth that looked acceptable on the market stall and fell apart or bled in use. That is a textbook quality-signalling failure: buyers could not distinguish good cloth from bad before purchase, so they stopped paying for good cloth, so good cloth stopped being made. The industry did not fail because of foreign competition in the first instance; it failed because a cheaper process made the product indistinguishable at the point of sale.

Complex designs continued to be made into the early 1970s, and there was a limited revival in the 1960s driven partly by Peace Corps interest, but the market never returned to its previous scale 1. Imported Dutch and English wax prints, and later Chinese imitations, took the position adìrẹ had held.

The revival since the 1980s is real and its central figure is Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye 5. Born at Ògìdì in Kogi State into a family of weavers, adìrẹ makers, indigo dyers and leatherworkers, trained at Òṣogbo and a product of the Ọ̀ṣogbo art school milieu, she opened her first Nike Art Centre at Osogbo in 1983 and now runs four centres offering free training, one of which, the Nike Art Gallery at Lekki in Lagos, holds over 7,000 works and is described as the largest art gallery in West Africa 5. Her stated purpose is to re-establish adìrẹ as art rather than as a craft commodity.

On the fashion side Amaka Osakwe's label Maki Oh is the most cited contemporary revivalist, with adìrẹ-derived garments worn by Michelle Obama and Lupita Nyong'o 5. In 2022 Bamidele Abiodun, First Lady of Ogun State, launched Adire Market Week to promote the cloth and support local manufacture 5.

Aṣọ ẹbí

Aṣọ ẹbí means family cloth, from aṣọ, cloth, and ẹbí, family or kin. In practice it is a fabric chosen by the hosts of an event, bought by the guests, and made up by each guest into their own garment, so that the group appears at the event dressed in one cloth.

The origin is contested and the disagreement is substantive 6. One position holds that uniform dress marking kinship is precolonial, particularly at funerals. The other holds that aṣọ ẹbí as a named institution belongs to the friendship associations of early twentieth-century Yoruba society, above all in Lagos.

The reconciling account, which the evidence supports better than either extreme, is that kin-marking uniform dress is old but aṣọ ẹbí as a generalised, named, market-driven institution is twentieth-century and Lagosian. The decisive fact is material: its spread was enabled by the importation of cheap mass-produced fabric from England after the First World War 6. Forty guests cannot be dressed identically in hand-woven cloth, because hand-woven cloth is made strip by strip in small quantities and no two lengths are the same. Uniform dress at scale requires uniform yardage, and uniform yardage arrived with industrial textile imports.

Socially it began within blood kin, especially at funerals, where family wore cloth sometimes printed with the portrait of the deceased, and extended outward to friendship circles, social clubs with their emblems on the cloth, and whole communities 6. The cloth makes the celebrant's circle visible, and because there are usually tiers of cloth at different price points for different classes of guest, it also makes rank within that circle visible.

Economically the mechanism is direct. Hosts buy the cloth wholesale and sell it on to guests at a markup, and the proceeds offset the cost of the event. Aṣọ ẹbí is therefore simultaneously a solidarity display, a transfer of funds to the celebrant, and an effectively compulsory levy on the guest, since a guest who declines the cloth is visibly outside the circle. The resulting financial strain is a live subject of criticism in Nigerian public debate, where the practice is regularly attacked for promoting extravagance 6.

The contemporary cloth is dominated by Ankara wax print and by lace, not by aṣọ òkè or adìrẹ, though aṣọ òkè persists as the higher-status option for the immediate family and for the aṣọ ìyàwó group at a wedding 6.