From Kings to Kids: Refashioning Akan Adinkra Symbols as ‘African’ Motifs in a Nineteenth-Century British Cloth Design

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, British textile companies began making factory-printed cloth with adinkra motifs for African consumers. These symbolic designs were previously reserved for hand-stamped cloths among Akans of present-day Ghana. Such textiles illustrate the complexities of re-presenting history and shaping cultural knowledge through cloth and colonial exchanges. This article focuses on the design and circulation of one specific British textile design with adinkra symbols made during the 1890s to 1930s, the earliest recorded evidence I have found of adinkra in factory-printed cloths. This textile pattern reveals how merchants, designers and printers historically transformed adinkra symbols from Akan society to become global markers of Africa.

Acknowledgements

At the 2016 African Studies Association (ASA) Annual Conference, I presented an earlier version of this research on the panel ‘The Visual Arts of Africa’, chaired by Dr Peter Mark. My sincere thanks to Kelly Askew, Nachiket Chanchani, David Doris, Elisha Renne and Raymond Silverman for their feedback on this research project. I conducted archival research for this project in England with the generous support of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award and grants from the University of Michigan African Studies Center, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Department of the History of Art. This project was also supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. My thanks to the archival institutions that granted me access to the materials discussed in this paper.

References

Notes

1 Today, hand-stamped adinkra cloth is most commonly known for its manufacture with stamps carved of calabash, a type of gourd. However, my research uncovered that some cloth makers historically used other materials to create stamps—including cassava and cocoyam—before turning to calabash. For more information about the historical transformations of printing technology for hand-printed adinkra cloth, see A. Martino, ‘Stamping History: Stories of Social Change in Ghana’s Adinkra Cloth’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2018).

2 This photograph is dated to the year 1891 because it was recorded in the photo album; however, the album does not specify if 1891 is the year that the album was compiled or if it was the year when all of the enclosed photographs were taken in Accra and Lagos; the other photographs discussed in this article from the Basel Mission Archive typically include a wider date range of multiple decades due to the way information was recorded in that archive.

3 Art historian John Picton dated the earliest use of adinkra symbols in factory-printed textiles at Broad Oak Printworks in England to 1910–1911—twenty years after Holm made this photograph. J. Picton, ‘Technology, Tradition, and Lurex: The Art of Textiles in Africa’, in The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition, and Lurex, ed. J. Picton (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995), p. 29. Christopher Steiner analyses adinkra symbols in a factory-printed cloth made in the 1920s. C. B. Steiner, ‘Another Image of Africa: Toward an Ethnohistory of European Cloth Marketed in West Africa, 1873–1960’, Ethnohistory, 32, no. 2 (1985), pp. 99–101.

4 R. Nielsen, ‘The History and Development of Wax-Printed Textiles Intended for West Africa and Zaire’, in The Fabrics of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment, ed. J. M. Cordwell and R. A. Schwarz (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), pp. 467–98.

5 ‘Manchester’s African Trade’, West Africa, no. 1751, pp. 850–51. For more on Manchester’s textile trade in Africa, see Steiner, ‘Another Image of Africa’; J. Halls and A. Martino, ‘Cloth, Copyright, and Cultural Exchange: Textile Designs for Export to Africa at The National Archives of the UK’, Journal of Design History, 31, no. 3 (2018), pp. 236–54.

6 Steiner, ‘Another Image of Africa’, pp. 99–103; see also D. Ross, ed., Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998).

7 Unfortunately, limited information has been published on individual textile designers active in the African textile trade. For more information on the wider role of textile designers in this industry and the collaborative nature of this work with merchants and printers, see Frederika Launert, ‘The Role of Design in the Lancashire Cotton Industry, 1900–1939’ (Ph.D diss, University of Central Lancashire, 2002).

8 Notable scholarship on the relationship between visual and verbal arts that pervades Akan society includes H. Cole and D. Ross, Arts of Ghana (Los Angeles: University of California, 1977). Scholarship on Akan proverbs and links between proverbial speech and visual aesthetics includes K. Yankah, The Proverb in the Context of Akan Rhetoric, 2nd edition (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2012) and K. Yankah, ‘Proverbs: The Aesthetics of Traditional Communication’, Research in African Literatures, 20, no. 3 (1989), pp. 325–46.

9 The wide-ranging uses of adinkra symbols in other materials beyond cloth are addressed in scholarly texts on Akan culture, such as Cole and Ross, Arts of Ghana.

10 For background information on adinkra cloth, including its design, manufacture and cultural significance, see Martino, ‘Stamping History’; D. Mato, ‘Clothed in Symbol: The Art of Adinkra Among the Akan of Ghana’ (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1987); K. Arthur, Cloth as Metaphor: (Re-)Reading the Adinkra Cloth Symbols of the Akan of Ghana (Accra: Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems, 2001); A. Agbo, Values of Adinkra Symbols (Kumasi: Ebony Designs and Publications, 1999).

11 A. Glover, Chart of ‘Adinkra Symbolism’ (Accra: Artist Alliance Gallery, first published 1969, third revised edition, 1992); Twi translation from Agbo, Values of Adinkra Symbols, p. 20.

12 R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Proverbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), p. 91.

13 R. S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 265, no. 11.

14 This black-and-white photograph was taken between 1901 and 1917 by an unrecorded photographer and is now held at the Mission 21/Basel Mission Image Archives in Basel, Switzerland. Its caption states, ‘Ex-King Prempeh of Asante in Exile in Seychelles’.

15 The adinkra cloth that dates to 1817 is now held at the British Museum, museum record no. Af1818.1114.23; see also Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti, pp. 262–68.

16 Logan Muckelt’s archival materials now held at the Manchester Central Library special collections only include pattern books, no other accompanying records.

17 P. A. Sykas, The Secret Life of Textiles: Six Pattern Book Archives in North West England (Bolton: Bolton Museums, 2005), p. 27.

18 Ibid., p. 26. Boatema Boateng has analysed copyright issues specific to adinkra; B. Boateng, The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

19 Sykas, Secret Life of Textiles, pp. 26–31.

20 Ruth Nielsen elaborates on these printing techniques. Nielsen, ‘History and Development of Wax-Printed Textiles’, pp. 473–81.

21 Philip Sykas’ study of Logan Muckelt is one of the only published studies of the firm to date: Sykas, Secret Life of Textiles, pp. 26–31. See also P. Sykas, ‘The North West Pattern Book Survey’, Textile History, 32, no. 2 (2001), pp. 156–74; and Launert, ‘The Role of Design in the Lancashire Cotton Industry’.

22 For background information on this industry, see Nielsen’s seminal text on factory-printed cloth for African markets. Nielsen, ‘History and Development of Wax-Printed Textiles’, pp. 467–98. See also Picton, ‘Technology, Tradition, and Lurex’, pp. 9–30; and N. Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). African Print Fashion Now! is among the latest exhibitions and catalogues on the topic; S. Gott, K. Loughran, B. Quick and L. Rabine, eds, African Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2017).

23 Nicola Stylianou has researched the V&A Museum’s collection of British textiles for Africa; N. Stylianou, ‘Producing and Collecting for Empire: African Textiles in the V&A, 1852–2000’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts London, 2012).

24 Sykas, Secret Life of Textiles, p. 152.

25 Ibid., pp. 27–31. My research did not uncover whether either firm continued to print Logan Muckelt’s textile design with adinkra motifs. However, F. W. Ashton & Co. made other cloth designs that referenced adinkra motifs. For example, the Whitworth Art Gallery holds in its collection a fancy-print cloth from 1946 designed with adinkra motifs (ref. no. 2/9. T.2001.89).

26 At the time that I conducted this research, Logan Muckelt’s archive had not been fully catalogued. Some of Logan Muckelt’s pattern books recorded cloth design names. Yet among those I researched, Logan Muckelt’s fabric samples of this specific design with adinkra motifs do not include any names.

27 Ewe culture in Ghana also makes hand-woven cloths called kente, which display visual and symbolic differences to kente cloth made in Akan society. Factory-printed kente cloths typically reference Akan kente cloth patterns and colours rather than Ewe kente cloth designs, consistent with the wider adoption of Akan kente as a marker of ‘Africanness’ and African American identity. For more on these changes to kente cloth, see Ross, Wrapped in Pride.

28 Literature on the design and construction of adinkra cloth patterns is available in Mato, ‘Clothed in Symbol’, and Martino, ‘Stamping History’.

29 Picton, ‘Technology, Tradition, and Lurex’, p. 28. Steiner also includes ethnographic collections, in addition to collected textiles and photographs, as possible avenues for European designers to access African imagery during the mid- to late nineteenth century. Steiner, ‘Another Image of Africa’, p. 98.

30 Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation, p. 64.

31 For example, the British Museum now holds West African textiles that merchant Charles Beving—of Blakely & Beving and later Beving & Co.—collected during his trips in West Africa; Beving’s son donated this collection to the museum in 1934, after his father’s passing in 1913. Beving’s collection forms an important record of the kinds of textiles that merchants and designers in Britain used as inspiration. While there are no adinkra cloths, it forms a notable collection of historical African textiles including hand-woven and dyed textiles from the Gold Coast.

32 The Horniman Museum opened in 1890, but its collection holds a limited number of adinkra cloths and stamps that were added much later in the mid- to late twentieth century.

33 Helen Elands’ research on Ebenezer Brown Fleming’s contributions to this textile industry includes attention to relationships between British and Dutch textile printers in the late nineteenth century. H. Elands, ‘Dutch Wax Classics: The Designs Introduced by Ebenezer Brown Fleming circa 1890-1912 and Their Legacy’, in Gott et al., African-Print Fashion Now!, pp. 53–61.

34 Research that I conducted on adinkra cloth, as well as prior research completed by art historian Daniel Mato in the 1980s on adinkra cloth, has not yielded any clear evidence to explain the integration of adinkra cloth into funeral dress; Mato, ‘Clothed in Symbol’. Debates continue today in Akan oral history over the introduction of adinkra cloth, in which some narratives claim that the Akan translation of the word adinkra means ‘to say goodbye’ and therefore explains its use at funerals, even though photographic evidence confirms that the Akan royal court dressed in adinkra for early twentieth-century political events.

35 Ross’s edited volume Wrapped in Pride traces some of these changes, focusing on the historical transformations of kente cloth within Akan society and Ghana to its expanding roles among African Americans to mark African heritage and identity; Ross, Wrapped in Pride. Boateng’s work analyses another important dimension of the evolving roles of kente cloth: the implications of these changes on copyright and intellectual property; Boateng, The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here.

36 Nowadays, the symbolic meanings of adinkra do not restrict symbol uses at Akan events as strictly as in the past. Akans today often select an adinkra cloth for its visual appeal as much, if not more than, its symbolic meaning.

37 Sykas, Secret Life of Textiles, p. 30.

38 N. Melland, Some Impressions of West Africa (London: Bonner and Co., 1923).

39 Ibid., p. 39.

40 D. M. Stephen, ‘“The White Man’s Grave”: British West Africa and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925’, Journal of British Studies, 48, no. 1 (2009), pp. 111–13; J. Woodham, ‘Images of Africa and Design at the British Empire Exhibitions Between the Wars’, Journal of Design History, 2, no. 1 (1989), pp. 17–18.

41 Photo Union Photographers, ‘Gold Coast Africans in the Native Village at Wembley’. Postcard published by Raphael Tuck & Sons Ltd, London, England. Postcard now in the United States Library of Congress, Area Studies, African and Middle Eastern Division, ‘Africana Historic Postcard Collection, West Africa, Ghana’, https://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/afs/africana-postcards.html (accessed 29 February 2020).

42 For example, a photograph that G. F. Tillis made in 1925 was captioned, ‘Trip to the British Empire Exhibition. Organised by the calico printers that the donor worked for—C.P.A.’ (Greater Manchester County Record Office, ref. 963/1, negative sheet no. R37/41).

43 R. S. Rattray, A Short Manual of the Gold Coast (Accra: Gold Coast Colony, 1924).

44 Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti, pp. 262–68.

45 Rattray, Short Manual of the Gold Coast, p. 267.

46 Outside of African markets, John Forbes Watson collected Indian textiles from mid-nineteenth-century European exhibitions that served as design inspiration and references for industrialising printing techniques. J. Watson, The Collections of the Textile Manufactures of India, vols 1–18 (India Office of the British Government, 1866); S. Tuckett and S. Nenadic, ‘Colouring the Nation: A New In-depth Study of the Turkey Red Pattern Books in the National Museums of Scotland’, Textile History, 43, no. 2 (2012), p. 162.

47 For more on portrait photography in Africa, see J. Peffer and E. Cameron, eds, Portraiture and Photography in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); and E. Haney, Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion, 2010).

48 Scholarship on Holm’s work and career includes: O. Gbadegesin, ‘“Photographer Unknown”: Neils Walwin Holm and the (Ir)retrievable Lives of African Photographers’, History of Photography, 38, no. 1 (2014), pp. 21–39; C. Gore, ‘Neils Walwin Holm: Radicalizing the Image in Lagos Colony, West Africa’, History of Photography, 37, no. 3 (2013), pp. 283–300; E. Haney, ‘If These Walls Could Talk! Photographs, Photographers, and their Patrons in Accra and Cape Coast, Ghana, 1840–1940’ (PhD diss., University of London, 2004).

49 Ross, Wrapped in Pride, p. 158.

50 For more on colonial photography in Africa and other places, see K. Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); C. Pinney and N. Peterson, eds, Photography’s Other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); P. Landau, ‘Empires of the Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa’, in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. P. Landau and D. Kaspin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 141–71.

51 Bruce Willis’ discussion of the adinkra symbol mpuannum includes this photograph. B Willis, The Little Adinkra Dictionary: A Handy Guide to Understanding the Language of Adinkra (Washington DC: Pyramid Complex, 2015), pp. 124–25.

52 Revd R. K. Asamoah-Prah, ‘The Contribution of Ramseyer to the Development of Presbyterian Church of Ghana in Asante’ (MPhil Thesis, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, 2011).

53 Ibid., pp. 87–104.

54 Steiner, ‘Another Image of Africa’, p. 105.

55 A. Lethbridge, West Africa: The Elusive (London: John Bale Sons and Danielsson, 1921), p. v.

56 Steiner, ‘Another Image of Africa’, p. 105.

57 Mid-twentieth-century exhibitions were also sites for Europeans to encounter textiles designed for African markets. In 1946, Logan Muckelt displayed its textiles for African markets as wall hangings and furniture fabrics at the British Council of Industrial Design’s ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition held at the V&A Museum. M. Schoeser, ‘Fabrics for Everyman and for the Elite’, in Design and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain: The ‘Britain Can Make It’ Exhibition of 1946, ed. P. Maguire and J. Woodham (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), p. 68. Unlike the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley that offered artistic inspiration to textile designers, the British Council of Industrial Design’s exhibition invited British textile designers to repackage ‘African wax-prints’ for alternative audiences and contexts.

58 Paul Jenkins and Christraud Geary have written on the Basel Mission’s photo archive and related artistic practices of creating engravings from Basel Mission photographs; P. Jenkins, ‘The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa and the Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture’, History in Africa, 20 (1993), pp. 89–118; C. Geary and P. Jenkins, ‘Photographs from Africa in the Basel Mission Archive’, African Arts, 18, no. 4 (1985), pp. 56–63, 100.

59 These historical representations of textile designs from African cultures in European publications include prints that Owen Jones made entitled ‘Savage Tribes’ (see ‘Savage Tribes’, pl. no. 1) published in O. Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day and Son, 1856).

60 Mato, ‘Clothed in Symbol’.

61 Hwemudua is not included in Glover’s or Rattray’s studies of adinkra symbols; Glover, ‘Adinkra Symbolism’; Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti, pp. 265–67. Agbo translates hwemudua as ‘measuring stick’, and identifies the motif as a ‘symbol of examination and quality control’. Agbo, Values of Adinkra Symbols, p. 43.

62 E. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–14.

63 Connections between the rise of factory-printed cloths emulating adinkra cloth patterns and the transition to screen-printing adinkra cloth is elaborated upon in Martino, ‘Stamping History’, pp. 141–97; and Boateng, The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here, pp. 172–75.

64 I elaborate on this discussion of what defines an adinkra cloth among Akans and Ghanaians in my dissertation (Martino, ‘Stamping History’, pp. 323–28).

65 For more on screen-printing adinkra and other innovations to adinkra cloth, see Martino, ‘Stamping History’, ‘Chapter 3: Of Stamps and Silkscreens: Innovating Adinkra Cloth Technology’, pp. 141–97.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Allison J. Martino

Allison J. Martino is a Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. She recently completed her PhD dissertation, ‘Stamping History: Stories of Social Change in Ghana’s Adinkra Cloth’, at the University of Michigan. Her research traces the cultural evolution of adinkra cloth from its use in the early nineteenth century as royal dress among Akans of Ghana to its expanding roles today as a global icon of Africa.