Exhibition Cloth is the Center of the World:
Nigerian Textiles, Global Perspectives

September 16, 2001 to November 11, 2001

goldstein.che.umn.edu

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foto: Pelete bite (cut- and pulled-thread cloth) worn by Kalabari women in a funeral procession.
White threads are selectively cut with a razor blade or pocket knife and removed from plaid madras cloth (injiri; from India) to make new patterns. Photograph by Joanne B. Eicher, 1983.

Interpretive Goals
The Dogon proverb from which the exhibit takes its title-"cloth is the center of the world"-encapsulates our interpretive goals for this project. Firstly, we aim to convey to visitors the centrality of cloth to West African life. Cloth has played an essential role in the social, cultural, and economic development of this geographic area. The artifacts made and used in Nigeria embody beliefs about cultural identity, relationships between ethnic groups, relationships between past and present through the mediator of tradition, and the commercial value of the material object. Secondly, as conveyed through the proverb, cloth creates systems of cultural and economic relationships that allow us to understand these artifacts in a global context.

Using cloth as a basis for interpretation, this project will educate visitors about Nigeria's historic and contemporary role in the world. Viewers will learn about the intersection of Nigerian history and world history through the presentation of information on the concurrence of the cloth trade and the slave, palm oil, and petroleum trades. Counteracting media images of static ethnic conflict, we aim to present an image of the makers and users of these textiles as dynamic and creative people, willing and able to adapt and thrive in difficult conditions and to express their life force in an aesthetic mode.

We have drawn from the expertise of four internationally renowned scholars of Nigerian cloth to interpret each section of the collection for the exhibition story. The scholars-Dr. Lisa Aronson, Art History Department, Skidmore College; Dr. Norma Wolff, Anthropology Department, Iowa State University; Dr. Elisha Renne, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan; and Anne Spencer, Curator of Ethnology, Newark Museum-add important interdisciplinary perspectives to the exhibition theme, and provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on Nigeria. Each scholar has contributed an illustrated essay for the exhibition catalog.

The Textiles
The exhibit concentrates on four types of cloth made and used in Nigeria in contemporary times-adire, akwete, wax prints, and pelete bite. These four types of cloth have survived changing tastes and fortunes and remain the most vibrant and flexible types of Nigerian cloth. Numerous examples of each type in the Eicher collection give it a depth seldom realized in a personal or public collection, allowing us to present the complexity of context as well as of cloth, the visual richness of the cloth as textile, and the cultural expressiveness of the cloth as dress.

Adire is a resist-dyed fabric primarily produced in the western part of Nigeria. It is most easily recognized as a richly patterned blue and white textile. Commercial or hand woven cotton fabric is twisted, folded, stitched, or tied with raffia to produce design areas that will resist the deep indigo blue dye. In another type of adire a paste starch is used as the medium for blocking the penetration of dye into the fabric in certain areas to create the design.

A wax printed textile is also a resist-dyed fabric, one in which wax has been used as the medium to create the design by blocking the penetration of dye into the fabric in certain areas. The wax print fabrics are commercially woven and printed by machine, and, until the last quarter of the 20th century, manufactured in and imported from Europe. They are now produced in Nigeria, as well as other locations in Africa. And yet, these cloths have become remarkably intertwined with all facets of African life, from the mundane and ordinary to the ritual and ceremonial. How this process has occurred provides a fascinating glimpse into the history of trade relationships between Africa, Europe and Indonesia in the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, the adoption of what originally came from outside the continent reveals much about the values Africans place on textiles and the highly developed shades of meaning printed cloth can have.

The colorful and richly patterned textiles known as akwete are woven on a vertical loom by women in the southeastern Nigerian town of Akwete. However, akwete weaving is rarely sold in the local or regional markets. Instead, the weavers sell the vast majority of their cloths to patrons in other parts of West Africa and Nigeria, most particularly to those with whom they were once heavily involved in trade.

The cloth known as pelete bite is uniquely associated with the Kalabari Ijo people of the Niger Delta area in southern Nigeria. Until recently, due to the extensive research of Joanne Eicher, little had been known about this cloth outside of this limited region. Pelete bite is a cut-thread cloth made from the colorful, imported Indian cotton plaid fabric called madras. Kalabari women cut and pull out specific areas of thread in the madras plaids, creating subtle open-work designs. Each design is named and symbolically represents the Kalabari people's cultural past and mythology. Furthermore, pelete bite lends itself to the visual identification of individuals as Kalabari. As such, these cloths are critically important in several life-stage events and ceremonies, such as those marking birth and death.

Together, the four types of textiles reflect and play essential roles in the life of Nigerian women. Three of the four textiles (akwete, adire, and pelete bite) are produced directly by women, and the exhibition will explore this connection of women's creativity with cloth production. All four are worn by both men and women. They are worn by women as forms of dress-as wrappers in which long lengths are wrapped around their lower body, as shoulder cloths, and as head wraps. The exhibition and catalog will also present another important aspect of Nigerian women's involvement with these cloths-that of preserving kinship ties and cultural identity by collecting and storing these valuable textiles for use in family rituals and ceremonies. Here in the United States, African textile and dress scholar Joanne Eicher extends this theme through over thirty years of purchasing, commissioning, and collecting these cloths for research and educational purposes. She also documented how they are worn and used in family, community and cultural ceremonies such as funerals and dancing.