Two hunters from Bonwire — the names given are Ota Kraban and Kwaku Ameyaw — were out in the forest at Anwomaso, and they stopped, because there was something in front of them worth stopping for.
Bonwire, 18 km from Kumasi. You will hear the looms before you see them.
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Two Men Watched a Spider Work
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Two Men Watched a Spider Work
Two hunters from Bonwire — the names given are Ota Kraban and Kwaku Ameyaw — were out in the forest at Anwomaso, and they stopped, because there was something in front of them worth stopping for.
A spider was building a web.
They stood and watched it work: the frame first, then the crossing, then the filling, the whole thing assembled out of nothing in front of them by an animal with no tools. They watched until it was finished. Then they went home and did not sleep, and in the morning they took raffia fibre and built a frame and tried to do with their hands what they had seen done with eight legs.
The first cloth they made was raffia and it was poor. The second was better. They took it to the Asantehene, and he looked at it for a while, and then he made it royal — this cloth is for the court, and the court will say who may wear it.
That is kente. Silk came later, unravelled from imported cloth and rewoven; the colours came to mean things — gold for status, green for growth, blue for love and harmony, black for the ancestors and for grief; and every pattern got a name and most names are proverbs. Adwinasa: all the motifs are used up, the weaver has exhausted his skill. Emaa da: it has not happened before.
At Bonwire the loom is narrow, and the strips come off it four inches wide and metres long, and they are sewn edge to edge into a cloth a man can wrap. A full high-grade cloth takes weeks. Try the loom. You will produce about an inch.
If you visit Ghana. Bonwire, 18 km from Kumasi. You will hear the looms before you see them.
Two hunters from Bonwire — the names given are Ota Kraban and Kwaku Ameyaw — were out in the forest at Anwomaso, and they stopped, because there was something in front of them worth stopping for.
A spider was building a web.
They stood and watched it work: the frame first, then the crossing, then the filling, the whole thing assembled out of nothing in front of them by an animal with no tools. They watched until it was finished. Then they went home and did not sleep, and in the morning they took raffia fibre and built a frame and tried to do with their hands what they had seen done with eight legs.
The first cloth they made was raffia and it was poor. The second was better. They took it to the Asantehene, and he looked at it for a while, and then he made it royal — this cloth is for the court, and the court will say who may wear it.
That is kente. Silk came later, unravelled from imported cloth and rewoven; the colours came to mean things — gold for status, green for growth, blue for love and harmony, black for the ancestors and for grief; and every pattern got a name and most names are proverbs. Adwinasa: all the motifs are used up, the weaver has exhausted his skill. Emaa da: it has not happened before.
At Bonwire the loom is narrow, and the strips come off it four inches wide and metres long, and they are sewn edge to edge into a cloth a man can wrap. A full high-grade cloth takes weeks. Try the loom. You will produce about an inch.