Ankara, Adire, Aso-Oke, Akwete: A Short Guide to Nigerian Cloth

Ask for "African fabric" and you will usually be handed wax print. It is the most visible Nigerian textile and the least Nigerian in origin — which is a more interesting story than the marketing version.

Ankara — the wax print everyone means

What it is: industrially produced cotton with a wax-resist printed pattern, saturated colour, and the same design on both faces.

Where it comes from: this is the complicated part. The technique is Indonesian batik. Dutch manufacturers industrialised it in the 19th century to sell into the Indonesian market, where it did not succeed — the machine-made crackle and irregularity that the process produced were read as defects. The cloth found its market instead in West Africa, where those same irregularities were accepted and the bold designs were wanted.

Over the following century West African traders, and then West African consumers and designers, took control of what the cloth meant. Patterns acquired names, proverbs and associations locally, not in Europe. Vlisco, the Dutch producer, still sells into the market; so do Nigerian mills and, in enormous volume, Chinese ones.

So is it authentic? The question is badly posed. Ankara is genuinely, deeply Nigerian in meaning, use, naming and design authority, and genuinely foreign in origin and often in manufacture. Both are true. It is a case study in a culture adopting something and making it unambiguously its own.

How to spot quality: the pattern should be equally strong on both sides — a print that is pale on the reverse is a cheap imitation of the wax process. Good wax print has a slight crackle in the ground colour, feels crisp rather than limp, and does not bleed heavily on the first wash.

Adire — Yoruba resist-dyed indigo

What it is: cloth patterned by resist-dyeing in indigo, from the Yoruba south-west, with Abeokuta as the best-known centre.

How it is made: the resist is applied before dyeing so the covered areas stay pale. The main methods are adire oniko (tying and binding with raffia), adire alabere (stitching, then removing the thread after dyeing) and adire eleko (painting or stencilling cassava-starch paste onto the cloth).

Why it looks the way it does: indigo builds in layers. Each dip deepens the blue, so depth of colour is a record of labour. The characteristic adire palette — deep blue to near-black, with white or pale blue pattern — is a direct consequence of the dye chemistry.

Adire is historically women's work, and adire eleko in particular is a drawing tradition as much as a dyeing one.

Aso-oke — Yoruba handwoven strip cloth

What it is: narrow strips woven on a horizontal loom, then hand-sewn edge to edge into a broad cloth. Aso oke means, roughly, "top cloth" — prestige cloth.

How to recognise it: the seams. Visible joins running the length of the fabric at regular intervals are the signature of strip weaving, and they are a feature, not a flaw.

Where you see it: weddings, chieftaincy, naming ceremonies. It is ceremonial cloth, made in coordinated sets for a family or a wedding party. The classic varieties are sanyan (beige-brown, from wild silk), alaari (deep red) and etu (dark indigo, "guinea fowl").

Akwete — Igbo handwoven cloth

What it is: broad handwoven cloth from Akwete in Abia State, south-eastern Nigeria, woven by women on an upright loom.

Why it is different: unlike aso-oke's narrow strips, Akwete is woven wide — a single panel, no seams. The weaver builds motifs into the cloth during weaving rather than printing or dyeing them afterwards, and individual weavers have historically guarded particular patterns as their own.

Akwete is the one that gets least attention internationally and is the closest to home for us. A cloth where the pattern is structural — built in the weave, not applied on top — is a good description of how we would like our own design to work.

Why we do not print any of them on a t-shirt

Because a photograph of cloth printed onto other cloth is a flat copy of something that was never flat.

Adire's depth comes from immersion. Aso-oke's character comes from the seams and the hand. Akwete's motif is a structure in the weave. Reproduce any of them as a digital print on a jersey tee and you keep the appearance and lose everything that made it worth reproducing — plus you have taken a living craft's output and used it as wallpaper.

What we take instead is the logic: indigo's discipline of building depth in layers, uli's line, the idea that a pattern should be built in rather than applied on top. That is the part that transfers.

If you want to buy the real thing

Buy it from the people who make it. Balogun and Oshodi markets in Lagos for ankara; Itoku market in Abeokuta for adire; Akwete itself, or Aba, for Akwete cloth. There are excellent weavers and dyers selling directly online now, which was not true ten years ago.

A hand-dyed adire wrapper is not expensive relative to what it is, and it will outlive nearly everything else in your wardrobe.