Kuba Cloth - Collectors Piece - Antique
This is another fine piece of Kuba cloth. particularly as this is a collectors piece as it is approximately 50 years old. It is of a generous length of 4.3 metres x 60 cm. It is worth reading the Kuba cloth story as follows:
The Kuba People
The Kuba, also called Bakuba, are a cluster of about 16 Bantu-speaking groups in southeastern Congo, living between the Kasai and Sankuru rivers. The embroidered and appliqué decorated raffia cloths of the Kuba peoples are the best known survivors of an ancient African tradition of fine quality raffia cloth weaving that was once widespread across the whole of Central Africa.
Symbols in the After-Life
The Kuba believe that high quality, correctly patterned raffia dress is key to being recognised by clan ancestors in the land of the dead, so families accumulate the cloths and pass them down through the generations.
Creating Cut-Pile Kuba Cloth
The basic unit of Kuba weaving is the undecorated square of plain raffia cloth, the mbal, woven by men on an upright single-heddle loom. Although men sometimes decorate the cloth they weave, only women produce the most laborious and prestigious type of cloth decoration, cut-pile embroidery. It takes about a month of...