Kente Weaving in Adanwomase

We returned to the kente weaving workshop where there were maybe a dozen weavers at work. Most of the remaining weavers were in the village at the funeral.

As is typical in most Ghanian villages, there’s no electricity here. Everything operates on the power of the human body.  The above photo illustrates the yarn stretching from the looms to spindles about six or eight yards away.

Kente is made in narrow strips about four inches wide and about six feet in length. The strips are stitched together to create a large piece of fabric.

The workshop and the equipment were interesting. I wished I had been there on a day that more weavers were present.

The weavers are generally friendly and willing to be photographed. I didn’t want to disturb them while they were working and risk causing them to make a mistake in their beautiful and intricate designs, so any questions I had I asked of our visitor center guide.

The weavers have no back support at their work stations.

Even the feet don’t get to relax. This must be exhausting work.

Patterns can be very simple or very complex. They have meanings. Some patterns are reserved for royalty only.

The weavers are extremely rapid at their work.

You can see what this kind of work does for the arms and shoulders.  This weaver has fastened a flashlight overhead in his work area so he can work after dark.

I’ve just discovered that Adanwomase has a website.  You can find out more about the village and kente cloth here.

Kente Fever

I definitely had kente fever. A few steps away after buying my first cloth, another store beckons.

Oh, wow! My rationalization mechanism was working overtime:  what am I going to do with it? I don’t sew, and I won’t cut it! Is it going to end up stored in a plastic box and just taken out and looked at like a souvenir once in awhile? I can’t put it on the bed, the cats will snag it and get hair all over it. But it’s gorgeous, and it’s helping the people who live here, and it’s better than a donation to charity, and I’ll have something to show for it.

My advice:  don’t even bother trying to rationalize it. Just buy it if you love it!

A few doors down, some smocks were hanging up for sale and of course one caught my eye. The price was 30 cedis, half what I paid in Bolga. The material was lighter weight and a little rougher to the touch than the Bolga smock I had bought. I liked that it was lighter weight, and a little fabric softener would take care of the rest.  Stanley again inquired about a price reduction.  I’m telling you, that’s the way it’s done in Ghana. The guy wouldn’t budge on the price, and I didn’t care. I bought it.

In Adanwomase, prices are already at rock bottom, so if you go there know that no one is trying to gouge the tourist. If that isn’t enticement enough, the Adanwomase villagers have done something else in order to encourage tourism by making Adanwomase a pleasant place to visit and shop. They have signed a pledge, worked out with the Visitor’s Center and a Peace Corps Volunteer assigned to their area, that villagers promise not to beg tourists for money or hassle them in any way.  So respectful are they that my presence didn’t attract the usual gaggle of children. I kind of missed that!

Unfortunately, when I get shopping fever the  photography suffers. That’s why I have no photos of the village itself. I was too distracted by all the beautiful kente for sale.

It was so hot. Fortunately there was a shop open that was selling sodas. Cold ones, even! And, oh, yeah, they also had some kente for sale. Oh, it was hard to keep from buying something in every shop.

I had my golden kente, so I thought I’d treat myself to one more piece in a different color. There was another shop open on the way back to the visitor’s center where I found a pattern in green and purple that I liked.

The shop owner was also very willing to sell only one piece of a three-piece woman’s set, and for the same 60 cedis as in the other shop. Stanley bargained hard with her, maybe because he hadn’t gotten any price reductions for me on my previous two purchases of the day.

She finally relented to a small reduction, but like the young man who sold me the cloth in Bolga, she wasn’t happy about it.  If I had it to do over again, I would have slipped her the five-cedi reduction on the way out, without Stanley noticing.  He was looking out for me, but she needed it more than I did.

Buying Kente Cloth

When buying Kente cloth, it’s useful to know that it’s packaged in two ways:  men’s kente and women’s kente.  Men wear kente like a toga, so if you buy a man’s kente cloth, it will be a much larger piece of material, like roughly the size of a bedspread, and correspondingly will be more expensive.  Cost of a man’s kente cloth can be from 300 cedis on up. The price will vary depending on the materials used, number of colors of thread used, and the difficulty of the design.

Women’s kente is about half the cost of a man’s kente because there is less cloth, but it’s sold in three pieces. One piece is wrapped around the body, one is wrapped around the head and the third is the baby wrap, the piece of cloth used to hold a baby on its mother’s back.

I had no idea what I was going to use the kente for, but I didn’t want to spend 150 cedis for it. I asked if kente was strictly for adults or if children ever wore it. I figured if they had children’s kente, the piece of cloth would be smaller and so would the price. I mentioned I just wanted a small piece of cloth. The shop owner said that children sometimes wear kente but he could also sell me just one piece of a woman’s three-piece kente ensemble.  Perfect!

In Adanwomase, since the kente is woven here, it would be a very easy matter to make a matching replacement piece of cloth to once again complete the three-piece ensemble. The same colors and patterns are replicated on a regular basis. So buying one piece is no problem.

The price for one piece of the three-piece set was 60 cedis. Wait a minute, 60 isn’t one-third of 150. It was explained that in a women’s set, one of the pieces is larger than the other two. Okay, that made sense. The piece that gets wrapped around the body is the largest piece. Stanley inquired about a price reduction. The shop owner smiled and politely advised us that that was the final price. I remembered that someone at the Accra Arts Center showed me a piece of kente and had asked 60 cedis for it, but the cloth might have been one of the smaller pieces of a woman’s three-piece set. I felt more than comfortable with the price, which worked out to roughly US$40 for a gorgeous, hand woven piece of Ghana national treasure about the size of an afghan.

Which one to choose?  Oh, that was a problem. Normally I don’t care for orange or gold, but those colors are components of quite a lot of kente designs. Over time, I began to like the kente patterns in orange more and more.   I narrowed it down to two, and finally chose this one.  Then I had a brilliant idea.

I asked the shop owner if I could take his picture with the piece of kente I didn’t buy “so I could regret it for the rest of my life.” He laughed and stretched out the other piece of cloth.

And I do regret it!!!

Adanwomase

Day nine of the Ghana road trip:  searching for the lesser known Kente village.

Nkoranza and Techiman aren’t very far from Kumasi, and Adanwomase, the kente weaving village, is so close to Kumasi that you could almost consider it a suburb.  After our yam shopping spree, it wasn’t even lunch time, so there was more than enough time to see kente weaving before we stopped for the night.

Kumasi was nothing like I remembered it from eleven years ago on my last visit. I recall being taken around sightseeing by a friend of a friend and everything being very easy and pleasant. Now it’s tremendously busy and congested. Stanley wanted to stay well away from the city center. Though I would have liked to have seen the downtown area again, I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day going an inch per hour. My time here was too brief. Even though we took a broad detour around the city center, traffic was awful everywhere.

Adanwomase is nowhere near as well known as Bonwire for its kente weaving industry, the largest money making enterprise in the village.  I learned about Adanwomase from the Bradt Guide to Ghana when I was planning my trip.  The village was recommended precisely because it is less well known.  The quality of the kente cloth made here is just as good as Bonwire, but prices are lower and it’s hassle-free for tourists.  Lesser known and hassle free are two phrases which get my attention when it comes to vacation planning.

Again, this was a place where Stanley had never been.  I felt rather pleased with myself that I had been the reason that Stanley had seen four places (Mognoori, Sirigu, the Bolga weaver workshop and now Adanwomase) that in his 15 years of taking tourists around Ghana he had not been to before.

Stanley got us through the horrendous Kumasi traffic and then started asking people for directions to Adanwomase.  Surprisingly, a lot of people had never heard of the place.  I double checked the map in the Bradt Guide, and we persisted.

We finally saw a sign that confirmed we were going in the right direction.  Soon we were on a dirt road surrounded by cornfields. We came to a fork in the road where I saw the top of another sign like the one in the photo above barely peeking above the corn, but the cornstalks hid most of it so that we couldn’t tell which fork to take.  We took the wrong one.  After asking a few more people, we finally rolled into Adanwomase.

Adanwomase is a small village.  The livelihood of most of the people who live there is connected with the making of kente cloth. I didn’t see any restaurants, and there were not many stores.  You could walk through the whole village in maybe fifteen minutes.

A sign pointed the way to the visitor’s center near the kente weaving workshops, which was located maybe a quarter of a block off the main street. The sun was beating down relentlessly, and I grabbed my beautiful new Sirigu straw hat before we locked up the Land Rover. There was no one at the visitor’s center when we knocked on the door.

As is typical in a village, after Stanley made a few inquiries of the first couple of people he saw, the Ghana grapevine took care of the rest.  Someone went to find the man in charge of the visitor center, and he showed up in a few minutes.

We told the young man that we’d had a bit of trouble finding the place. He said that they had made a few more signs that hadn’t been put up yet. They had put one sign up near Bonwire, but as Adanwomase is in direct competition with Bonwire for tourist business, it had been removed almost immediately.

The visitor center at Adanwomase is new, having opened earlier this year.  It was only a short distance from the kente weaving workshop.   Our guide normally began the kente tour by taking visitors to the village and going to a yarn shop, so you could see the raw material from which kente is made.   Unfortunately for me, it was a Saturday and most of the villagers along with almost all of the nearly 150 kente weavers were attending a funeral.

We walked back to the main street to see if we could find a yarn shop open, but we didn’t.  Instead, we stopped at one of the few shops which were still open that sold finished pieces of kente.  I forgot about the heat immediately when confronted with this dazzling display of kente for sale.  The cloth was so arresting that I even failed to notice how beautifully carved the display case was! It wasn’t until I was back at home showing the photos to a friend that she pointed that out.

I asked about color fastness. This was something I wanted to know more about because I had bought some kente twelve years ago in Togo, and each time I wash it, it leaves the water blue.  The guide said that cloth woven with cotton yarn is more likely to bleed and fade, especially if the cloth has a lot of white in it. But cloth woven with rayon yarn won’t. The way you distinguish what material is used is to touch the fabric. Rayon has a silky feel, and cotton is more rough.

Now the real dilemma begins:  of all  the gorgeous cloth in the display case, which one do I choose?

Crazy Dangerous Things You’ll See on the Road in Ghana

Ghana is a poor country which has a long way to go in terms of taking care of its citizens. There are very few regulations in place regarding public safety. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just discuss highway safety in this post. Regulations that do exist are enforced sporadically. Infractions can often be taken care of with a small payment to the policeman who pulls you over.

These guys weren’t just hanging on, they were dancing!

The white haze on the right half of the photo isn’t smoke pouring from an exhaust, which happens often enough. It’s just a dirty windshield.

As a result, you’ll see all kinds of crazy dangerous things on Ghana’s roadways. Passengers traveling nonchalantly on top of trucks, for one.

If riding on top wasn’t crazy dangerous enough, how about perching on the back bumper?

Not only do we have a guy on top, look at how the vehicle tilts to one side.  Either there’s too much stuff inside, or something’s broken. Overloaded vehicles are common, as well as vehicles in unsafe mechanical condition.  Even more to consider, this isn’t a private vehicle. It’s a tro-tro, a vehicle which transports passengers and cargo like a state bus.

This tro-tro is parked at the moment, but not for long. Guys riding on tro-tro roofs are likely mates, the guys who assist the tro-tro driver by collecting fares and loading and unloading cargo. If the mate is on the roof, that means they can squeeze one more paying passenger inside.

Why even hang on to anything?  What could possibly happen?

I’ve gone through all my truck-on-the-highway photos.  Almost all of them have passengers riding on top.

There were six or seven people inside this taxi when it passed by in Techiman.  Two people sharing the bucket seat in front is very common. West Africans are typically a lot less well fed than Americans, so it’s doable. Taxi and tro-tro drivers like to maximize their fare capability to offset fuel costs and police payoffs.

This is simply trying to make a left turn at an uncontrolled intersection in Kumasi.  Traffic in Kumasi is as much of a  nightmare as it is in Accra. Many more traffic signals are needed, but that would take money that the Ghanaian government doesn’t have. Impatient drivers simply take insane risks and squeeze by each other with only inches to spare.

Unsafe loads were such a “normal” sight that I’d often forget to take a picture of them.