This is a living document; it will be updated as more research, sources, and details emerge.
These raw materials have formed the foundation of African textile production for millennia; fiber makers across the continent transformed them into cloth, currency, and craft long before recorded history caught up.
Cotton
What it is: Spun fiber from the Gossypium plant; Africa’s most widespread textile material, used for both clothing and, historically, as currency.
Found: Cotton itself appears in the archaeological record by ~3000 BC (seeds at a Nubian site, Afia). The earliest woven cotton textiles date to the Meroitic period, c. 300 BC–300 AD (fragments from graves at Meroe and Karanog).
Where: Nile Valley (Nubia/Sudan), spreading through the Sahel, East & West Africa
Read more:
- Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History, the standard scholarly reference for cotton and weaving history across West Africa
- "Cloth in African History" — free overview covering cotton’s spread continent-wide, from Nubia to Aksum to West and Southern Africa
Bast
What it is: A spun fiber, not a sheet made by soaking or retting plant stalks or inner bark (phloem) until the fibers separate, then spinning those fibers into thread and weaving them on a loom, the same way cotton is processed. This differs from bark cloth (used in Uganda, Congo/Zaire, Rwanda, Malawi, and historically Ghana), which is made by beating a single piece of bark flat into a felted sheet closer to paper-making than weaving. Bast fiber can come from several different plants, including fig trees, jute, flax, and hemp-leaved hibiscus (Hibiscus cannabinus, sometimes called kenaf), botanically unrelated to true hemp despite the name.
Found: 9th century AD, fragments excavated at Igbo-Ukwu, Nigeria; hibiscus bast weaving documented in Cameroon’s Grasslands via 20th-century fieldwork, though likely much older
Where: Southeastern Nigeria (Igbo-Ukwu); eastern Madagascar (surviving practice); Cameroon Grasslands Tikar and Bamum territories, centered around Foumban
Bark extraction in Uganda. A craftsman strips bark from a Mutuba (Ficus natalensis) tree for barkcloth, a traditional method where the bark is harvested in one piece, softened, and beaten into textile. © J.K. Walusimbi, via UNESCO
Read more:
- "Igbo-Ukwu Textiles: AMS Dating and Fiber Analysis" (McIntosh & Cartwright, 2022) — Springer/African Archaeological Review
- "Raw Materials in Sub-Saharan African Weaving" — Adire African Textiles
- Lamb, Venice & Alastair. Au Cameroun: Weaving–Tissage. Elf Serepca Cameroun/Roxford Books, 1981.
Raffia
What it is: Fiber stripped from raffia palm leaves, the dominant weaving material in Central Africa, most famously associated with Kuba and Kongo cloth.
Found: Documented use by the 17th century in the Kongo Kingdom (raffia weaving itself is likely older, but harder to date archaeologically)
Where: Congo Basin, Kuba Kingdom (DRC), Angola, Gabon, Cameroon
Read more:
Silk
What it is: Wild silk gathered from moth cocoons (not farmed), most famously woven by the Yoruba into “sanyan” cloth, and also produced by the Marka-Dafing community of Burkina Faso.
Found: Dates to the ~8th century, though silk-specific evidence is harder to pin down
Where: Southwestern Nigeria (Yoruba), Burkina Faso (Marka-Dafing), Côte d’Ivoire, and Madagascar
Read more:
Wool
What it is: Hand-spun wool from wool-bearing sheep is rarer in sub-Saharan Africa; the Massina (Macina) breed of Mali’s Niger Bend region is the notable exception among the region's typically hairy (non-wool) sheep.
Found: 11th–12th century, wool textile fragments excavated from the Tellem burial caves, Bandiagara Cliff, Mali
Where: Niger Bend/Inland Delta (Mali), Cape Verde
Read more:
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- Gardi, Bernhard. “Mali: Weaving with Wool and Cotton.” In Woven Beauty: The Art of West African Textiles, edited by Bernhard Gardi, 60–98. Basel: Museum der Kulturen, 2009.
- Gardi, Bernhard & Gilbert, Michelle. "Arkilla, Kaasa, and Nsaa: The Many Influences of Wool Textiles from the Niger Bend in West Africa" — The Textile Museum Journal 48, no. 1 (2021): 24–53
