The Process of Making Bogolanfini or Mud Cloth
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In recent years the stark black and white designs of Bogolanfini have become, along with kente, one of the best known African cloth traditions around the world. Bogolanfini, which translates as "mud cloth", is a long established tradition among the Bamana, a Mande speaking people who inhabit a large area to the east and north of Bamako in Mali. The production of Bogolan cloth involves a unique and lengthy procedure, which we can only outline here. The raw material is provided by plain white cotton cloth woven by men in narrow strips on the local version of the double heddle loom. The plain cloth that is to be turned into bogolan is first sewn up into a womans wrapper cloth or whatever other garment the customer requires. Although men in Bamako have taken up a simplified form of bogolan dyeing in recent years, in the Beledougou area it remains primarily a women's craft passed on from mother to daughter. The cloth is first washed in water and allowed to dry so that it can shrink to its final size. It is then soaked in a brown solution made from the pounded leaves of certain trees. Although the main leaves used are widely known, specialists have their own precise closely guarded recipes to give the best results. Once the cloth has been soaked in the mixture it takes on a deep even yellow colour which fades only slightly when it is spread out on the ground to dry in the sun. It is now ready for the mud dye to be applied. The mud used is collected from ponds and left to ferment in a covered pot for about a year, during which time it becomes black.
Small pieces of bamboo and flat metal spatula of various widths are used to draw the design onto the cloth using the mud solution. When all the designs have been drawn in outline she then uses a wider implement to fill in the mud dye over the spaces left between them. One of the unique features of high quality bogolan is that it is the background not the designs themselves that are painted onto the cloth leaving the design in the remaining undyed areas. It can take several weeks of slow and painstaking work before the whole cloth is covered. The cloth is then washed with water to remove any excess mud leaving a black background from which the yellow designs stand out. The whole process of dipping the cloth in the leaf solution and outlining the designs with a layer of black mud dye is then repeated, giving the cloth a second coating of dye. The final stage is to apply a solution that includes caustic soda to the yellow areas so that they are bleached to the desired white. It would seem strange to begin with a white cloth, dye it to yellow, then finish up by treating the yellow areas so they become white again. The reason for this apparently paradoxical procedure lies in the chemical processes at work in the dyeing process. The active ingredient in the mud dye is iron oxide, which is converted by tannic acid in the leaf solution into a fast dye of iron tannate. The yellow stage is therefore essential although as a colour it is not present on the finished cloth.
Reprinted courtesy of Duncan Clarke of Adire African Textiles.