African Art

While this Kongo mpu may appear simple in color and design, it comprises an upper-class prestige cap, bestowed upon its owner upon ascension to office. Close-fitting caps, like this one, are worn by noblemen and -women, while taller mpu are exclusive to the king and chiefs. Even the Kongo word for chief, mfumu a mpu, or "chief of the cap," recognizes the power of the mpu. Beginning from the center point and spiraling outward, artists work with a single strand of fiber and build onto the central string to create the kotting and interlace patterns typical of mpu. Spirals, like the one on the crown of this mpu, are powerful and resilient symbols in the Kongo Kingdom, serving as metaphors for longevity and continuous existence. 

This indigo strip-weave cloth from Ewe weavers in southern Ghana, suggests a West African-wide aesthetic, popular from Senegal to Nigeria. Historically, male weavers used horizontal looms to produce such strip-woven cloths for prestige clothing. Wearers generally wrapped the large, luxury cloths around their bodies in order to visually command attention through their great size and expensive apparel. Additional heddles allowed master weavers to create supplementary weft float designs in the woven cloth, resulting in more complex, intricate, and sought-after designs. Similarly, natural indigo dye has long been prized across West Africa and beyond for its rich, dark, bluish-black color. Expert indigo dyers, from Wolof women in Senegal to the Hausa men of northern Nigeria, cultivated the Indigofera plant into dyestuffs, which was clearly superior to natural European woad. Only when Europeans devised synthetic dyes in the late nineteenth century did natural indigo production begin to falter. The depth of blue, contrasting so starkly with unbleached cotton, effectively embodies this long-standing tradition of indigo strip-weave cloth.