There is a long-running myth that Africans did not have clothes until the arrival of Arabs and later, colonisation. In fact, Africa has a long tradition of making its own unique clothing since time immemorial. From Malian mud cloths, which they say are made of the earth, the river and the sun, to the famous red Maasai Shuka, clothes across the continent carry with them deep and complex histories both local and global. Jamila Versi takes a deeper look at the story behind Ugandan bark cloth and speaks to some experts working with the material today.
Scrolling online, you come across a cute brown polka-dotted mini dress. On Shein.com, you can buy it from China and have it shipped to your home for just £6.99. In the world of fast fashion, companies such as Shein pride themselves on speed, moving from design to production in as little as 10 days. The app updates daily with between 2,000 and 10,000 new designs.
But that quick turnaround comes at a cost. According to the NGO Earth.org, fast fashion is the second-biggest consumer of water and is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions – more than international flights and maritime shipping combined. The clothes have an equally short lifespan: around 85% of fast-fashion textiles end up in landfill each year.
Much of this discarded clothing is shipped around the world. Ghana has become known as ‘fast fashion’s dumping ground’, with around 15m discarded garments arriving each week in what is colloquially called obroni wawu — ‘dead white man’s clothes’.
The garments are sent to local markets, but around 40% arrive unusable because of tears, stains or other damage. Clothing piles up on beaches, creating bleak mounds of waste.
The speed of production has a human cost, too. Investigations into the fast-fashion supply chain have reported workers working up to 17 hours a day and earning as little as £1 an hour.
Fast fashion is built around speed: clothes are designed quickly, produced quickly and discarded quickly. But what might fashion look like if materials were designed not to exhaust the landscape, but to regenerate it? In Uganda, one ancient textile tradition offers a radically different model.
A Life-Giving Tree
Sitting across from me, José Hendo, a Ugandan-born British designer, cuts an impressive figure. With a bright pink afro, she wears what looks like leather cloth decorated with metal badges around her neck. But this, she explains, is not leather. It is olubugo – terracotta-coloured bark-cloth traditionally made in Uganda. Considered one of the oldest cloth-making traditions, in 2005, UNESCO proclaimed it a ‘Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’.
The Mutuba tree, also known as Ficus natalensis, grows in tropical regions and has a long cultural history in Uganda, particularly among the Buganda people. The tree stores water during the rainy season and releases it into the surrounding soil during the dry season, “so all the plants around it thrive,” says Hendo.
“So, you knew that if you had that tree in your gardens, you had food all year round. It’s like a life source, a life giver – it nourished everything around it, not just the people – the animals as well. And when you scrape bark off the tree, the chickens and the hens and the goats and sheep come and start eating it – because they know they benefit from it,” says Hendo.
The tree’s properties may extend even further. A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology found that Ugandan barkcloth could inhibit the growth of MRSA – an infection caused by bacteria resistant to many antibiotics – by as much as 99%.
Transforming bark into cloth is a slow process, passed down orally for generations. During the rainy season, the bark is carefully removed; incisions are made around the inner bark at the top and bottom of the tree before it is cut vertically and stripped off the tree.
The bark is then boiled, sometimes using solar stoves, for around 20 minutes before being beaten repeatedly with specially designed mallets. The rhythmic, soothing sound echoes through the forest as the bark stretches and softens.
The trees frequently grow beside banana trees, whose leaves are wrapped around the Mutuba tree to protect it as the bark regenerates. It grows back within about nine months. With trees often living between 60 and 100 years, a single tree can produce up to 200m 2 of bark in its lifetime.
“They pound it, and it stretches and stretches and stretches… The knowledge transmitted from generation to generation was a father teaching his son. This tradition has been in the family I work with for more than 350 years, from father to son,” says Hondo.
Traditionally, barkcloth has been used in many forms: as royal regalia, bedding (particularly useful against mosquitoes), burial shrouds, and room dividers.
Hondo explains: “So, imagine you have the cloth that kind of was the fabric of everything in society. If you wanted to buy a cow, you get the cloth, and you got a cow. And it could be (and still is) used for burial shrouds, bride prices, bridal dresses…”
For Hendo, these uses reflect the deeper significance of the tree. “I don’t want to use the word sacred because it detracts from the practical uses of the tree.”
Ugandan barkcloth began to fall out of fashion as cotton was introduced through Arab trade routes and European textiles became increasingly dominant during the colonial period. But the tradition has survived – Hendo is not the only artist reclaiming the material.
I also sat down with Lesli Robertson and Pamela Kyagera of Mekeka Designs, who use nature-based materials for their products. Like Hendo, they are finding new uses for traditional barkcloth. One challenge they face is the generational divide surrounding the material.
“The younger generation fears barkcloth a lot. They can’t even come near it. They associate it with dead bodies and then witchcraft,” says Pamela Kyagera, Operations Manager and Founding Partner.
But those perceptions often change when young people see how Mekeka Designs is reinventing the material.
“When they see what we’ve done, they’re mesmerised. They wouldn’t imagine that it can come out like that. For instance, we add banana silk, which is another indigenous textile we use. And when they see these combinations, they get mesmerised. The young artists have been very, very much encouraged.”
Moving beyond fashion
For both Hendo and Mekeka Designs, working with barkcloth goes beyond the material itself. Whether Hendo is fashioning it into intricate garments or Mekeka is combining it with traditional materials such as raffia, made from palm fibres, to create elaborate wall pieces, sustainability sits at the centre of their practice.
Mekeka collaborates with a tree farmers’ organisation for whom barkcloth revitalisation is also tied to community farming and food security.
It is about “really looking at the Mutuba tree as a centre of a polyculture farming practice,” says Lesli Robertson, Creative Director and Founding Partner at Mekeka. “Because the Mutuba tree is at the centre, you get five or six different types of foods that can grow in and around the canopy of the tree – in addition to all the different uses of this one barkcloth tree.”
The group is also working to geolocate trees and make the barkcloth supply chain more transparent. “We want people to be able to go through technology, ‘I know where this was sourced, I understand the environmental benefits of using it – there’s the tree that this came from, and there’s the farmer that made it’.”
For Hendo, everything revolves around sustainability. Her project, Bark to the Roots, has launched a campaign to plant one million Mutuba trees while working with communities to ensure the practice of barkcloth-making does not disappear.
“I use barkcloth as my ambassador for sustainability,” she tells me excitedly. “The tree doesn’t die to give you the cloth or all the things the tree gives. As a sustainable designer and artist, when I found this, I was home! I knew the battle was won because I had the weapon; I had the tool to work with to instigate the change I thought needed to happen.”
This article is part of the ‘From Cotton to Cloth’, which explores Africa’s cotton opportunity and its potential to drive industrialisation.
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The cloth made from the Tree of Life
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