The textile trade of pre-colonial Africa

In December 1633, a Dutch ship reached the fort of Nassau on the ‘Gold Coast’ (modern Ghana), carrying more than 6,000 pieces of cloth which was to be exchanged for gold. However, unlike most cloth imported to the West African coast at the time, this cloth didn't come from India or Europe, but from the West African kingdom of Benin.¹

By the middle of the century, trade in Benin cloth expanded rapidly to over 16,000 pieces annually even as its price quadrupled.² The European buyers learned that the cloth came from the town of Koffo, "which lies one day's journey from Great Benin, but no white man may go there".³ Near the close of the century, this cloth was reported to have come from much further inland, and only part of the trade was controlled by Benin.⁴ The cloth trade became so lucrative that it drew in African mariners, who sailed from the Gold coast in order to cut out the European middlemen and purchase the cloth directly from Benin and its neighbors.

17th-century Dutch engraving depicting the city of Benin.

18th-century engraving of El-mina on the Gold coast, depicting local sail-boats.

The trade of textiles was one of the most important aspects of Africa's economic history. The growth of textile manufacturing across the continent was underpinned by domestic and external demand, facilitated by long-distance trade which linked producers to local and regional markets. The volume and complexity of the trade induced innovations in its organization, making African cloth competitive not just in local markets but in foreign markets within the continent and beyond.

Along the Swahili coast, the increase in demand for trade cloth led to the emergence of textile-producing centers on the islands of Mombasa and Pate in modern Kenya. 16th century accounts mention that the weavers of the island of Pate are particularly famous along the coast, for making silk and cotton cloth embroidered with gold and silver. These 'Pate cloths' found a ready market among the Swahili and in the interior kingdoms along the Zambezi, where they were used in the gold and ivory trade, and were considered more valuable than Gujarati cloths from India. In 1762, skippers from Pate and Mombasa were exporting about 10,000 pieces of cloth to the Kerimba Islands of Mozambique.⁵

Mombasa beachfront, ca. 1934, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek

As early as the 14th century, the city of Mogadishu in Somalia was renowned for its trade in local textiles, which, according to Ibn Battuta, were “unequaled and exported from it to Egypt and elsewhere.” By the 19th century, a fifth of Mogadishu's population of 5,000 worked in its textile industry to make an estimated 50,000 pieces of cloth annually, most of which were exported by local traders to the interior and across the coast as far as Zanzibar, with about 10% of the total being sent overseas. ⁶

Mogadishu, Somalia ca. 1909, Société géographique italienne.

In the Hausaland region of West Africa, the city of Kano emerged as the leading center of the Sokoto empire’s textile industry during the 19th century. In 1851, the city of 60,000 inhabitants produced an estimated 100,000 pieces of cloth annually, a fifth of which were exported to Timbuktu. Kano cloth could be found anywhere between the Atlantic and southern Mediterranean coasts, where it was carried by local merchants to places as distant as Tripoli and Lagos.

The city of Kano, Nigeria, ca 1931, Walter Mittelholzer.

a Hausa cloth-trader in Ghana, ca. 1925. Basel Mission Archives.

The dynamism of cloth-production and trade in Africa contributed to the growth of multiple textile traditions across the continent. The vibrant and diverse textile economies of pre-colonial Africa were not displaced by imports of foreign cloths, but rather expanded to meet increased demand from other parts of the continent and beyond.

This is especially evident in the great 'textile belt' of central Africa, where large volumes of cloth have been produced and exported since the 16th century.

While much of the region's documentary record is concerned with Kongo's extensive export trade in cloth —which during the 17th century outmatched all the places mentioned above— most of this cloth wasn't made in Kongo itself but came from the interior. Long-distance trade routes in central Africa connected disparate cloth-producing regions as far inland as the shores of Lake Tanganyika, bringing the celebrated textiles of societies such as the Kuba and Luba to coastal markets in Kongo and Loango.

The history of cloth trade in the ‘Central African Textile Belt’ is the subject of my latest Patreon article; please subscribe to read about it here:

1. Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897 by Alan Frederick Charles Ryder pg 93-94

2. Cloth in West African History by Colleen E. Kriger, pg 42, Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897 by Alan Frederick Charles Ryder pg 95, 97.

3. Nigerian Perspectives: An Historical Anthology By Thomas Hodgkin pg 167

4. How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 pg 97-99

5. Les cités-États swahili de l'archipel de Lamu By T. vernet pg 73-76, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa By Edward A. Alpers pg 131-132. (50,000 cruzados worth of cloth, each cloth in Mozambique cost about 5-6 cruzados according to an earlier account by Francisco Barreto)

6. East Africa and the Indian Ocean by Edward Alpers pg 79-91)