The Origin And History Of Popular Yoruba Attire 'Adire'

Adire is a sort of dyed cloth from southwest Nigeria that Yoruba women traditionally make using a variety of resist-dyeing techniques. 

The word 'Adire' is derived from the Yoruba words 'adi' (tying) and 're' (dying). It is a substance created using wax-resist processes to create patterned designs in a wide range of colors and tones. 

History

Indigo dyeing is a centuries-old custom in West Africa. The earliest known example is an 11th-century Dogon kingdom of Mali headgear dyed in the oniko style.

Adire textiles were created in southwestern Nigeria and spread to northern Africa by Yoruba traders and trader families. Some families that chose to travel north started making adire garments to sell to other ladies. Because it is typically produced by women, patterns, and motifs of the Adire are passed down from mother to daughter in households. 

Certain motifs, however, might be influenced by the artist's abilities and craftsmanship, as well as skills passed down through generations. Adire's patterns frequently feature representations of vegetation, animals, tools, and intellectual topics. 

The patterns of Adire are often representations of plants, animals, tools, and conceptual themes. Traditional themes are categorized into geometric, figural, skewmorphic, letters, and celestiomorphic types. 

The first examples of this style were most likely simply knotted motifs on cotton cloth that was handspun and woven locally. Abeokuta is regarded as Nigeria's adire-making capital; however, some argue that the huge cities of Ibadan and Osogbo (Yorubaland) are more important in adire-making because adire dyeing originated in Abeokuta when Egba women from Ibadan returned with this knowledge. The cloth's fundamental shape was that of two pieces of shirting material stitched together to form a woman's wrapper cloth. 

Techniques

There are three primary resist techniques used in Nigeria:

Oniko: this process involves tying raffia around hundreds of individual corn kernels or pebbles to produce small white circles on a blue background. The fabric can also be twisted and tied on itself or folded into stripes.

Alabere: Stitching raffia onto the fabric in a pattern before dyeing. The raffia palm is stripped, and the spine sewn into the fabric. After dyeing the raffia is usually ripped out, although some choose to leave it in and let wear and tear on the garment slowly reveal the design.

Eleko: Resist dyeing with cassava paste painted onto the fabric. Traditionally done with different size chicken feathers, calabash carved into different designs is also used, like block printing. Since the early twentieth century, metal stencils cut from the sheets of tin that lined tea chests have also been used.

Most of the designs are named, with popular ones including the jubilee pattern (first produced for the silver jubilee of George V and Queen Mary in 1935), Olokun ("goddess of the sea"), Sunbebe ("lifting of the beads") and Ibadandun ("Ibadan is sweet").

Nigeria is particularly well-known for its two-tone indigo resist designs, which are made by repeatedly dyeing cloth with cassava root paste to achieve a deep blue; the paste is then rinsed away and the cloth dyed again.

Before the paste is washed off, high-quality cloth is dyed 25 times or more to get a deep blue-black color. Other sections of West Africa have different types of indigo resist-dyeing; for example, the Bamana of Mali utilize mud resist, Senegalese dyers use rice paste instead of cassava root, and the Ndop of Cameroon use both thread and wax resists.