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| Glorious Ghana On The Textile Trail In West Africa – 2010. Magie and Bob spend about eight weeks a year travelling in West Africa – researching and documenting textile traditions and buying for their small fair trade business www.africanfabric.co.uk. Between trips to textile and quilt shows in the UK and Europe, they’ve managed to send in some brief impressions from their most recent trip early 2010. Ghana... When you step off the plane in Accra the heat hits you like a brick. The air feels almost thick with humidity, and this is the dry season! So lesson one is obvious: Slow down. Then slow down some more. And that’s exactly what we did on this trip. With every stop around this fascinating and friendly country, we brought things down to African pace. Not only did we conserve energy – we spent a lot more time with all of our regular batik dyers, bead makers and basket weavers. In Daboya where we work with the local indigo dyers and weavers of the indigenous blue and white strip cloth, it was great to just sit in the shade of the mosque and soak up the atmoshpere, observing the village at work... Young weavers arrived at their looms in the shade of a tree. They layed out their warp threads, set up their heddles and started to work weaving 60 metre cotton strips, the raw material for the local man’s smock. Young girls arrived with lunch. The old men, retired weavers, leaned against the wall of the mosque, stitching the strips together into smocks and chatting over the news on a transistor radio. A boy brought us cokes. Time just drifted away. Eventually, as the sun started to drop toward the tree tops, our taxi driver, who was born in Daboya, reminded us that we still had to cross the river back to the car for a dusty, bumby 90 minute drive back to Tamale. Reluctantly, we said good-bye to our friends in Daboya. Until next time, that is. In Bolgatanga in the far north of Ghana, our friend Okala took us for a long hot trek out to his village, home to the weavers who make the wonderful baskets that we buy for the African Fabric Shop. It was hot, almost 40C, but a blessed breeze blew across the dry sahel. We arrived at the village to find, well, nothing happening and nobody around. We sat under the big baobab tree to get out of the sun and waited. “Maybe nobody will come out today,” Okala said. “They normally work here, under the tree. But today it is windy. Maybe to windy to work.” “Windy,” we thought. “Without this wind, we would melt!” After a while, a few boys arrived to join us. They started to split and twist elephant grass for basket weaving. Gradually, some weavers arrived with thier partly woven baskets. Eventually, most of the village sat working and gossiping under the tree. Once again, time just drifted away. |
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| Magie and Bob with their new signboard, painted in Accra. |
| Magie tries her hand at basket weaving, near Bolgatanga, Ghana. |
| Magie and Trish with smock sewer in the shade of the mosque, Daboya, Ghana. |
| Magie unpicking resist threads with Musa in The Gambia. Musa dyes traditional Kola Nut and Indigo for us. |
