A Vanishing African Art Gets Poised For Posterity

by Sunaina Kumar

Adire, the traditional Yoruba textile craft, is finding new life with a new generation.

When she was seven years old, Nike Davies-Okundaye lost both her mother and her grandmother. It was left to her great-grandmother — the head of the craftswomen in a village in Ogidi in southwest Nigeria — to bring her up and teach her the craft of adire. Ogidi is one of the major centers of adire production in the entirety of the country.

Adire is a resist-dyed fabric which is created by applying wax, string or rubber bands to keep the dye from penetrating the exposed, open areas. Traditionally worn and produced by Yoruba women of southwest Nigeria, adire is a delicate and time-consuming process that can be traced back to the nineteenth century.

Primarily a female domestic craft, adire derived from two Yoruba words — adi (to tie) and re (to dye). It’s not unlike the methods used by its hippie-modern sister-fabric known as tie-dye. But unlike it’s psychedelic brethren, producing just five yards of adire is painstaking work and can take up to three weeks or more.