This week, we reconnect with the remarkable Tie-Dye or Adire in Yoruba, resist-dyed process produced and worn across the nation.
Dyes were said to have been discovered by primitive men through various uses of plant juices, flowers and leaves, etc. and applying the substances to basic clothes or materials. The practice of tie dyeing in the olden days was achieved through colours extracted from plants and herbs. However, earlier dye processes easily faded and washed off, but more adventurous series of application for producing different patterns and designs.
Broader colour palette of imported synthetic dyes were reportedly introduced in the second half of the twentieth century, and the tie-dye label was expanded to include a variety of hand-dyed textiles using wax resist batik methods to produce patterned cloth in an array of dye tints and hues. The earliest cloths were probably simple tied designs on locally-woven hand-spun cotton cloth much like those still produced in Mali. In the early decades of the twentieth century however, the new access to large quantities of imported shirting material made possible by the spread of European textile merchants in certain Yoruba towns, notably Abeokuta, enabled women dyers to become both artists and entrepreneurs in a booming new medium.
New techniques of resist dyeing were developed, most notably the practice of hand-painting designs on the cloth with a cassava starch paste prior to dyeing. New techniques of resist dyeing were developed, most notably the practice of hand-painting designs on the cloth with a cassava starch paste prior to dyeing. This was known as Àdìre Eléko, along with a new style more suited to rapid mass production (using metal stencils cut from the sheets of tin that lined tea chests, using sewn raffia and/or tied sections, or folding the cloths repeatedly before tying or stitching them in place). Tie-dye techniques have also been used for centuries in the Hausa region of West Africa, with renowned indigo dye pits located in and around Kano, Nigeria.
The Changing patterns, new tye dye appeals have led the fashion-conscious Yoruba in the urban and rural areas to adopt colourful tie-dye to meet fashion challenges and to be an alternative to machine prints. In Nigeria one can still buy indigo-dyed and eleko made by older women in Abeokuta and Ibadan and by artisans at the Nike Center for the Arts and Culture in Oshogbo where the artist Nike Davies-Okundaye trains students in traditional tye dye techniques. But, increasingly, the lover of indigo-dyed tye dye must turn to collecting pieces from the cloth markets such as Oje Market in Ibadan or from traders who specialize in the old cloth. Soon those also will be gone from the Yoruba scene.
Nigerian Tie-Dye History
In the 1920s and 1930s tye dye was a major local craft in the towns of Abeokuta and Ibadan, attracting buyers from all over West Africa. Most of the designs were 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”), and Ibadadun (“Ibadan is sweet”).
By the 1960s the production caught the interest of US Peace Corps workers in the 1960s. The traditional production of indigo- tie-dyes involves the input of two female specialists-dyers, who control production and marketing of adire, and decorators who create the resist patterns. In the oldest forms of tye dye, two basic resist techniques are used to create soft blue or white designs to contrast with a deeply saturated indigo blue background. Tie-dye oniko is tied or wrapped with raffia to resist the dye. Tie-dye has starchy maize or cassava paste hand-painted onto the surface of the cloth as a resist agent. Further experimentation led to two additional techniques. Tie-dye involves stitching the cloth with thread prior to dyeing to produce fine-lined motifs. Tie-dye is produced with the aid of zinc stencils to control the application of the resist starch.
The decorator works with a 1 x 2-yard fabric rectangle as a design field, making two identical pieces to sew together to make a square cloth most commonly used for a woman’s wrapper. Most wrappers have repeated all-over patterns created with one or more resist techniques with no one focal point of interest. The motifs used in tie-dye and the labels attached to them reflect the concerns of indigenous and contemporary Yoruba life: the world of nature, religion, philosophy, everyday life and notable events. Decorators, when not working with stencils, have a mental template in mind based on prototypes where particular motifs are combined together to identify a wrapper type, such as Ibadandun. Some motifs are pictographic, but often bear little resemblance to the thing signified by labels. For example, tie-dyed motifs such as “moon and fruits” have only a passing semblance to what they portray, while some motifs used in tie-dye eleko like ejo (snake) or ewe(leaf) are recognizable.