Structural Patterns in Asante Kente: An Indigenous Instructional Resource for Design Education in Textiles

Abstract

Asante Kente is a richly coloured, intricately patterned indigenous hand woven fabric that is typically produced at Bonwire and Adanwomase in Ashanti Region, Ghana. Kente is woven in long narrow strips with brightly coloured silk or cotton yarns on Nsadua Kofi, the traditional narrow loom, which is a box-like wooden structure in which the weaver sits to weave. The strips are sewn together lengthways to purposely create definite patterns in the constructed cloth. Asante Kente motifs and cloth designs have names with philosophical meanings and colour symbolism that serve as a medium of communication to the indigenes.  The cloth designs consist of dots, lines, shapes, textures and colours that are carefully crafted to form geometric shapes and intricate patterns that exhibit balance, rhythm, variety, proportion and repetition. Unlike Asante Kente cloth designs that evolve on the loom, weaving in the higher education textiles curriculum requires expression of the structure of design concepts as drafts on point paper. To demystify drafting, which many textiles students perceive as “difficult to learn” led to adoption of the quasi-experimental approach to interpret selected Kente motifs to demonstrate the process of drafting to 148 Year One Industrial Art students of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. Using the draft as instructional resource, the students were guided to translate drafts they had made into woven Kente stole on the broadloom. The focus of this work was to bridge the gap between indigenous hand weaving and weaving as it is taught in the formal educational system. The structural patterns of Asante Kente designs provided the needed instructional resource and aesthetic experience to ensure successful learning of drafting in textiles design education. The importance of the study is to help preserve this natural cultural heritage of Kente weaving in the youth who are given formal education and again to set the pace for further research to be conducted into the use of motifs, symbols and designs in indigenous cloth as vast resource in design education in textiles.

Keywords: Asante Kente Design, Structural Pattern, Instructional Resource, Drafting, and Textiles Design Education