KASAI VELVETS FROM THE KINGDOM OF KUBA

In the southern edge of the Congolese River Basin, a kingdom known to its neighbors as the Kuba, “people of the king,” flourished throughout the latter half of the last millennium. During three centuries of isolation from influences outside of Africa, the Kuba developed an original form of geometrical art and one of the greatest textile repertoires in the world.

There is a story, which may be apocryphal, that I want to tell you. It involves a Belgian official trekking via motorbike to the territory of the Shoowa, a northern group particularly renowned for its sensitivity to surface design. But I can’t speak of a “meeting” and ignore the ruptures such encounters caused: the Belgian colonizers’ early twentieth-century sacking of the capital, Nsheng; the instability and political turmoil wrought by colonialism and global trade, visible in formal shifts in textile production as Kuba elites sought more eye-catching designs to declare, and preserve, their authority. 

Every object speaks to the time and space of its making. Art, so central to Kuba life, absorbed and delineated the shockwaves of history. 

Still, the story goes: when a Belgian official arrived in the Shoowa village in a cloud of dust, the engine puttering to a halt, it was not his motorbike that caught the attention of the reigning king, but the pattern its tires traced in the dirt. The king instructed an aide to copy the tires’ imprints and named the pattern after himself: “Kwete’s design.”

Kasai velvets, or buiin

These cut-pile embroidered prestige cloths, known as winu (plural buiin), or “Kasai velvets,” were sometimes traded as a light, portable form of currency with other groups in the region or Europeans. In the span of only twenty years in the mid-to-late 20th century, ten thousand pieces of embroidery left the Kuba Kingdom. 

The Textile Resource Center holds four such cloths from the kingdom of Kuba, each a unique choreography of texture and form. Whoever made these particular cloths divided the surfaces into three—sometimes four—sections, and explored the geometric possibilities of composition by rotating, reflecting, and interlocking the smallest integral element of an embroidered motif. 

As in the story of Kwete’s design, these motifs can be associated with a specific king. Motifs may also reference the natural world or design itself, such as the double crossing which delineates the idea of interlacing, named after WOOT, the mythological founder of Kuba culture.

Can’s and cannot’s. I can picture her: the embroiderer licking the raffia thread and rolling it on her thigh to soften it. She threads it through an iron needle and onto the cloth that a man has woven from split younger leaves of the raffia palm, upon which she has made no preliminary guidelines, she draws the lines with stem stitches. She fills in the space between with cut-pile work, repeatedly pulling a thread under the weft. The tightness of the weave, rather than knotting, holds it in place. But I can’t know this: what pops into her mind as she bends over the fabric—her mother? Her lunch? A neighbor’s snide remark? What do the motifs mean to her, as her stitches flipped, slid, and rotated them across the woven plane?

She cuts the crown—the highest point—of the stitches and rubs the cloth with her hand to raise a pile.

Fig. 8, 9: Magnification x 200 of cut-pile embroidery and stem stitch work

It wasn’t by a chance opening of a certain cabinet that I found the Kasai velvets. I had searched for them in the collection’s database after reading an article about raffia textile production and use among the Kuba, drawn to the description of their role in burial rites. The Kuba  fabricate these plush panels  as funerary gifts. The body of the deceased  lies in state for several days prior to burial on an inclined platform (mweek), dressed in layers of decorated textiles with a winu as the final covering. Within the Kuba kingdom, textiles function as a chart of social relationships. In Ilueemy, the land of the dead to which the deceased travels by crossing a river, social hierarchies are thought to be parallel to those of the village. Thus, the rank of the deceased must be visibly established. To be buried without traditional cloths is said to be equivalent to being buried nude. During the ritual confinement of mourning periods, textile production increases to replenish the depleted stores.

My use of the present tense is suspect—that article is over thirty years old. Another art historian observed, somewhat euphemistically, that with recent “difficulties in maintaining supplies of textiles,” the Kuba display the embroidered cloths on the body and then return them to a family storehouse, for use in another funeral. 

Because of the complexity in their designs—how they use internal surface divisions to expand space, composing patterns in multitude of directional planes—Kuba raffia cloths are among the most studied textile artifacts in sub-Saharan Africa. And yet, these four velvets, like so many art objects from that region of the world, arrived in a private collection with their unique histories silent—their social and spiritual meanings obscured without an understanding of the context in which they were created. 

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