Custom · Early 1900s to today
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Adire looks like the oldest cloth in Yorubaland. Its golden age was actually built on cheap imported shirting and metal cut from tea chests, and it was run almost entirely by women.
The name tells you how it began. Adire comes from two Yoruba words, adi, to tie, and re, to soak. You tie up a piece of cloth so parts of it are protected, then you soak it in indigo. The tied parts stay pale, the rest turns blue. Untie it and you have a pattern.
It was, and mostly still is, women's work. Yoruba women made it, sold it, and taught it to their daughters, and many patterns passed from mother to daughter inside one family. That is part of what makes adire interesting: it is a whole design tradition that lived inside women's households and women's businesses, with each dyer adding her own hand to what she had inherited.
Indigo dyeing itself is ancient in West Africa. The oldest known piece is an eleventh-century cap from the Dogon country of Mali, dyed in the same tied style that Yoruba dyers call oniko. The earliest Yoruba adire was probably simple tied designs on local cotton, handspun and handwoven, rather like cloth still made in Mali today.
There are three main ways to make it, and each one is a small feat of patience. Oniko means tying raffia tightly around hundreds of little corn kernels or pebbles, one by one, so that the finished cloth is scattered with tiny white circles on blue. You can also twist the cloth and tie it on itself, or fold it into stripes. Alabere means stitching. The dyer strips a raffia palm and sews its spine into the cloth in a pattern before it goes in the dye. Usually the raffia is ripped out afterwards, but some people leave it in and let ordinary wear slowly uncover the design. The third, eleko, uses cassava paste as the resist. The paste is painted onto the cloth, traditionally with chicken feathers of different sizes, or pressed on with carved calabash, almost like block printing. Good cloth goes back into the indigo twenty-five times or more to get that deep blue-black before the paste is washed off.
Here is the twist. Adire's great boom was not some untouched village craft. It came out of global trade.
In the early twentieth century European textile merchants spread through Abeokuta and other Yoruba towns, bringing in large amounts of cheap imported shirting, the plain white cotton used for shirts. For the dyers this was a gift. Suddenly there was plenty of smooth, even cloth to work on. Women's businesses took off. Adire became a major craft in Abeokuta and Ibadan, and buyers came from all over West Africa. Its basic form settled into two lengths of shirting sewn together to make a woman's wrapper.
The dyers grabbed whatever else the new trade brought. Tea arrived in chests lined with sheets of tin, and from the early 1900s dyers cut those tin linings into stencils for applying cassava paste. So one of the most traditional-looking cloths in Nigeria was being patterned with recycled packaging from the British tea trade.
Even the designs picked up the times. Most adire patterns have names. Some are from nature or belief, like Olokun, after the goddess of the sea, or Sunbebe, the lifting up of beads. One is just civic pride: Ibadandun, Ibadan is sweet. And one of the most popular was the jubilee pattern, first produced in 1935 for the silver jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary. Egba women in Abeokuta were selling cloth celebrating a British king's twenty-five years on the throne.
Abeokuta is usually called the capital of adire. Not everyone agrees on that. Some say Ibadan and Osogbo matter more, and that adire dyeing actually reached Abeokuta when Egba women came back from Ibadan with the skill.
The boom did not last. By the end of the 1930s two shortcuts were spreading: synthetic indigo, and caustic soda. At the same time, lots of new, less skilled people rushed into the business. Quality fell and demand collapsed, and it has never fully recovered.
The finest kind, the complicated starch-resist designs, carried on being made until the early 1970s. In the 1960s, interest from American Peace Corps volunteers gave adire a small revival, but it never got back to what it had been. Today the simpler stencilled designs survive, along with some good oniko and alabere work. Local taste, though, has moved on to "kampala", a bright, many-coloured wax-resist cloth that some people count as adire and some do not.
In recent years there has been a push to bring the old cloth back. The textile artist Nike Davies-Okundaye has championed it and trained many people, and younger designers such as Amaka Osakwe of the Maki Oh label have built it into fashion. Michelle Obama and Lupita Nyong'o have both been seen in adire-inspired clothes. In 2022 Bamidele Abiodun, wife of the Ogun State governor, launched an Adire Market Week in Abeokuta to promote the cloth and protect local makers against cheap foreign copies. On its main stage that April was the former president Olusegun Obasanjo.
So adire's story is not quite the one people expect. It is old, yes. But its peak came from women taking imported cloth and tin from tea chests and turning them into something unmistakably their own, and its decline came from cutting corners. Anyone trying to save it now is really trying to bring back the patience.
