Ankara and Wax Print: The Story Behind Africa's Most Famous Fabric

At a wedding in Lagos, the bride's family arrives in matching outfits cut from the same bright cloth. In a market in Lomé, traders sit beneath towering stacks of folded fabric, each piece with its own name. On a catwalk in Paris, a designer sends out jackets in bold circles and swirls. The fabric in all three places is wax print, known in Nigeria and much of the world as Ankara. To many people it is simply "African print". Its history, however, is a story of trade between three continents.

What is wax print?

Wax print is cotton cloth printed on both sides using a resist technique adapted from batik. In batik, wax is applied to cloth so that dye cannot reach the waxed areas, creating patterns. Industrial wax prints use machines to apply resin to both sides of the fabric before dyeing, then add further colours. A characteristic feature is the "crackle" or veining effect, where dye seeps into tiny cracks in the resin, so that no two lengths are perfectly identical.

The word Ankara is widely used in Nigeria and Ghana and internationally for wax-print and similar printed fabrics, especially cheaper imitations. Where the name came from is not clearly documented, and several competing explanations circulate.

From Java to Holland

The story begins in Java, in present-day Indonesia, where batik is an ancient art. In the 19th century, the Netherlands controlled Indonesia as a colony, and Dutch manufacturers tried to produce machine-made imitations of Javanese batik to sell back to the Indonesian market at lower prices.

One of these companies was founded in 1846 in Helmond, in the southern Netherlands, by Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen. It later became Vlisco, the best-known wax-print brand in the world. British manufacturers, especially in and around Manchester, also produced imitation batiks.

The plan to sell in Java largely failed. Indonesian buyers preferred their hand-made batik, and the industrial version, with its "imperfect" crackles, did not appeal.

Finding a market in West Africa

The fabrics found an unexpected market on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and elsewhere in West Africa. Historians still debate exactly how. One widely told story involves West African soldiers recruited by the Dutch to serve in the East Indies army in the 19th century, who brought batiks home. Another emphasises European and African traders who saw a demand for colourful cloth. Whatever the reasons, by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wax print had become hugely popular along the West African coast.

Crucially, Dutch and British firms began designing for African tastes, adapting colours and motifs to what African customers liked. They relied heavily on African traders and on feedback from markets.

The "Nana Benz"

Among the most important figures in wax-print history were the market women of Lomé, in Togo, known as the Nana Benz, because many of them became rich enough to drive Mercedes-Benz cars. From the mid-20th century, these powerful businesswomen controlled the wholesale trade in wax print across the region, deciding which designs would sell and sometimes suggesting new ones. Anthropologist Nina Sylvanus has studied how they shaped the cloth's success.

Patterns with names

One of the most fascinating features of wax print is that many designs have names, often given by traders and customers rather than by the manufacturers. A pattern might be named after a proverb, a famous person, a current event or an idea. Some well-known examples:

• "Speed bird" or "Flying birds": a design of swallows, sometimes interpreted as meaning that money flies away quickly.
• "Your foot, my foot": footprints, said to suggest a couple who walk together.
• "Michelle Obama's handbag": a later name given to a popular design.
• "Eye of my rival", "If you go, I go" and many more.

Names vary by country and change over time. Wearing a particular pattern can send a message: about love, wealth, jealousy, politics or status. In this way, wax print carries meaning a little like the adinkra symbols of Ghana or the named weaves of kente.

African manufacturers and new competition

After independence, factories in Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire and elsewhere began producing wax and imitation-wax prints. Brands such as GTP (Ghana Textile Printing) and ABC Wax became well known. In recent decades, however, many African textile factories have struggled or closed, faced with competition from cheaper prints imported from China and elsewhere, as well as second-hand clothing.

This raises an uncomfortable question: is wax print truly "African"? Many people point out that it was designed and made in Europe, and today often in Asia. Others reply that it became African through use: African traders chose the designs, African customers named them, and African tailors transformed them into styles that are now part of the continent's identity. Both views have truth in them.

Wax print and other African textiles

Wax print is only one of Africa's many textile traditions. Others include hand-woven kente, bògòlanfini mud cloth, Kuba raffia cloth, and hand-dyed indigo adire from Yorubaland, described in our story on adire cloth. Unlike these, wax print is factory-made, but it has become a canvas for African creativity in tailoring and design.

Fashion and the future

Today, wax print is used for everything from everyday dresses to high fashion, and for school uniforms, church groups, political campaigns and family celebrations, where everyone wears the same fabric, a practice known in Nigeria as aso ebi. African designers have made it central to contemporary fashion, while artists such as the British-Nigerian Yinka Shonibare use it in sculpture to explore questions of identity, colonialism and authenticity.

Why it matters

Wax print tells a story of globalisation long before the word existed: an Indonesian art copied by Dutch factories, rejected in Java, embraced and transformed in West Africa, and now sold around the world. It reminds us that culture is not always pure or simple. Sometimes, what becomes most meaningful to a people is what they adopt, name and make their own.

Further reading

• Vlisco — About Vlisco and its history
• Textile Research Centre Leiden — Vlisco and West African printed textiles
• Philadelphia Museum of Art — Creative Africa: Vlisco, African Fashion on a Global Stage (2015)
• Nina Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2016)