Kuba Cloth: The Velvet Made From Palm Leaves

Run your fingers over a square of Kuba cloth and you will feel something unexpected: a soft, dense pile, like velvet. Look closer and you see that it is made of thousands of tiny tufts of fibre, each one inserted by hand, forming maze-like geometric patterns that seem to shift as you look at them. The material is not silk or cotton. It is raffia — fibre from the leaves of a palm tree. This is the textile art of the Kuba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Kuba kingdom

The Kuba are a group of related peoples in the Kasai region of the central DRC. From around the 17th century, they formed a kingdom ruled by a sacred king, the nyim, with an elaborate court, titles and ceremonies. Among the groups within the kingdom were the Bushoong (the ruling group), the Shoowa, the Ngeende and others.

The Kuba court was a centre of art. Carved wooden cups, boxes and royal portrait figures (ndop), beaded masks and above all textiles were made to express status and identity. Patterns were so valued that they could be named, owned and passed down.

From palm to thread

Kuba cloth begins with the raffia palm. Fibres are stripped from the young leaves, dried in the sun, softened by beating, and split into fine strands. Each strand is only as long as the leaf, which is why Kuba cloths are built from panels about the size of a large square towel — roughly a yard on each side, limited by the length of a single fibre.

Traditionally, men weave the plain raffia panels on a single-heddle loom. The cloth is then softened further by pounding it in a mortar. After that, the work passes largely to women, who decorate it.

Shoowa "velvet"

The most famous Kuba textile technique is cut-pile embroidery, especially associated with the Shoowa. Using a needle, the embroiderer pushes a few strands of dyed raffia under a thread of the woven base and trims them very short with a small knife, leaving a tuft. There is no knot; the tension of the weave holds each tuft in place. Repeated thousands of times, row by row, it creates the soft, velvety surface.

The designs are geometric — interlocking lines, zigzags, diamonds and labyrinth patterns — and often seem to break their own rules, changing direction or rhythm halfway across the cloth. Scholars and artists have long admired this quality of improvisation. A single panel could take months to complete.

Skirts many metres long

Kuba textiles were also made into extraordinary ceremonial skirts. Panels were sewn together into wrappers that could reach many metres in length, wound around the body several times. They were decorated with:

• Appliqué — small patches of cloth sewn on, sometimes originally to cover holes, which became a decorative style in itself.
• Patchwork and reverse appliqué.
• Embroidery and dyeing, in colours from natural sources: red from camwood, black from mud or charcoal, and the natural cream of the raffia.

Cloth as wealth and farewell

For the Kuba, cloth was wealth. Raffia textiles served as currency, dowry and tribute, and marked rank at court. Above all, they were essential at funerals. The dead were dressed in their finest textiles and buried with many more, so they would be recognised and honoured by the ancestors. Families spent years accumulating cloth for this purpose.

Kuba and the modern world

In the early 20th century, Kuba textiles reached European collections and influenced modern artists. Henri Matisse famously owned and displayed Kuba cloths, and their bold, free geometry has been linked to the paper cut-outs of his later years. Paul Klee and others also admired them.

Today, Kuba-inspired patterns appear on fabrics and homeware worldwide, and genuine cloths are collected by museums from New York to Tervuren in Belgium. In Kasai, raffia weaving and embroidery continue, though the craft faces economic pressures.

Like Mali's bògòlanfini, Kuba cloth shows how African textiles carry meaning far beyond decoration — status, memory and the journey from life to death.

Why it matters

Kuba cloth is one of the great achievements of world textile art: a velvet made by hand from palm leaves, in patterns of astonishing freedom. It is a reminder that some of the ideas Europe thought of as "modern" — abstraction, improvisation, bold geometry — were being practised in the Congo long before.

Further reading

• ClothRoads — The making of African Kuba and Shoowa raffia cloth
• Mint Museum — Designing Dynamism: Kuba textiles from the DR Congo
• Georges Meurant, Shoowa Design: African Textiles from the Kingdom of Kuba (Thames & Hudson, 1986)