A Hausa Charm Gown

It seemed that if examples of this kind of dress were being made in Hausaland today they might provide additional ideas about the significance and even the origins of the Hausa embroidery patterns that I had been interested in for some time.5 During the course of other work I questioned Hausa people over a period of two years about charm gowns with writing on them, but without much success, and among the embroiderers and draughtsmen6 who were spoken to, Malam Nuhu was the only one who immediately responded. He said he knew very well what these charm gowns looked like, and when he was asked if he could make one he said straight away that he could. This was in October, I97I, and two months later, after some initial difficulty in finding the kind of gown he wanted to work on, Malam Nuhu had produced the finished article. His own contribution consisted of inscriptions and decorative patterns in inks of several different colours, with green, yellow and maroon predominating. 7 The gown he used was bought for him by a friend in Zaria City market and is an old Hausa type known as binjima. It has a sleeveless, rectangular upper part, a circular neck hole, and is open at the sides. In the case of Malam Nuhu's binjima this opening extends from the shoulders to a point almost half way down the wide skirt. The British Museum's gown already mentioned, though it has a rectangular instead of a circular neck hole and is open down the complete length of the sides, could be considered a close relative of this binjima type. Malam Nuhu's gown is made from local, plain white cotton material, hand woven in strips by men and commonly called fari,8farin Hausa, orfarin tudu. The average width of a strip in this case is 6 cm and those forming the upper part of the gown overlap so that the material is of double thickness, while the strips in the skirt are joined edge to edge and form a single layer of cloth. The widening of the skirt results from twentyfour gussets that taper upwards from its lower edge. 9 To 'charm' the gown Malam Nuhu arranged over seven hundred written characters and phrases on its outer surface. Some are in rectangular grids,1? some are set inside ornamental patterns, and others stand on their own. The front and back of the gown differ in that the front has a fairly balanced combination of Man (N.S.) 9, 62o-624

Art · Charm (quantum number · Hausa · Linguistics · Particle physics · Physics · African history and culture studies · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Philosophy

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