Instead of jewelry this time, we’re working on these bogolan bags. Bogolan is a West African type of cloth dyed using mud. After the mud is used, natural substances or bleach are used to put designs on it. The process of making these bags is not simple. We have to find the fabric, send it to the bogolan dyers, retrieve it, cut it and then sew it. It’s crazy. I travelled to a city called San - about three hours from Sevare - and I met PC Baba there. We went to visit the families of bogolan dyers to see how they dye the fabric and to see how our order from them was coming along. Here are the fruits of our labors:
The tissue we buy comes in large rolls like this. They have to be measured to strips of 2 meters and then cut and 10 have to be sewn together. This all has to happen before they are dyed.
This is a natural product that comes from one of the trees here (Baba only gave me the Bambara word for it). After they boil the leaves - like tea - this becomes the first step of the process as they dip the white tissue in it.
You can see the tissue turning yellow here.
The woman in the foreground is putting the tissue in the yellow liquid and the woman next to her is wringing all the excess dye out of it. After this step, the tissue is lain under the sun to dry.
This is the actual print that is put onto the bogolan. In the tin is the mixture of bleach and they use stencils - I was amazed! - to make the design as uniform as possible.
Due to the size of our order, everyone in this family is helping out and at one point there were six designers working hard.
Both before an after the bleach design is created, the tissue is covered in mud - giving it the name of mudcloth. These two boys were mixing mud to prepare to slather onto the tissue.
Here the mud is put onto the bogolan to reinforce the black color. I was worried the design would be ruined but alas, all went well.
At the end of every step, the tissue has to sit under the sun to dry. You can see all steps of the process here - far left is the just the yellow tissue, middle is the mud, and far right on the truck is the bleach design. In Africa, everything is done together, so the horse eating and using the truck as a surface is no coincidence.
Finally, here is Peace Corps Baba!!! He's sorting through all of the bogolan that this family has already made for us to determine whether or not it was well made. If it's not, he'll leave it and ask them to touch it up.Coming up next....the task of finding a good tailor in West Africa.
