What Is Kente Cloth?

What is kente cloth and who wears it?

Kente is the strip-woven prestige cloth of the Asante people of Ghana and the Ewe people of Ghana and Togo, worn for ceremonies and special occasions. Men traditionally wrap a large cloth around the body like a toga; women wear kente as an upper and a lower wrapper.

In the Asante kingdom the kings kept tight control over its making and use, and kings and queens had their own personal designs. Some named designs may be reserved for the king or other high-ranking officials.

Where does kente come from?

Kente comes from the weaving towns of central and eastern Ghana and neighbouring Togo, but whether Asante or Ewe weavers made it first has been debated in Ghana since the 1990s. The scholar Malika Kraamer notes that textiles from the Ewe- and Twi-speaking regions have been interconnected since at least the 19th century.

Asante tradition credits weaving either to Ananse, the wise spider of Akan oral literature, or to a man named Ota Kraben, who brought the technology from the north. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates a royal weaving centre on the outskirts of Kumasi, the Asante capital, to the 17th century. The village of Bonwire, near Kumasi, is remembered as the original home of Asante kente weavers.

The name appears in writing by 1847, when a man’s cloth of 27 strips entered a Danish collection as a “cotton blanket (kintee) from Popo”, an Ewe town in present-day Togo.

Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, made kente visible on the world stage, and the cloth came to carry a message of African unity. He and his entourage often wore it on visits to President Eisenhower in 1958 and 1960.

Was kente originally made of silk?

No: the earliest kente was woven in cotton; silk came later as a luxury, and rayon has since taken over much of its role.

A popular claim holds that kente began as a silk cloth, but the museum record points the other way. The Met states that the first kente cloths were made with blue and white cotton threads, and that later cloths used imported silk dyed in vivid colours. According to the Horniman Museum, the bright silk threads were unravelled from cloth imported from Europe and combined with cotton.

Rayon, a regenerated cellulose fibre, is now often used instead of silk; the Met’s 20th-century wrapper is rayon and cotton. UNESCO’s 2024 listing names all three: kente is woven from silk, cotton or rayon.

How is kente made?

Kente is woven in long strips roughly 7.5 to 9 cm wide on a horizontal treadle loom, and the strips are then sewn edge to edge into a larger cloth.

Asante and Ewe weavers use the same narrow-band treadle loom. Its two heddles, the frames that lift sets of warp threads, let the weaver set warp-faced patterns (lengthwise stripes) against weft-faced patterns (crosswise blocks) within one strip.

The work runs in four stages: winding yarn off the skeins and laying it out in colour order, threading the loom, weaving each strip to length, and sewing the strips together lengthwise.

Sources differ on who weaves. The Horniman Museum’s 1999 notes say the cloth “is woven by men”, and the Wrapped in Pride materials, adapted from the Fowler Museum at UCLA, name men as the primary weavers, “although a few women are known for their weaving skills”. UNESCO’s 2024 listing, based on Ghana’s nomination, says “both women and men are involved”, with women “in charge primarily of weaving and producing cotton yarn” and men making the looms. The sources do not explain the difference.

What do kente patterns and colours mean?

Each kente design has a name, drawn from proverbs, history, people or everyday objects, and the name carries its meaning; the wearer’s age, social status and gender influence the choice of colour and design.

Asante cloths are usually identified by their warp-stripe pattern. Warp names honour chiefs and queen mothers, recall historical events and natural phenomena, or quote proverbs, and the name rarely describes the pattern. Weft motifs are usually named after objects and tend to resemble them: sekan (knife), afa (bellows), afe (comb). Two names describe a whole cloth:

• Adweneasa: weft designs fill every available block of the warp; translated as “my skill is exhausted” or “my ideas are finished”.
• Mmaban: a cloth combining two or more warp patterns; Venice Lamb defined it as “mixed” or “there are many”.

Ewe kente is known for representational weft motifs such as stools and daggers, animal images that suggest proverbs, and occasionally words woven into the strips.

Charts that give each colour one fixed meaning circulate widely. None of the museum or UNESCO sources cited here sets out such a code. UNESCO links colour choice only to the wearer’s age, social status and gender.

How is kente worn today?

In Ghana kente is still ceremonial dress, worn at the installation of chiefs, at funerals and on special occasions; abroad it is a sign of African heritage, seen at graduations and in churches.

At the funerals of important chiefs, queen mothers and elders, the deceased is occasionally dressed in kente, or the funeral bed is covered with it. Wearing kente to mark graduation goes back at least to the late 1950s in Ghana; in the United States, kente stoles were first worn only by African American graduates and now appear at more diverse ceremonies. In US churches kente appears as pulpit and altar drapes and on vestments and robes, most of all during African American History Month. The cloth has also moved into hats, bags, shoes and jewellery, though much kente-inspired clothing is printed, not handwoven. A handwoven cloth still counts as formal wear.

How can you tell handwoven kente from a printed copy?

Look for the joins: handwoven kente is a set of narrow strips sewn edge to edge, so a cloth made in one continuous width is not kente.

• Count and measure the strips. Each is a narrow band, roughly 7.5 to 9 cm across; a man’s full cloth can have 24 or more. Widths vary, so trust stitched joins over the tape measure. A line that looks like a join but has no stitches is printed.
• Check the edges of narrow pieces. If a stole or single strip has no joins, check that both long sides are woven edges, not cut and hemmed.
• Question the fibre. Rayon is now often used instead of silk, so a glossy cloth sold as silk kente may be rayon. Pay silk prices only for silk.
• Ask the name and the place. Every design is named, so a seller of handwoven kente should know the pattern’s name and the town where it was woven.

A kente-pattern print is a geometric print, not a woven cloth; Ankara, the wax-printed cotton worn across West Africa, is a different textile.

How do you wear or buy kente respectfully?

Buy handwoven kente from its weaving communities, learn the name of the pattern you wear, and keep it for occasions rather than novelty wear.

Kente is sold and worn far beyond the communities that weave it. What is sensitive is narrower. Some named designs may be reserved for the Asante king or other high-ranking officials. Printed copies sold as kente take the name from its weavers. Ask what a pattern is called and whom it belongs to before you wear it.

In 2025 kente became a geographical indication (GI) in Ghana, a legal protection that sets rules on who may sell cloth as kente. It ties the name to weaving communities such as Bonwire, Adanwomase, Agotime-Kpetoe, Agbozume and Tafi Atome. As of 2026 the protection is national, and Ghana is working to extend it abroad.

When buying, ask who wove the cloth and in which town. UNESCO’s 2024 listing notes that each community of producers is led by a chief weaver responsible for production standards, so buy from a named weaver or weavers’ group. Ewe weavers in Togo also make kente, outside Ghana’s GI.

If you want only the pattern, buy a print as a print and do not call it kente.