I am threads woven together. Specifically, threads from cotton crops grown on West African soil, spun, in the past, by the spindly hands of grandmothers. Men wove those threads on looms that required muscle power. Plain and coloured threads were mixed into striped patterns dictated by local traditions to form narrow bands of cloth. Those narrow bands sewn together adorned chiefs, warriors, and healers across West Africa. Today, I am still the fruit of West African cotton, but the spinning of my thread is mechanised in deafening factories; the weaving, still artisanal, is now done by women as well, on looms that keep growing wider and wider.
I have different names. I have different fates.
In Sierra Leone, they nowadays call me by the annoyingly simple name of “country cloth”. A bit of an insult to my glory days when I dressed any paramount chief worth his name. Relegated to rurality, the workmanship that crafts me has become negligent and sloppy. Sometimes I am ashamed of the grotesque forms I’m found in.
In Mali, they forgot to name me. What with all the competition from other fabrics, loud and brazen, if you ask me. There is the mud-dyed bogolan cloth that gets diaspora tourists all ecstatic – oh how authentic. There is the coveted, and always imported, bazin, whose shine I can’t stand, much less its obscene crackle that some seek out to broadcast their spending power with each step they take. If you remember to want me in Mali, you have to ask blandly for “woven cloth”. My memory is not what it used to be, but I’m pretty sure that my great-great-grandmother dressed the emperors of the Mande world, Sundiata Keita and his lineage. And now I’m just “woven cloth”, never picked up by modern-day Malian leaders who like to crackle as they walk.
In Ghana, I hold a place of greater honour, at least in the north – the south was conquered by my distant cousin, the ostentatious one, who boasts about her name, kente, being recognised all the way in the Americas. Anyway, in northern Ghana I am called fugu. Kwame Nkrumah proudly wore me when Ghana gained independence in 1957, and presidents and bigwigs continue to wear me. But, at times, I have been positively peeved at Ghanaian couture skills. I am after all just a fabric; I need couture to put me in my best light. There have been incidents that have left me fuming with embarrassment. Like when, in 2026, President John Dramani Mahama wore me on a state visit to Zambia, and I was not recognised, and even mocked. Why is the Ghanaian president wearing a woman’s blouse? the Zambians asked. Ghana had to institute a national fugu-wearing day every Wednesday thereafter to educate ignorant fools.
In Burkina Faso, I need not suffer any such fools. Ah, Burkina Faso. I’m never misunderstood there, and when I adorn Burkinabè dignitaries, the finishing is such that I command immediate understanding and respect. (Well, there was one disrespectful incident, all the way back in the 1980s, when the Burkinabè ambassador in Côte d’Ivoire was refused entry to a meeting because his outfit was mistaken for a pyjama. There is much jealous malice between immediate neighbours, and I presume that incident had less to do with me than with geopolitical rivalry. In any case, dignified as I am, I withheld from any disparaging commentary on my Ivorian cousins, the baoulé and korhogo cloths, though much about them can be commented on.)
As a child of many mothers, I am not supposed to have any favourites; I should be grateful to all. But I can’t hide that Burkina is my preferred mother, my Mummy. She has been the most nourishing, the one who has gone to trouble to find treats to delight me. Like a mother vigorously rubbing her child’s cheeks with Vaseline on church Sunday, she has known how to make my quiet splendour shine.
I even share a name with Mummy Burkina, for in that country I am called faso dan fani. Her last name is my first. Literally, my name means the woven cloth of the country. Admittedly, translated, it is a combination of the Sierra Leonean and Malian names that leave me feeling cold-shouldered. But country here means the homeland, the nation, not the rural backwaters. And dan fani has a musicality to it that woven cloth decidedly lacks. The name faso dan fani actually comes from Dioula, a dialect of Mandekan, the latter being so widely spoken in Mali you would think they would use that name for me there too. I guess that faso dan fani has become so associated with my favourite mother that Malians don’t feel legitimate using it.
I was baptised in Burkina Faso by the same person, Thomas Sankara, who gave the country its new name. That Sankara fellow – now there was a president who honoured me. He favoured his military fatigues too much for my tastes, but whenever he let go of those dismal green outfits, he wore me, faso dan fani, in tasteful muted colours. When Ghana’s president at the time, Jerry Rawlings, came over, those two young heartthrob presidents made me look so glamorous, dressed in matching light-coloured faso dan fani smocks, dark aviator glasses, and rakish berets. But they quickly went back to their military fatigues, which they had kept on underneath just in case.
It was Sankara who revived me from the state of neglect I had been languishing in. Yes, Burkinabè remained faithful to me for certain ceremonies, and in rural areas where commerce was scant, I continued to be the clothing of choice, or, to be brutally honest with myself, the cloth of a lack of choice. But in the cities, I suffered much snubbing. In the Sahelian heat, Ouagalais rejected my 100% cotton breathability for cheap polyester clothing so they could look modern in the office. I couldn’t help a little sneer whenever they caught itchy heat rashes.
Anyway, my friend, my godfather, Sankara, made it obligatory for civil servants to wear me in the office and at official ceremonies! For the first time in my long history, I was the subject of a piece of written legislation. It was such a moment of pride and joy for me. I still remember the exact title of the legislation – kiti (the Sankara revolution term for decree) n°AN IV-161 CNR.CULT of 10 November 1986. And my godfather, sharp man that he was, had none of that syrupy and stifling talk about authenticity. This is what he responded to one Ivorian journalist who asked him if imposing faso dan fani was a quest for authenticity: “No, it’s not a quest for authenticity, because there are some authentic stupidities. We did this because we want the development of our country.” The first part made me laugh; the second part got me thinking.
I was no economist, but I found my godfather’s logic airtight. Burkina Faso grew a lot of cotton, and almost all of it was exported as raw material. Processing it at home into clothing would create new jobs and wealth. Faso dan fani was produced in a labour-intensive way, which did not require heavy investment in machinery. With Burkina Faso being a bit cash-strapped at the time, focusing on craft manufacturing was a smart move, buying time to figure out what to do with the loss-making headache of a textile factory that Sankara had inherited and renamed Faso Fani. (It’s the dan in my name that speaks to handiwork.) Besides, at its peak, that factory employed only 900 people, a drop in the ocean with respect to the number of people I could put to work. Also, god-daddy cared greatly about women’s emancipation, and he saw an opportunity in my production for women’s employment. At that time, many women had been trained by religious orders in traditional weaving, and my production, which initially was the domain of men, was quickly becoming women-dominated. The seal on the airtight logic was forcing people to wear me, an expedited creation of demand to close the virtuous loop.
So, the closing months of 1986 were a fantastic time for me, as I awaited the decree on 1 January 1987 to come into effect. I fantasised about the creative transformations that I would finally go through: new colours, new patterns, new garment styles! I had grown a bit bored with being reproduced in the same, and sometimes lacklustre, forms – blue, black, and white have their nobility, but I longed for some exciting brightness.
Alas, you can lead goats to grass but you can’t force them to chew. Some Burkinabè acted like small-brained ovine and just went through the motions. Civil servants acquired the obligatory faso dan fani, made thoughtless outfits they hung in their offices, while they continued coming to work in their scratchy polyester. When colleagues alerted them that Sankara was paying an impromptu visit to their offices, they quickly slipped on their dan fani. I acquired a new annoying name: Sankara arrive – Sankara’s coming.
That hurt. My hopes were further dashed when, less than a year after the momentous decree, I learnt about the gunning down of my godfather. I resigned myself to return to a state of insipid stagnation. I felt I was not liked, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, by Sankara’s replacement, Blaise Compaoré. Despite coming from a Mossi lineage whose nobility dressed exclusively in faso dan fani, Compaoré snubbed me almost entirely. If you think I’m being precious, just look at his photo archive. Once Compaoré tossed aside military fatigues to distinguish himself from his former brother, he wore an ample selection of Western suits, the occasional bazin boubou, and during campaign periods, ridiculous wax print emblazoned with his own image. Only ever so rarely did he don a faso dan fani outfit despite having the height and slenderness to pull me off marvellously.
In the decades that followed, I was mostly bored out of my mind in Burkina Faso – produced ad infinitum in some combination of blue, black, and white stripes. Other countries also failed to offer me any delightful treats, although through my Nigerian cousin, aso-oke, I got occasional flashes of vicarious excitement. To be fair though, not everything was glum in Burkina. The momentum of my artisanal production was never entirely stalled, for some NGOs had lapped up the Sankara let’s-consume-what-we-produce vibe like a cat laps up full-cream milk. Setting up women’s weaving cooperatives was a darling intervention in some quarters. Weaving skills were maintained, and in some cases even improved – without expedited demand creation, weavers had to work harder to capture the attention of clients.
There were even occasional sparks of pzazz from local designers. I had a shiny phase – I mean this literally. I was woven with a mix of local cotton and metallic lurex threads to come out in sheeny (disco-ball shine-level!) fabrics in rich greens, purples, burgundies, and silvers. It was exciting at first, but the artificial fibres made me too brittle and the craze burst after too many outfits tore at inconvenient moments. I’m no stickler for authenticity, as you may have gathered, but this time I was a bit vexed by the inauthenticity of this stylistic development. Why had the innovators opted for crass imported lurex when they could have added shine using West African wild silk, ennobling me rather than embarrassing me?
That irritating innovation was the height of my stimulation in those slow decades, up until 2014. In that year, my god-daddy started popping up on people’s t-shirts, and before the end of the year, Compaoré fell from power. That 2014 uprising unexpectedly ushered in new glory days for me. The new president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, despite having been a long-time ally of Compaoré, for some reason loved me, or at least found it expedient, given the zeitgeist of the day, to pretend to love me. He wore me often, and he wore me royally. He was the first president ever to wear me for his official portrait.
Thanks to him, I took an exciting step (finally!) into the era of contemporary male fashion. Kaboré favoured minimalist embroidery and slim-fitted tunics, which somehow flatteringly hid a mid-age bulge. His ministers and officials followed suit. Madame ministers, for their part, harassed their tailors to fashion me into form-fitting attire that did not drown out curves. Pardon me my frivolity, but I was thrilled to be associated with cleavage. The creative energy I had craved for decades also transformed me into curtains, cushion covers, handbags, and even shoes. My colour palette exploded. Bored was I no longer.
In 2017, 30 years after god-daddy’s death, I got renewed legislative attention. (Yes, I remember the number of this one too.) Ordinance n° 2017-059 encouraged all public officials, as part of efforts to promote cultural identity, to wear FDF (that’s me, in acronym) during official ceremonies and national celebrations. Fairs and events that involved public procurement of commemorative fabrics were henceforth to prioritise faso dan fani as the fabric of choice. Public administrations were also exhorted to use me in their interior décor.
Consommons burkinabè – Buy Burkinabè – was back in vogue. I started to travel. I had always been available in large quantities at the Ouagadougou airport duty-free, picked up here and there by a departing diplomat or tourist. Now I travelled through designers to runways across the world. Not to boast, but I could suddenly name-drop more than my snooty cousin kente. Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Stella Jean, and Imane Ayissi all included me in collections that graced Paris, London, and Milan fashion weeks. I admit that sometimes I didn’t recognise myself. Sometimes I looked too Scottish or tweedy for my taste, but the interest and the fashioning into new textures and silhouettes were a welcome boost to my ego.
However, it was the developments at home, in Faso, that interested me the most. They were the most determinative of my fate after all. In 2018, President Kaboré mentioned that it would be a good idea to make me the fabric for school uniforms too. Some people cheered patriotically at this suggestion. I have to admit though that I wasn’t entirely thrilled at the thought of having to dress boisterous, snotty-nosed kids for non-ceremonial events. I didn’t trust them to have the decorum I require.
As I mulled this over, I became aware that I had also drawn the interest of copycat fabrics. Cheap cotton prints from China that imitated my patterns drew some budget-constrained, or in some cases simply taste-constrained, Burkinabè. The government mounted a dramatic defence of authenticity through a public bonfire of counterfeit dan fani fabrics and massive fining of the non-patriotic importers. What I found a more convincing response was the creation of a quality certification, a geographic indication label that went public in 2021. To be certified as genuine faso dan fani, fabric had to be produced in Burkina Faso using cotton grown in Burkina Faso (it was definitively too late for Mali to adopt my Burkinabè name), and meet all kinds of specs concerning thread selection, dye quality, weaving procedure, and quality control.
Buyers could now, thanks to a label, be assured they were getting good quality faso dan fani and koko dunda. Ah yes, I have not mentioned koko dunda, the fabric that shared the stage with me in the prestigious label launch ceremony. Some people have tried to characterise our relationship as one of embittered co-wives, locked in an unending battle of come-uppance. I reject such characterisation. Koko dunda is more like a sister to me. A younger sister. To be more precise, an adopted little sister. Poor thing, her origins are so wretched.
Her birth name was “tchè ti barala” – literally, my husband is unemployed. She was worn by women – presumably spouses of the unemployed – in the western region of Burkina who were on extremely tight budgets. Identified by a dyeing pattern, more than a weave, she was processed on all kinds of cheap leftover cotton bast fabric – think, old white bedsheets. The whims of Sébastien Bazemo, a fashion designer from Bobo-Dioulasso, who experimented with new colours and dye patterns, magically turned the fabric into an overnight sensation in the late 2010s. He wisely rebaptised the fabric koko dunda, after the neighbourhood that used to be its production hub. That’s my little adopted sister. She’s very popular, in some circles. And now we both had a label.
My third piece of legislation was to be shared with little sister, koko dunda. In 2023, with Captain Ibrahim Traoré as president, a decree was issued that officially encouraged wearing either of us for a wide category of people, beyond just public officials – ambassadors, judges, university professors, military personnel, and even schoolchildren. For the latter category, I was glad that I had a little sister now, for she was definitely better suited to such lower-level purposes than I. And indeed, schools that opted for faso dan fani rather than koko dunda were submerged by complaints from parents about how expensive I am. (I am handmade after all! It can take a full day to make just two metres of me.) Others, with unruly and perhaps Kung Fu-obsessed offspring, complained that I tore after just a few wears. Would you make a bunch of brats eat in your best bowls every day, drink their breakfast juice from your champagne flutes?
I was more joyful when the judiciary took me up. In 2024, the new faso dan fani judge robes were unveiled; they were to replace imported robes which had previously cost at least 1,500 euros. The new robes, in sober black with tasteful gold embroidery on the sleeves and down the centre, capped with a black and golden bonnet, all of course 100% Made in Burkina, came in at just 200 euros. It was such a proud moment for me. I felt the envy of many Africans, particularly those in countries where judges still wore those absurd whiteman baroque-era wigs.
I was a bit more nervous about being worn by military personnel. Soldiers after all have legitimate reasons for jerky, violent movement. To my relief, the decree specified that my wear was encouraged for military ceremonies, not everyday combat. I made quite an international media sensation when, in July 2026, the graduating cadets from Burkina’s premier military school were dressed in black, purple, and red striped dan fani. The pattern was a salute to Gulmu traditions from eastern Burkina, copying a design that in olden days young men wore for initiation rites. I was grateful for the textile innovation that went into fortifying me and for how I was mixed with other fabrics to be fit for purpose.
My history in the decades since Sankara sometimes feels like an expanding spiral. My godfather set in motion something that didn’t take off altogether. The ethos of the 2014 uprising and President Kaboré set off a new wider spiral. (That spiral also inspired other countries – I’m having an exciting moment in Benin, for instance, where I’m known as kanvo.) Now Captain Ibrahim Traoré is widening that spiral even more, stretching my abilities to clothe an ever-expanding range of purposes. Ironically, however, just like with my godfather, I have few chances to adorn Captain Traoré.
He, too, rarely tires of his combat fatigues.
*Photo by Héctor J. Rivasa on Unsplash