African Clothing

Masai leather cape with glass beads, from north-eastern Africa

Africa's a big place, so people had very different styles of clothing in different parts of Africa. And this page covers a lot of time, from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages, so there were also a lot of changes in clothing during that time.

People in Africa seem to have started wearing clothing around 75,000 years ago -at least, that's about the time that the first body lice got started, and lice need clothing to live in. The first clothing was made out of animal skins - leather and fur shawls and loincloths. And the first jewelry was probably made of seashells and feathers.

Bark cloth from the Congo, in central Africa

After many thousands of years, people began to make lighter, less sweaty kinds of clothes. Probably the first kind of cloth made in Africa was pounded bark fibers. You peel the bark off trees and pound it with a rock until the fibers get soft and the hard part breaks off. This makes small pieces of cloth which can be pounded or sewn together. In Uganda in Central Africa, for instance, people used the bark of fig trees. This kind of bark fabric may be related to the development of Egyptian papyrus. People also pounded cloth from the raffia palm.