Adire cloth is worn as a wrapper, primarily by women, and has long been tied to female entrepreneurship in Abeokuta, where dyeing became both an artistic practice and an economic livelihood. Named patterns carry their own histories — "Jubilee" marked…
Adire — "tie and dye" in the Yoruba language — is a resist-dye tradition of the Yoruba people of south-west Nigeria. While indigo dyeing itself predates it by centuries across West Africa, adire as a distinct named craft took shape in the early 20th century in Abeokuta and Ibadan, and expanded significantly through the 1920s and 1930s as imported cotton cloth became widely available through European textile traders.
Two panels of plain cotton cloth are sewn together to form the base for dyeing.
Depending on the technique chosen: *oniko* binds raffia around maize kernels or pebbles to reserve small circles; *alabere* stitches raffia through the cloth in patterns; *eleko* paints a cassava-starch paste as a resist using a chicken feather, metal stencil, or carved calabash.
The resist-treated cloth is dipped in indigo dye. Bound or pasted areas resist the dye, leaving the original cloth colour once the resist is removed.
Raffia ties or starch paste are removed, revealing the finished pattern against the indigo ground.
Adire cloth is worn as a wrapper, primarily by women, and has long been tied to female entrepreneurship in Abeokuta, where dyeing became both an artistic practice and an economic livelihood. Named patterns carry their own histories — "Jubilee" marked the 1935 British royal jubilee, while others like "Olokun" (the sea goddess) and "Ibadadun" ("Ibadan is sweet") reference local deities and civic pride.
Since the 1930s, adire has faced growing competition from synthetic, industrially printed textiles, and authentic hand-resisted cloth has become harder to find in Nigeria. A partial revival took hold in the 1960s, and adire remains produced today, though at a smaller scale than its early-20th-century peak.
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