Sierra Leone · Textile / Basketry
Kpokpo (also kondi gula, "country cloth"); kpoikpoi (a related, larger prestige-hanging form); kula njawi (a documented kpokpo subgroup with supplementary weft-float patterning)
The hand-spinning, dyeing, and narrow-strip weaving of thick, heavy cotton cloth by Mende (and related Vai and Gola) weavers of Sierra Leone and neighboring Liberia, using a tripod loom found almost exclusively in this region of West Africa. Women traditionally card and spin locally grown cotton into yarn on drop spindles; men then weave the yarn on the distinctive tripod loom, in which the treadle, heddles, and beater are suspended from a tripod of poles while the warp is fixed to a ground stake, allowing the weaver to physically move down the length of a long warp — stretched 9 to 12 meters — as weaving progresses, rather than the warp moving through a fixed apparatus as in conventional looms. Narrow four-inch strips are woven and sewn edge to edge into the finished kpokpo cloth, prized for its weight, durability, and use in gbari robes, wrapper sets, chief's hammocks, and elaborate kpoikpoi prestige wall hangings — one thirteen-foot Metropolitan Museum of Art example is directly compared in scholarship to Ghana's kente cloth and the Fulani weavings of the Niger Bend as among the most technically sophisticated achievements of West African master weaving. The craft was severely disrupted by Sierra Leone's civil war, with tripod-loom weaving documented as only beginning to resume in its aftermath.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not independently inscribed
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