"African basket" covers about as much ground as "European bread." The continent holds dozens of distinct weaving traditions, each tied to a particular plant that grows in a particular place and a technique that developed around working it. Knowing which is which tells you a great deal about how a basket will behave in your house.
Three ways to build a basket
Nearly every basket you will encounter uses one of three structures.
Coiling wraps a bundle of grass into a spiral and stitches each round to the one below it. The stitching is usually the decorative element, and pattern comes from where the maker changes color. Coiled baskets hold their shape well and tend to be dense and quiet in the hand.
Twining works two flexible strands around a set of rigid uprights, crossing them between each one. It produces a firmer wall than coiling and shows a fine horizontal ribbing.
Plaiting weaves flat strips over and under each other, the way you would weave paper strips as a child. It is quick, produces a lighter basket, and is common where the material comes in broad flat strands.
Tanzania: milulu grass
In the Iringa and Njombe regions of southern Tanzania, women weave baskets from wild milulu grass, which grows abundantly in the area and is cut, dried and prepared by hand before any weaving begins. These are coiled baskets, built in a tight spiral from the base outward, and a single piece can take weeks to complete.
The craft passes down through families rather than through schools. Undyed milulu is a pale sage-cream. Colored bands are added by dyeing the grass before it is coiled, which is why the pattern in an Iringa basket sits inside the structure rather than on top of it.
They are light for their size, hold their shape, and stack. If you have seen a round, wide-mouthed grass basket used for blankets or firewood, there is a good chance it came from this tradition.
Zimbabwe: cane from Buhera
The Buhera district in eastern Zimbabwe produces a very different object. Cane is dried and then worked into vessel forms, round through the belly and drawn in at the neck, more sculpture than storage.
Because of that shape they tend to be used as standalone pieces rather than as containers. They also do not stack, which makes them a different proposition to ship and to live with.
Ghana: Bolga and elephant grass
Around Bolgatanga in Ghana's Upper East region, baskets are woven from elephant grass, known locally as kinkahe and sold as veta vera straw. Each straw is split in half by hand and then rolled into a tight twist, which strengthens it and gives the finished weave its faint wavy texture. A single round basket can run past 25,000 knots and take roughly a week from splitting to final trimming.
They are woven mostly by women of the Gurune, also called Frafra, in a region where poor soil and erratic rain make farming alone precarious. The original form had no handle at all. It was a round untrimmed sieve used for winnowing grain and for brewing. Handles came later, once baskets started going to market, and are often bound in goat leather from the same area.
Bolga baskets have real give to them, which is what makes them good market and laundry baskets and less good as structural storage.
Rwanda: sisal over sweetgrass
The Rwandan agaseke is coiled, but built from two materials doing two jobs. Wild sweetgrass forms the core of the spiral. Sisal, stripped and pounded from agave leaves, is wrapped and stitched over that core and carries all of the pattern. The classic form has a flat circular base, a body taller than it is wide, and a sloped conical lid finished with a point.
The stitching is tight enough to protect the contents from damp and pests, so these were working objects as much as ornaments, traditionally holding jewelry, sweets, or gifts for honored guests. Since 1994 the agaseke has been widely known as the peace basket. It appears on Rwanda's national seal, and it is still given at weddings and births.
Botswana: mokola palm
In the Okavango Delta, Bayei and Hambukushu women coil baskets from the leaf fiber of the real fan palm, called mokola locally. The fiber is stripped into strings, wrapped around a core of grass or vine, and stitched through with a needle made from sharpened wire set into a wooden handle.
Color comes from soaking the palm strings in boiled solutions of bark and root. The patterns carry names, and the names come from the animals around them: forehead of the zebra, knees of the tortoise, ribs of the giraffe. Depending on size and complexity a single basket takes weeks, and sometimes a great deal longer than that.
South Africa: ilala palm
Zulu weavers in KwaZulu-Natal coil strips of ilala palm frond over a grass core, and the frond's natural waxy coating does something remarkable. Fill one of these baskets with liquid and the fibers swell, sealing the gaps between coils, and the vessel becomes watertight with no lining and no treatment of any kind.
The bulb-shaped version, the ukhamba, was made to hold sorghum beer. A small amount of moisture still works through the wall and evaporates off the outside, which cools what is inside. The taller lidded bottle form, the isichumo, was made for carrying water, its narrow neck cutting down spillage on the walk back from the river.
How to tell what you are looking at
Look at the wall of the basket first. If you can see a spiral of stitched bundles running around it, it is coiled, and it will hold its shape. If you see flat strips crossing over and under, it is plaited, and it will flex. If you see fine horizontal ribbing over vertical ribs, it is twined.
Then look at the material. Grass is fine, matte, and slightly fibrous at the cut ends. Palm is broader and glossier. Cane is woody and holds a curve.
None of that tells you whether a basket is good. All of it tells you what it will do on your shelf.
The baskets we carry come from the Tanzanian and Zimbabwean traditions described above. You can see the current ones in handwoven baskets.
