Aesthetics of Communication: Texts on Textiles ( Leso ) from the East African Coast (Swahili)

The leso, ¹ a wrap cloth, is an object of everyday use on which proverbial art is visually represented in writing. It serves as a means of equivocal interpersonal communication (see Bavelas et al.), which is achieved by playing on processes of (communicative and semiotic) representation. With this communication the participants have a means to transgress culturally defined boundaries of power and powerlessness. In other words, the cloth lends them a voice of resistance. The leso constitutes a communicative genre, i.e., it is a conventionalized form of communication that is designed to be used within a certain kind of situation as the best possibility for reaching one's goals (see Luckmann).

Such communicative genres can be found all over Africa. Some of them are quite well known, for instance the communicative use of tissue-wax/wax-prints (another wrap cloth) in various countries of Western and Central Africa (see Domowitz; Bellow; Toure; Roth; Ikome and Madidi-Mazunze). Pot lids are used in a similar way in Angola by the Woyo people, a practice that is historically accounted for but seems to be extinct (see McGuire). Also, the communicative use of animal names among the Dciriku of Namibia (see Möhlig) has aspects of equivocal communication. ² Compared to the these examples, where an object is associated with proverbs or proverb-like texts, the leso appears as a special case. We could say that because the proverbs on the leso are explicitely represented in writing, the verbal has a purely symbolic relationship to its visual representation, ³ while in the other cases the verbal is iconically represented on the object. ⁴ In the example of tissu wax/wax prints, women give cloths proverb-names according to the patterns printed on them. In her article "Wearing proverbs," Susan Domowitz recounts an incident of equivocal communication from the Anyi (Côte d'Ivoire):

After divorcing his first wife, this man began seeing another woman. He noticed that she often wore a cloth in which the wild spider figured in the design [. . .], and suspected that she was trying to say something to him. Then he remembered a proverb that says, 'What one does to cendaa (a small harmless spider), one does not do to bokohulu (a large spider considered dangerous).' The man interpreted this to mean that he should not mistreat this woman as she supposed he had mistreated his first wife. At this point in his story I asked him if he knew there was a cloth with this specific proverb name. He replied, "No . . . but I knew that pagnes [cloths] have their names.' His familiarity with this popular proverb prompted him to ask the woman what she was trying to say, and she confirmed that the message of that very proverb was indeed intended for him. (Domowitz 84)

As for many African cultures, for the Anyi, who are culturally and linguistically closely related to the Akan, the relationship between the verbal and the visual arts is central to their aesthetic. ⁵ There is evidence of a very beautiful kind of oblique communication from the last century among the Woyo of Angola:

The medium was a wooden lid with motifs carried from the kitchen to the eating area. The communication took place between husband and wife, or between parents and son or daughter, and the message usually concerned fundamental principles for a successful marriage. (McGuire 54)

The carvings on the lids referred to proverbs. For instance, a certain fruit would represent the proverb "The fruit Ntumpu, dedicated to the divine Mvemba, will answer one question for you if you are a good person." Mvemba is here interpreted as the guardian of the family and symbolizes family loyalty (McGuire 54). The pot lids often contained several such carvings, rendering the message in a complex and sometimes complicated way. Pot lids were specifically carved for the occasion...