© National Folklore Board (NFB), Ghana, 2023
Kente is a Ghanaian handwoven textile made from narrow strips of silk, cotton, or rayon woven on horizontal looms. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2024 and registered as Ghana’s first Geographical Indication product in 2025, Kente is not simply a decorative pattern but a living system of communication, identity, and place-based knowledge.
For A Bit of Art, Kente shows how cultural heritage can become a “Meaningful Artifact” when translated with attribution, craft literacy, and respect for the communities who sustain it.
A Cloth That Speaks
To understand Kente, begin not with colour alone, but with communication. UNESCO describes Kente as a fabric whose colours and designs are influenced by the age, social status, and gender of users, and whose finished cloths are named with proverbs, sayings, and social situations. This makes the cloth a form of cultural speech: a way to mark identity, occasion, aspiration, rank, remembrance, and belonging.
A Kente cloth is built strip by strip. The repeated bands, shifting blocks, and carefully placed motifs create a visual rhythm that can be read as both design and record. In the ABOA lens, this is where heritage becomes more than surface beauty. It becomes a system: one that can teach contemporary audiences how material objects carry social memory.
Kente is one of the handwoven textiles made in Ghana
Photograph: Thompson Avornyotse
© National Folklore Board, Ghana, 2023
From Royal Courts To Pan-African Memory
Kente is closely associated with the Asante of Ghana, and museum collections preserve examples that show the sophistication of its royal and prestige traditions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Kente as cloth made from narrow strips sewn together, with many Kente cloths named according to their warp pattern or after rulers, plants, birds, animals, and other references.
The cloth also became part of a wider political and cultural vocabulary in the twentieth century. The Met cites Venice Lamb’s observation that, under the influence of Ghana’s late president Kwame Nkrumah, Kente became “something more than purely Ghanaian and almost the uniform of pan-Africanism.” This history helps explain why Kente continues to appear in graduation ceremonies, public rituals, diaspora fashion, and global cultural moments: it carries not only craft, but recognition.
The design system within the cloth
One British Museum example, Af1947,06.2, shows the technical and symbolic density of Kente. Produced by Kwasi Amwah in Nsuta in 1935, the rectangular wrapper is composed of 21 narrow handwoven strips of European imported silk, hand-sewn together along the selvedges. Its alternating strip patterns include red and yellow zig-zag motifs, blocks of black, blue, green, white, red, and yellow, and a terminal design near the cloth’s edges.
Af1947,06.1
Kente cloth
Producer name/ Made by: Kwasi Amwah
Production date 1935
(c) The Trustees of the British Museum. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
For contemporary product design, these details matter. A responsible brand does not simply lift a zig-zag or colour palette. It asks what the construction is doing, how the pattern is named, where the cloth comes from, and who holds the knowledge. The opportunity is not to flatten Kente into a trend, but to translate its internal logic into thoughtful lifestyle objects: textiles, accessories, interiors, stationery, and everyday rituals that carry cultural context with care.
In 2024, UNESCO inscribed the craftsmanship of traditional woven textile Kente on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The following year, Ghana launched Kente as the country’s first Geographical Indication product, in an initiative organized by the Registrar General’s Department in collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization.
This matters because a geographical indication links a product to a specific place when its qualities, characteristics, or reputation are due to that origin. For Kente, that connection is not only legal or commercial. It is cultural: the name, technique, reputation, and meaning of the cloth are rooted in Ghanaian weaving communities and the practitioners who keep the tradition alive.
Kente offers a powerful lesson for cultural IP: the strongest products are not the ones that borrow the most visible motif, but the ones that understand the heritage system behind it. For A Bit of Art, this means transforming verified cultural stories into “Meaningful Artifacts” that are beautiful, useful, and ethically legible.
A display of how Kente is traditionally worn by Ghanaians
Photograph: Thompson Avornyotse
© National Folklore Board, Ghana, 2023
A Kente-informed collection could explore strip construction, modular rhythm, symbolic colour, and named patterns through accessories, home textiles, stationery, and gifting. But the heart of the opportunity is attribution. When heritage is translated with cultural credit, source clarity, and practitioner respect, the product becomes more than design. It becomes a quiet bridge between archive, artisan, and everyday life.