Download Free African Basketry Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online African Basketry and write the review.

From the Preface:"Over the years, Paulus Gerdes has established himself as the pre-eminent expert on patterns in African weaving and basketry, and the broader implications of these patterns. ... This new book is a broad gallery of plaited African designs. These range over much of the continent while concentrating on those parts of Africa that are closest to his Mozambique center, including Kongo, Mbole and Mangbetu from Congo, Cokwe and Lunda from Angola, Digo from Kenya, Soga from Uganda, Zulu from South Africa, and Makhuwa in Mozambique itself, but including such distant peoples as Bamileke in Cameroon. In Gerdes' gallery we are shown the love of patterns and symmetries that are the result of centuries of exultant exploration. Enjoy!"Donald W. CroweProfessor of Mathematics, EmeritusUniversity of Wisconsin
Basketry is both art and craft - representing the blend of African culture, environment and technology. Southern Africa has a rich tradition of basketry and this book documents the origins, historical context, usage, and raw materials utilized in the crafting of different types of basketry in South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, and other countries.
The manufacture and decorative use of wire in Southern Africa traditional arts dates back to the first millennium AD. With advancements in telecommunications, a new type of wire -- multi-colored plastic-coated copper wire, often referred to as telephone wire -- came into being. Beginning in the late 1960's, Zulu night watchmen started weaving scraps of this wire around their traditional sticks. This new material was also applied to making izimbenge -- beer pot covers -- that had been traditionally made from grass and palm. Today, there is wide variety in the creative use of this wire, and, in post-Apartheid South Africa, Zulu craft artists are imbuing old forms with the colourful contemporary material of telecommunications. The result is a vibrant, distinctive new folk form gaining international attention. This is the first and only publication to document the development of this transitional art. Including more than two-hundred examples of baskets, this book traces telephone-wire weaving from its roots to its most current forms, featuring the works of the most renowned contemporary weavers. The accompanying text -- from some of the foremost experts in African art and craft -- traces the history of telephone-wire weaving as well as discussing its significance to South African culture and art history. Today telephone wire baskets are at the heart of growing markets for South African products and sustainable cultural industry in Zululand.
Basic skills for making splint baskets from scratch.
In a powerful and rhythmic picture book, a grandmother tells the tale of Gullahs and their beautiful sweetgrass baskets that keep their African heritage alive. Reprint.
Looks at the history of the African art of sweetgrass basket making in the Christ Church Parish of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
The divination baskets of south Central Africa are woven for a specific purpose. The baskets, known as lipele, contain sixty or so small articles, from seeds, claws, and minuscule horns to wooden carvings. Each article has its own name and symbolic meaning, and collectively they are known as jipelo. For the Luvale and related peoples, the lipele is more than a container of souvenirs; it is a tool, a source of crucial information from the ancestral past and advice for the future. In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how Angolan refugees living in Zambia use these divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. Silva documents the special processes involved in weaving the baskets and transforming them into oracles. She speaks with diviners who make their living interpreting lipele messages and speaks also with their knowledge-seeking clients. To the Luvale, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of jipelo articles drawn in configurations, interact with persons and other objects, punish wrongdoers, assist people in need, and, much like humans, go through a life course that is marked with an initiation ceremony and a special burial. The lipele functions in a state between object and person. Notably absent from lipele divination is any discussion or representation in the form of symbolic objects of the violence in Angola or the Luvale's relocation struggles—instead, the consultation focuses on age-old personal issues of illness, reproduction, and death. As Silva demonstrates in this sophisticated and richly illustrated ethnography, lipele help people maintain their links to kin and tradition in a world of transience and uncertainty.
New edition of award winning book "Women and Geometry in Southern Africa: Suggestions for Further Research", published by the "Universidade Pedagógica" (Mozambique) in 1995. The original book contains chapters on geometrical ideas embedded in basket weaving, bead work, wall decoration, tattooing, and ceramics. The expanded edition includes a foreword by Sibusiso Moyo (Secretary of the African Mathematical Union Commission on Women in Mathematics in Africa, and Research Director of the Durban University of Technology, South Africa), afterwords by Ubiratan D'Ambrosio (Brazil) and Jens Hoyrup (Denmark), and the papers "Makwe colour inversion, symmetry and patterns" (Northeastern Mozambique) and "Symmetries on mats woven by Yombe women from the area along the Lower Congo." The book contains also a chapter written by Salimo Saide on the geometry of pottery decoration among Yao women (Nyassa Province, Mozambique). (2013, 276 pp.)