Jenna and Gus in Bamako

Week # 32 Searching for "Kerka"
The Fulani blanket weavers of Badalabougou

Scattered about Badalabougou you can find small groups of men weaving blankets with their crude looms nestled against the roadside. For several months each year over a dozen weavers from heartland of the Fulani region of Mali known as Gimbala, from the villages of Boyo, Ngouma, and Kanioume, travel to Bamako to make extra money selling wedding blankets. Most of them have very crude living conditions, working seven days per week on their looms. We have gotten to know this small community who, like ourselves, are strangers in Bamako.
One of our closest friends, Laba Sare, works as a night guardian for a French family and operates his loom at a busy intersection. He has been coming to Bamako for many years, and because of the poor harvest in the Douentza region this year, he spent over eight months away from his family, sending money back to his village of Boyo each week.

Like in almost every other corner of the world today, with the fast pace of change in Africa, many forms art are disappearing. The famous Fulani "Kerka" style blankets are no exception. Kerka's were historically over 15 feet long and eight feet wide, taking over 6 months to complete. They were such a grand undertaking that the purchaser of a Kerka is required to kill a sheep before the work can begin.
Because of their steadily declining incomes over the past few decades, today Malians are not able to afford such labor intensive blankets, and the Kerka has been substituted by much simpler and less expensive blanket designs.

About eight years ago a French woman paid Ali Sare's (above) to have his father (now very old) teach him the now lost art and then make her one. With over 64 different motifs and four different blanket styles, it took him many months to master.

Since that time Ali has not been commissioned to make another blanket of such complexity. Because of this we decided to ask him to make us a couple scaled down version (approximately 4.5 feet x 3 feet), and after almost a months work, he recently finished his first one for us.

Above, Ali poses next to his loom during a break from the Kerka tedium.

When you see one of these blankets you will want one! What is amazing is that there are only a handful of weavers left in Mali who know this art... and most of them are very old and not longer have the stamina and/or eyesight to weave. While all of Ali's fellow weavers strive to learn this style of weaving, their harsh economic realities prevent them from the luxury of free time that they would need to learn the art. Weavers learn their trade from their fathers, and are in fact a cast of the Fulani called mabudjos, but slowly over the past generation the economic realities in Mali have no allowed the fathers to pass their trade down to the children. In less than a generation the knowledge of Kerka making has all but disappeared!

Ali's goal is to somehow create a small weavers school in his hometown of Kanioume to reverse this trend!

The photo above is of a Kerka made by Ali's father over 40 years ago out of wool. If in good condition, older blankets like this are often purchased for museum collections.

Here Djoubolo Drame and his 13-year old son Issa weave much simpler blankets. Issa is just learning the trade, only recently completing his first blanket. These types of blankets can be woven in five to six days and usually are sold for between $25 - 30. Subtracting the money for all of the thread (called Garadji in Fulfulde) a weaver is lucky to average $2/day for their work!

What is most humbling to us is that these weavers send 80% of their earnings back to their families in the north. When our friend Laba recently left town to return to his village after almost eight months in Bamako he had $150 for himself.