Tafi Abuipe & Ewe Kente

Two traditions, one name

Almost every article ever written about kente treats it as an Ashanti cloth from Bonwire, with everything else as a regional variation. That is wrong, and it is the single most persistent error in Ghanaian cultural writing.

There are two distinct weaving traditions. They use an almost identical narrow-strip loom, they have influenced each other across centuries of trade and war, and they produce different cloth for different reasons.

• The name. The Ewe call their cloth kete — also avɔ or edɔ locally. "Kente" is the form that went international.
• Ashanti kente is geometric and abstract. Blocks, bands, checks and named patterns, worked within a codified visual language.
• Ewe kete is figurative. Animals, human figures, ceremonial stools, household objects, plants and symbolic forms woven directly into the cloth — meaning carried by representation rather than by abstraction.
• And since the 1940s, Ewe cloths have carried written text. Words, in the weave.
• Ewe weavers name their patterns, turning a cloth into a visual proverb or a statement rather than a decorative scheme.

Stand in front of an Ewe cloth with a stool and a bird and a line of text in it, then look at an Ashanti cloth, and you will never confuse them again.

Adanudo: the cloth of skill

The most distinctive category of Ewe cloth is adanudo — roughly skilled cloth or wise cloth.

Technically, it is defined by weft-float inlaid pictures: figures worked into the surface of a plain silk, rayon or cotton ground, so that images sit within the weave rather than being applied to it. Animals, objects, people, symbols — a great many of them, on a single cloth.

Adanudo has been described by scholars since the 1940s and is regarded by collectors as among the highest expressions of West African textile art. It produces some of the most narratively complex strip-woven cloth made anywhere on the continent.

A single adanudo may be assembled from strips woven by many different hands — one documented example in a major museum collection was made from strips by over twenty weavers, each contributing a distinct voice to one cloth. That is not a compromise in the design. It is the design.

Ewe women traditionally wear kete as three pieces: a wrapper skirt, a fitted blouse, and a third length draped over the shoulder or arm. The three-piece set is the ceremonial standard at funerals, outdoorings and festivals, and colours are chosen with purpose — red, black and dark tones for funerals, and so on. If you buy a single cloth as a souvenir, understand that you are buying one part of a three-part grammar.

Buying honestly

Most articles about kente tell you to buy at the source and stop there. Here is the part that actually saves you money and disappointment.

• Single weave versus double weave is the whole question. Much of what circulates as market kete is single weave — lighter, thinner, mass-produced to keep the price down. The double weave — kededzi or keredzi — is the serious cloth, and it is what you get when you place a specific order for a chosen design and pay the appropriate price.
• Feel the weight. Double weave is noticeably thicker, sturdier and heavier in the hand. Cotton combined with rayon gives a stronger, denser cloth than a light single weave in rayon alone.
• Check the join. A cloth is assembled from four-inch strips sewn edge to edge. Look at how the pattern lines up across the seams — a good cloth matches, a cheap one does not.
• Look at the reverse. On adanudo, the inlaid figures should be worked into the structure of the weave rather than floating loosely on the back.
• Beware printed "kente". Roller-printed fabric imitating kente patterns is everywhere and is not woven cloth. If it is cheap, wide and uniform, it came off a machine in a factory.
• Commission if you can. Ordering a specific design, waiting, and paying properly gets you the real thing and pays the weaver a real rate. It also means the cloth is yours in a way an off-the-shelf length never is.
• Ask what the pattern is called and what it means. Ewe weavers name their designs. A cloth whose name the seller does not know is a cloth the seller did not make.

Getting there

Connected reading

• Volta Regional Museum — our dedicated site, with our own photography of Volta kente and the region's material culture.
• HoInGhana.com — Ho and the Volta in depth.
• Tafi Atome — the monkeys seven kilometres up the trail, and the village that has protected them for two centuries.
• Ho & the Volta Region — the regional base, Kpetoe kente, and the Notsie migration story.
• Amedzofe & Mount Gemi — the neighbouring mountain community with its own language.
• Mount Afadja — the hard climb of the Volta hills.
• Wli Falls — Ghana's tallest waterfall.
• Public Transport in Ghana — reaching the Volta and moving around it.

Practical details last verified 16 August 2026. Tafi Abuipe is listed by the Ghana Tourism Authority among the country's principal weaving sites, at 14 km by road or 7 km by trail from Tafi Atome. The distinction between the geometric and abstract design language of Asante kente and the figurative design language of Ewe kete, the definition of adanudo as weft-float inlaid pictures on a plain silk, rayon or cotton ground, the incorporation of written text from the 1940s, and the practice of naming patterns are documented in the specialist textile literature and in peer-reviewed research. The absence of centralised royal authority among the Ewe, and its consequences for weavers' design freedom, is drawn from peer-reviewed comparative work on Akan and Ewe weaving, which also records that men are the principal designers and weavers in both traditions. Origin claims from Bonwire and from Kpetoe, the Notsie tradition, and Ewe accounts of weavers captured during the 1869–72 conflict are competing traditions and are presented as such. Kente was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2024, recognising both the Asante and Ewe traditions. Market days, festival dates and prices change — confirm locally.