When she was seven years old, Nike Davies-Okundaye lost both her mother and her grandmother. It was left to her great-grandmother—the head of the craftswomen in a village in Ogidi in southwest Nigeria—to bring her up and teach her the craft of adire. Ogidi is one of the major centers of adire production in the entirety of the country.

Adire is a resist-dyed fabric which is created by applying wax, string or rubber bands to keep the dye from penetrating the exposed, open areas. Traditionally worn and produced by Yoruba women of southwest Nigeria, adire is a delicate and time-consuming process that can be traced back to the nineteenth century.

Primarily a female domestic craft, adire derived from two Yoruba words—adi (to tie) and re (to dye). It’s not unlike the methods used by its hippie-modern sister-fabric known as tie-dye. But unlike it’s psychedelic brethren, producing just five yards of adire is painstaking work and can take up to three weeks or more.

Every day after school, Okundaye’s great-grandmother would teach her how to separate the cotton from the seed, how to make cassava paste—called adire elekois—and using a chicken feather, apply that paste onto the fabric to create the intricate patterns of Adire that are passed down from one generation to the next.

Adire was originally produced to make use of old hand-woven materials (kijipa); when a garment or wrapper grew faded, it could be redyed. When the missionaries came to Africa, they brought imported calico and it was used for adire, explains Professor Dele Layiwola in their book, Adire Cloth in Nigeria. These days craftsmen buy (mostly imported) cotton and apply the adire patterns onto the existing fabric.

“But no one wants to do it anymore,” sighs Okundaye—now 67 years old—on a sunny weekend afternoon. She is sitting across from me at her gallery, which is located on a peninsula close to the lagoon in the bustling city of Lagos.

“It’s just too much work and the money is too small.” Hailed as the “Queen of Adire” Okundaye is the most famous proponent of this Nigerian textile tradition, credited for making it known—and celebrated—by the outside world. But despite its creeping popularity in the West, its future remains uncertain. 

In the afternoons, Nike Art Gallery—West Africa’s largest gallery and a center of Lagos’s buzzy art scene—spreads quietly across four floors, boasting more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures and textiles all crammed together; it’s more a museum than a gallery.

But by evening, a steady stream of visitors, tourists, artists, and her protégés come to learn the art of adire from “Mama Nike” and the space thrums with voices and laughter. Weekends at Nike Art Gallery are unique and draw people from all over the city.

With Mama Nike presiding, young artists from Lagos and surrounding towns share stories of their work over food and drinks; it’s a way of dipping into Nigerian art and culture, with performances of music, dance and masquerades unfolding throughout the evening in the large gallery.     

“I was born into this tradition,” says Yemisi, a 25-year old adire artist from Lagos whose grandmother is a master artisan. “It was easy for me to pick up the technique, but I’m also training in painting as I can’t sustain myself on adire alone.”

Though the history of the craft is difficult to trace, adire—originally prepared only with locally grown indigo—is thought to have started in the 1800s. The tradition of using indigo for dyeing cloth however is thought to be at least a thousand years old in West Africa, according to scholar Jane Barbour whose book from 1971, Adire Cloth in Nigeria, remains an authoritative text on the craft.

While adire flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, it started to decline in the 1950s along with Nigeria’s indigenous textile industry, which was wiped out when cheaper imported cloth flooded the market.

The decline of adire is often linked to the rise of ankara, the hugely popular, brightly colored wax prints that have come to symbolize African fabric around the world. Ankara has a troubled colonial legacy, and ironically is not African at all.

The wax prints came into the African continent from the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, when the Dutch created a mass-produced version of Indonesian batik. These days, cheap copies of ankara are primarily produced in China.

Okundaye is warm and energetic, and always dressed head to toe in wrappers and headscarves emblazoned with the exquisite and striking adire patterns created by her own hand. A vital part of her craft she explains, is the sharing of its methods.

Okundaye has trained thousands of people in the art of adire by holding free community workshops at her art centers in Oshogbo, Ogidi, Abuja and Lagos, for the last two decades.

“I see it as a way of saving the art, so it’s not something our grandmothers once did,” she says.  “I also think of it a means of solving poverty. People who have no means of livelihood can be taught adire to make a living for themselves.”

But all of this is not possible, she explains, without creating proper infrastructure to support the industry; the government needs to actively invest in its future.

Despite Okundaye’s dedication to passing along the adire artform and its burgeoning presence on the more conventional fashion scene, she remains skeptical about the future of the textile tradition and has slowly modernized her methods to accommodate the lagging interest.  “When I saw that people weren’t buying adire fabric anymore, I started transferring the patterns on the fabric to the canvas, using pen to make the same designs that we used to paint with feathers.”

While adire is largely a forgotten and dying form in its country of origin, the ancient craft from Nigeria is making itself known in Western fashion spheres. In April this year, noted author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was invited to address graduating seniors at Harvard College, and she boasted her adire excitement on Instagram, heralding a newfound cache for this Nigerian handiwork:

“Honored to be the Harvard University Class Day Speaker 2018. And I felt fully like myself in this lovely Adire dress by The Ladymaker.”

For Adichie, wearing adire is a conscious choice and part and parcel of her activism; she launched “Wear Nigerian” last year to support local designers from her homeland.

Until just a few years ago, not many had heard of adire outside of Nigeria, but that’s slowly changing. Today adire is enjoying a coming out moment and boasts global icon enthusiasts including Michelle Obama, Lady Gaga, and Lupita Nyong’o.

For a clutch of young Nigerian designers catering to the fashion conscious around the world, adire’s rich history is a compelling selling point to consumers; the craft is indigenous, difficult to produce, rare, and every pattern is a unique form of storytelling.

“Adire was once dying out due to the cheap textile alternatives coming from the east,” says Niyi Okuboyejo, founder of the menswear label Post-Imperial. “But many young Nigerian designers are now embracing it. The method appeals to several global markets as we have several retail doors in Japan, France, England and the US.” 

Okuboyejo is of Nigerian-descent and based out of the United States, where he has found a following for his adire-inspired formal and office wear.

“A lot of the symbols in adire have meaning and when put together could serve as a platform for storytelling,” he writes me in an email. The patterns in adire are a tapestry of the rich old stories of Yoruba culture, the myths, the history, the folklore, and the rituals.

“It is just one of the many traditional textiles that we still have. As it has done for Post-Imperial, it can serve as a tool to create narratives for the Black designer (especially one of Nigerian descent). Africa is the last frontier of new ideas due to so much untapped concepts and narratives within it, and adire is part of that.”

For designers like Okuboyejo and Amaka Osakwe (named “West Africa’s Most Daring Designer” in a New Yorker profile)—her label Maki Oh is entirely inspired by adire and a favorite with celebrities—the fabric represents pride in African and black heritage.   

Okundaye, meanwhile, is planning for the future in case adire’s current en vogue moment begins to fade like so many fashion trends tend to do. She plans to open a textile museum in Lagos later this year; she has already collected all the fabrics she wants to exhibit. “It will be the first of its kind,” she says, “a place to see all the textiles of Africa.”

She pointed towards her adire paintings.

“You can put this on your wall and remember the vanishing art.”

Sixty-year-old Hajiya Hamsatu Allamin—popularly referred to as “the woman that speaks with Boko Haram”—is the mother of 8, winner of the 2016 Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice’s (IPJ) Women Peacemakers, and is one of the most powerful conflict mediators in Nigeria today.

Boko Haram (which loosely translates to “Western education is forbidden”), was formed in 2009 by a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists who violently oppose Western forms of government, education, and society. Since they began an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria, more than two million people have been displaced, at least 20,000 killed, and thousands of women and girls are believed to have been subjected to horrific sexual abuses.

The militant terrorists’ sprawling power and destruction continue today; on Sunday August 19th around 2 a.m., Boko Haram stormed Malari village in the Borno state with guns and rocket-propelled grenades, claiming the lives of more than 60 people in their continued attempt to establish a so-called Islamic state governed through fundamentalist Sharia law.

Hamsatu’s activism—which started about the same time as the insurgency—focuses on gaining justice for raped women and girls, re-integrating the ex-wives of Boko Haram, and rehabilitating former child soldiers.

In this interview, Hamsatu discusses her potent human rights work, her persistent fears, and the ever-evolving fate of the Northern Nigerian women who have suffered under the terror of Boko Haram.

Orji Sunday: What factors influenced the rise of Boko Haram and your activism against Boko Haram?

At some point Boko Haram lived among us in various communities throughout Maiduguri, Nigeria. Whenever they attacked on the military, they would return to the community and we would absorb and hide them—to expose them is to ask for death. And when the military came for counter insurgency operations, they would arrest every youth in the entire community, including the innocent. When the violence escalated, the military started burning our houses too.

At any rate, the military was a threat and Boko Haram was another threat on the other hand. It was in this crossroad that I decided to speak against the silence. I encouraged the communities to stop hiding the insurgents. This made me popular with the people and the insurgents, too, and those encounters made me gradually embrace full time activism. The Boko Haram were all living with us, they were the children of the people we knew, but you couldn’t talk about it, and nobody could go and report it.

The Boko Haram lived among us and whenever they attacked the military, we would absorb and hide them—to expose them is to ask for death.
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Can you talk about your activism with the sexually abused women and girls in northeastern Nigeria?

When Boko Haram seized some communities and small settlements in Banki, a Nigerian town bordering Cameroon, many residents fled to Cameroon. The Cameroon soldiers captured them, collected all they had, and allegedly stripped the women naked, asking them to spread their legs wide and open so they could molest the women as they so desired.

Later the Cameroonian army handed over the refugees to the Nigerian army. At Bama, a city in Borno state Nigeria, the Nigerian military separated women and children and husbands—the women and children were moved to an IDP facility in Bama, Borno state, Nigeria.

It is during their stay in the Bama IDP camp that they suffered huge sexual abuses; they alleged that military officers demanded sex before offering them food and relief materials.

We organized these women and girls into a group called Knifar Movement to collectively seek the release for their husbands after years by the military, in addition to getting justice against the alleged rapists. The violated women are over 1,600, and some of them had babies out of those sexual violations.

But nobody listens to us or cares to look at their situation.

Can you talk more about confronting Boko Haram insurgents?

Whenever there is such incident, I go to the women in those communities, get the details and report to the government sponsored security agents. In all honesty, it was very risky. And sometimes, the insurgents would come to me brandishing their guns, but I still kept talking to them.

Gradually even Boko Haram came to understand that I was neutral and harmless and they started opening up to me. They apologized for the threat and started telling me their own version of the story. They would tell me, “Mama, your government does not value life.”

There are more than 1,600 violated women— some of them had babies out of these sexual violations—but nobody listens to us or cares to look at their situation.
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Why does Boko Haram respect and trust you to lead negotiations with the government?

It is very easy. They know who is honest and not. They tell me:

“Mama, we are not willing to listen to any man, much as we are ready to listen to you. When our leader was killed in 2009, and we went underground and those who were shot during a harmless burial ceremony were allowed to die because the military refused to allow us donate blood to some of them who were just injured. The government did not care about justice then, but you did. So why should we listen to them when nobody listened to us?”

In this war against insurgency, I don’t take sides. If some military personnel suffer violation and injustice and he is willing to speak up, I would join him to fight for justice. I know that the ordinary Nigerian soldier too is a victim.

Can you speak about your other project targeted at ex-wives of Boko Haram?

I want to engage the former wives of Boko Haram next so that they wouldn’t go back. I have started in a small scale, but I want to assist them in every possible way to get back to their life and society. Because of my little resources, I need to create a small social network amongst a small number of them and we can take it further from there. And some of them are pregnant from Boko Haram. The plan is to send the younger ones to school and train the older ones on the trade of their interest, in addition to providing start-up stipends for them. Then I would engage the communities on the danger of sidelining these people. But I don’t have the resources to do this all alone or to do more than this.

What are the mistakes in the current handling of the Boko Haram issue?

We have a lot to do to get this war over. And a whole lot more to do after a truce has been reached. Almost every person and institution tackling this war is focused on humanitarian issues. We have not turned our attention to the root causes. How can a society saturated by former child soldiers, aggrieved women, aggrieved suicide bombers, and aggrieved survivors—people who have lost a stable psyche—sustain peace?

My prayers and pleasure every day is to touch the lives of my people. And to change the little I can change. Making a difference in their lives.

What are your fears and worries especially looking at the nature of your work—you are almost confronting death daily?

I am not afraid of speaking or dying. Many people warn me not to speak because my work is dangerous. Sometimes I worry that my immediate family could be targeted. But, I worry more about the women and the children because they have lost everything. They don’t have a future. They are living a completely hopeless life.

How can a society saturated by former child soldiers, aggrieved women, aggrieved suicide bombers, and aggrieved survivors—people who have lost a stable psyche—sustain peace?
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How do U.S. policies, leaders, and legislation dovetail with the situation in Nigeria?

The United States and the United Nations could do much more and I already said that when I addressed the United Nations Security Council a few months back. But a lot depends on Nigeria—a principal partner in resolving the conflict. While I blame the U.S. partly, I truly understand their position. If the Nigerian government had created the platform to deserve support, perhaps the U.S. could come in. This is a country that is not interested in her own progress. I have done politics in Nigeria and I know it does not work.

Nigeria is a country that is not interested in her own progress.
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What does the future hold for these women?

The women don’t have future unless we decide to give them one through collective actions as humanity. They have lost everything—their husbands, their children, their relatives and all the people that meant something to their lives. It’s sad, but in truth, the future is particularly bleak because even the government does not care.

Who is your hero?

My father is my hero. He taught me to read. He gave me everything to succeed. And he believed in me. My mother did not want me to go to school, but my father held firm and encouraged me. 

If you’d like to help support Hajiya Hamsatu Allamin’s work please consider donating to ICAN (International Civil Society Action Network) which supports women’s rights, peace, and security.